Postcard from Truckee
After leaving Denver I went to the Lake Tahoe area in Northern California / Nevada for my friend Jesse’s wedding. (Which went great, incidentally. Mazel tov to the happy couple.)
Along the way, I stopped in for a visit to Truckee, California, which recently elected a friend of mine, Morgan Goodwin, as vice mayor.…
5 Comments Sunday reading 3 July 2016
Welcome back to Sunday reading. It’s been an interesting week, what with the Brexit and all. (Or rather, potential Brexit. Apparently nobody over there has any goddamn clue what they’re doing.)
Brexit is worth talking a bit about, as there are some touch-points with urban policy.…
City size, variety, and consumer surplus
In the 1990s, in the early years of the information technology revolution, economist Robert Solow famously commented that “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Two decades on, that still rings true. Social life has been profoundly transformed by new technology: It has altered the way we communicate with friends and family, how we entertain ourselves, and even how we date.…
Apartments, proximity, and living space
Housing is a normal good. That is, it’s something that people tend to want more of as their incomes increase.
“More” doesn’t necessarily mean “larger”. People do tend to prefer larger homes as they get wealthier, but that’s not the only thing that matters.…
Postcard from Denver
Greetings from the United States, where I’ve been helping a friend get married and generally visiting friends and family. Along the way, I got to visit Denver, where one of my two brothers now lives. Here’s a picture of all three of us hiking in a state park near the city.…
Do motorways inevitably generate economic growth?
There were a number of odd things in the report released several weeks ago by the New Zealand Council for Infrastructure Development (NZCID), a lobby group. Matt has already reviewed the report in detail. Perhaps the oddest part of it was this sentence:
Motorway capacity is essential because motorways generate economic activity.…
The high cost of fossil fuel subsidies
One challenge in writing about hyper-local issues like transport infrastructure and urban planning policies is that it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture.
Planet-wise, the big picture is climate change. As California Governor Jerry Brown said in a recent interview, our environmental impact increasingly has an “uncompromising gravity”: climate change is a potential extinction event for the human race.…
Mid-week reading: strategy games, housing politics, fossil fuel subsidies, and the benefits of bike lanes
Welcome back to mid-week reading, which is (happily) becoming a more intermittent feature. One of the most interesting things I’ve recently read was Jonathan McCalmont’s exploration of anarchist scholar James C Scott’s arguments about the way that governments interact with their people: “Seeing like a state: why strategy games make us think and behave like brutal psychopaths“:
Cloaked as they were in the trappings of religion and medieval warfare, it was all too easy to overlook the morally dubious nature of the games’ relationship between players and in-game characters.…
“The train that saved Denver”
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about “the end of Auckland’s old growth model“. In that post, I argued that the old pattern – build roads and pipes into some paddocks and orchards, and subdivide away – is now kaput.…
“The accident is not the major problem”
A few weeks ago, I wrote about some misguided commentary on road safety that implied that “distracted walking” was a serious problem. It isn’t by any reasonable measure, but many of our other transport practices are unsafe.
On average, around 300 people die as a result of road crashes.…
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