Ryan Avent’s Posts

• If the grass looks greener, it’s important to understand the nature of the fence 0

  Posted 2 weeks, 5 days agoOne of the things about politics is that solutions always seem easier to implement and more promising before they stand a real chance of being implemented.

• The assumption of inconvenience 0

  Posted 1 month, 1 week agoEarly this week, I noticed a number of my favorite bloggers linking to a Elisabeth Rosenthal essay at Environment 360, on the mysterious greenness of European nations. The average American, as it happens, produces about twice as much carbon dioxide each year as your typical resident of Western Europe.

• Off the rails

  Washington Post features rail hack job from Robert Samuelson 4

  Posted 2 months, 2 weeks ago

  Today, the Washington Post's lame excuse for an economics columnist, Robert Samuelson, wrote an extremely regrettable piece arguing that investments in high-speed rail are misguided. But this is no honest entry into the discussion of how best to invest in transportation infrastructure. It's a hack job, plain and simple.

• A poor strategy for halting climate change

  Reducing emissions isn't an economy killer 0

  Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago

  The last thing we need at this juncture is for Americans to begin thinking that efforts to address climate change will plunge the economy back into the throes of deep recession.

• The Transit Authority: Done with the Gipper

  The aging of the Boomers means it's time for new priorities 0

  Posted 8 months, 1 week ago

  Why is transit funding still based on the priorities of the Reagan era? Ryan Avent says it's time to shake off Boomer-led policies.

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Ryan Avent’s Recent Comments

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  On settlement patterns

  All of the research on variable pricing for things associated with driving (be it congestion, insurance, or emissions) indicate that denser, more centrally oriented settlements are the result. By increasing transportation costs, these prices increase the incentive for everyone to be near everyone else.

  Think about pre-highway America, when transportation costs were much higher. Cities and towns both were far denser.On Congestion pricing might come in handy posted 1 year, 5 months ago 11 Responses

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  To Jabailo

  Several points. First, commutes aren't the only driving households do. Second, how many households have only one commuter? Third, if households made a housing decision based on a given home price and a given cost of transportation and the cost of transportation then doubles, then households on the margin will find themselves in serious trouble. And of course, if gas prices pose no problem to drivers, it becomes very difficult to explain the recent surge in transit ridership and corresponding drop in vehicle miles traveled.

  Billions in transit taxes? Really? You'd think that transit spending wasn't a tiny fraction of spending on highways. What's more, the self-satisfied exurban commuter is enjoying some nice benefits thanks to transit. In Washington, for example, Metro handles around 750,000 trips a day. Local buses carry another 500,000 people, and commuter rail accounts for thousands more. How would our friend the driver find his commute if those trips were instead made in single-occupancy vehicles?

  And there are also accident and pollution externalities to consider. Research on the subject has suggested, in fact, that once all costs are taken into account, transit subsidies are actually lower than they should be. One has to take an extremely narrow--and incorrect--view of cost and benefit to find that exurban living and long commutes are anything close to economically efficient, or sustainable.On America is ill equipped to handle expensive oil posted 1 year, 6 months ago 10 Responses

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  Couldn't have said it better

  Nice post, Jon.On Government-financed construction plus carbon pricing is the key posted 1 year, 6 months ago 23 Responses

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  Retrofitting suburbs

  Jon, it's not easy to do this, but it is possible, and often quite successful. Washington provides many good examples, some of which have been built in isolation, many more of which have been built around Metro stations. Two key things about such efforts: 1) suburban development is rough on local budgets, and so local governments are increasingly looking at densification as a means to boost tax base and reduce per capita infrastructure spending; and, 2) as I note in the post, rent and price premia for these new walkable developments indicate a lot of unmet consumer demand.

  A planned extension of Metro's Orange Line, recently nixed by the FTA (strongly anti-transit under Bush) would have paved the way for one of the most significant land-use shifts in recent history. Tysons Corner, a car-clogged suburban shopping mall and office park, would have been turned into a gridded downtown, served by four Metro stations. The federal share of the project was quite small relative to comparable highway plans, but the Bushies never seem to fail to make the wrong decision in such cases.On Transit investment should and will be a part of the peak oil solution posted 1 year, 7 months ago 39 Responses

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  I can't figure it out, either

  The constituency is clearly there. I can see why politicians might be hesitant to argue in favor of transit; it sits in the "urban issue" category that only inner-city leaders are allowed to talk about on the campaign trail. That doesn't explain why so few intellectual types embrace transit. It's odd--transit is a far more realistic and cost-effective solution to these problems than some other ideas which get tons of airtime.On Transit investment should and will be a part of the peak oil solution posted 1 year, 7 months ago 39 Responses