Is public transport an “inferior good”?
I’ve recently been taking a look at Statistics NZ’s Census data on car ownership in Auckland. One interesting observation is that low-income households are considerably more likely to not own a car. One implication is that minimum parking requirements, which require everyone to have carparks (or pay for their provision every time they go to the shops), are a quite regressive policy.…
35 Comments In defense of population growth
Growth: what is it good for?
Accommodating a growing population can certainly be challenging. It means having to find more money to invest in transport and water infrastructure to enable new residents to live and travel in the city. As Auckland Council’s recent consultation on the Long Term Plan shows, asking people to pay more is never a very popular proposition – even if they like how the money’s being spent.…
Demographia and omitted variable bias
My last two posts about Demographia’s analysis of house prices prompted quite a bit of discussion. I thought that it may be worth expanding on my points and clarifying why they mean that we should take Demographia’s conclusions with a large grain of salt.…
Alternative explanations for Auckland house prices
Last week I took a look at the economics underlying Demographia’s “International Housing Affordability Survey” and found them severely lacking. As it turns out, Demographia’s data isn’t much good as a measure of the costs of poor planning rules – but it does seem to provide some information about people’s “revealed preference” for urban amenity.…
Should we relocate the Ports of Auckland?
Disclaimer: in professional life I have done some work on ports, including co-authoring the 2012 PwC report on future scenarios for Upper North Island ports. This post doesn’t reflect the views of my present or past employers or clients. It’s just a quick thought experiment, based on some data and a few assumptions.…
Demographia fails Urban Economics 101
Every year since 2005, pro-sprawl think-tank Demographia has published a new edition of its “International Housing Affordability Survey“. They report a “median multiple” measure of housing affordability that compares median house prices to median household incomes within a number of cities, mostly in the English-speaking world.…
If you want more consumption choices, live near lots of other people
One of the many reasons that people choose to live in cities is that cities offer variety. As Stu Donovan has argued before, being around more people sometimes seems inconvenient, but it also exposes you to new ideas, new people, and new consumption choices.…
We need to stop lying to ourselves about congestion
Without getting back on the topic of pohutukawas or St Luke’s Road again, I did notice something funny in the statement that Greg Edmonds, Auckland Transport’s Chief Operating Officer, made in Metro Magazine in response to the issue:
The founding premise of the Auckland super city was that the city’s congestion was costing $1 billion a year in lost productivity and this had to change.…
MoT’s review of capital spending on roads, part 3
This is the second post in a series on the Ministry of Transport’s working paper on New Zealand’s capital spending on roads, which was prepared as an input to the 2015/16 Government Policy Statement (GPS) on Land Transport Funding. It was released to Matt under the Official Information Act just before Christmas.…
Upcoming seminar: New ideas in economic evaluation
Next Tuesday, the Government Economics Network and Auckland Council are hosting a seminar entitled “Economic evaluation in Auckland – new ideas and challenges“. It’s on a topic that I personally find very interesting – some readers may also be keen:
Estimating the economic impact of transport interventions using the Gross Value Added approach.…
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