Recently in an airport, I saw and bought a rather provocative issue of Scientific American. The cover declared that humans ‘evolved’ to exercise, while the most similar forms of life – chimpanzees and bonobos – function very well as couch potatoes, according to […]
Transportation
Should Transit-Oriented Housing be Limited to the Carless?
In addition to the NIMBYs and the YIMBYs, we now have the PHIMBYs: Public Housing in My Back Yard. This new acronym represents those who believe that public-subsidized housing should be added to our cities, but no private enterprise market-rate […]
Conferences on Urbanism
A Home in California: Are Our Communities Sustainable? Event Details:Tuesday, March 26, 20199 AM – 5 PMPepperdine School of Public PolicyWilburn AuditoriumMalibu, CAFor details and registration, click here In this conference Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy bring together a unique mix […]
The Gasoline Tax: Charles Krauthammer Breaks with Republican Orthodoxy
Charles Krauthammer, generally regarded as a conservative writer, declared more than a year ago that he had been for a gasoline tax increase of $1 a gallon for 32 years. That would be, if I calculate right, since 1983. I’ve […]
Which Taxes to Raise – A Revision
In earlier posts I suggested that the top bracket income tax could be raised to up to 40%, as in the Clinton era, without hurting government revenues or damaging the economy. It still might not, but I have decided that […]
Declining Hubs: A Good Location for Experimenting with High Speed Rail
I stumbled recently on a page in Therichest.com listing seven airports in America that are declining in their status as hubs, and it is interesting that they seem to be concentrated in one region: the area between the Great Plains […]
China’s High-Speed Rail
Yeah!!! I admit there are a lot of problems with California”s high speed rail, and it was probably a mistake, but if high speed rail could replace a lot of airplanes I would be very very happy. In Response To: […]
‘Streetcars’ vs. Light Rail
Samuel L. Scheib, editor of Trip Planner magazine, argues here that so-called ‘streetcars’, trams which actually run in the street with the cars, are not so much ‘public transit’ in the manner of light rail as a tourist amenity and […]
New York City Transit’s Inconvenient Pricing
New York City, much to my disappointment, has discontinued its transit one-day unlimited ride ticket. [You can still get such a ticket for a week, but I’m never in town that long.] What you can get is cards with $10.70 […]
Obama’s Dilemma, High Speed Rail, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and Other Miscellaneous Observations
Joel Kotkin, director of one of our favorite sites, Newgeography.com, has exposed how Obama has alienated people on all sides, even though he will probably win the election. I notice, now that I think about it, that while the Occupy […]