Robert Poole for the Reason Foundation: I’ve concluded that the way we fund and manage the U.S. highway system is broken and needs serious rethinking if it’s going to meet the needs of 21st century America.
The problems are legion, beginning with the huge direct cost of traffic congestion in America’s 200 or so urban areas — a whopping $160 billion per year just in wasted time and fuel. And while our highways and bridges are not “crumbling,” there are chronic problems of deferred maintenance, leading to many rough roads and a surprisingly large number of structurally deficient or functionally obsolete bridges. …
I now think that a far better model would be to re-conceive highways as another category of network utility, in addition to the familiar examples of electricity, water, telecommunications, and natural gas. Most network utilities are not run by government agencies, with key decisions made by legislators. Instead, the providers are organized as companies that sell services to customers, under government oversight. That’s true regardless of whether those companies are owned by investors or are government enterprises, such as municipal electric and water utilities.
If highways were provided by highway utility companies — investor-owned concession companies, government toll agencies, or nonprofit user co-ops — a great many things would be different. For example:
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People would pay for highways based on how much they use them, just as we pay for water by the gallon and electricity by the kilowatt hour.
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People would be just as familiar with what highways cost, based on their monthly bill, as they are with the cost of cable television, cell phones, electricity, etc.
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Per-mile highway charges would be subject to some form of regulatory oversight, based on the extent to which the highways and bridges in question had competitors or were essentially monopolies.
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Large-scale highway investments, for new highways and for replacing worn-out ones, would be financed via the capital markets, just as individuals do in buying a house and as other utilities do in building new facilities, rather than being paid for piecemeal out of annual appropriations.
Uber and Lyft look to stifle innovation
Ian Adams for the R Street Institute: It’s frustrating to see a collection of the most innovative and forward-thinking companies in the world — including Didi Chuxing, Lyft, Ola Cabs, Uber Technologies, Via Transportation, and Zipcar — come together to support “shared mobility principles for livable cities” that would foreclose all sorts of opportunities for economic and technological progress.
Some of the 10 principles — which look to lay down literal rules of the road for autonomous vehicles and other emerging transportation technologies while upholding goals like lower emissions and greater data-sharing — are totally unobjectionable…
In particular, it’s No. 10 on the list that is especially problematic. It proposes that autonomous vehicles in urban areas “should be operated only in shared fleets.” Among the sundry benefits the principles document proposes would flow from a shared fleet model are: “Shared fleets can provide more affordable access to all, maximize public safety and emissions benefits, ensure that maintenance and software upgrades are managed by professionals, and actualize the promise of reductions in vehicles, parking, and congestion, in line with broader policy trends to reduce the use of personal cars in dense urban areas.”
All of those things may prove true, and fleet ownership may be the model that makes the most economic sense for many urban consumers. But the only way to test whether any of it is true is through the free choices of consumers and manufacturers, not command-and-control centralized planning. Prescribing a one-size fits all ownership model to fit everyone’s varied lifestyles and consumer preferences is the antithesis of the American way.
A new million-man march
Algernon Austin for Demos: In the wake of the Great Recession, the labor market was unfriendly to everyone, leading many to give up looking for work. Individuals who give up looking for work are technically not in the labor market, and they are not counted as unemployed in official statistics even though they are jobless. For this reason, the unemployment rate underestimates the problem of joblessness.
This underestimation is very significant for African-American workers. These workers historically have experienced a very challenging labor market, due to the lack of investment in their communities and racial discrimination by employers. For black workers, the employment-to-population ratio is a better measure of the employment opportunities than the unemployment rate. The employment-to-population ratio simply measures the share of the working-age population that is employed …
Looking at the employment-to-population ratios for prime age (25 to 54 year old) workers … we see two things. First, the ratio from the last quarter of 2017 is lower than for the same quarter in 2000 for both white and black workers. By this measure, the job market still is not as good as we saw in 2000. Second, the black ratio is lower than the white ratio in both time periods. Even the black employment ratio in 2000, which was quite high for blacks, was still lower than the 2017 ratio for whites. Disinvestment and discrimination are the primary cause for these disparities.
In a very strong and racially fair economy, the black employment-to-population ratio today would be where the white ratio was in 2000. It would take 1.2 million more African Americans working for the black employment-to-population ratio to reach that level. When we have 1.2 million more black jobs, then we can celebrate the state of the American labor market.
