Mode choices & transit pricing

I make a regular trip to a yoga studio. It's about a mile and change from my house. I can drive, bike or take the train--all will get me there in 17-23 minutes. I drive more often than I'd like, because the parking AT THE METRO STATION PNR is free (unenforced), while the Metro ride will cost me $5.  This is despite the fact that I know (intellectually) that driving is costing me 62 cents a mile--but I also know that most of that is a marginal cost--my car will depreciate regardless, and I'll still need to pay insurance (regardless of how many miles I drive). Most people don't even consider the marginal cost of driving, especially beyond gasoline. (Everyone I've ever talked to 'budgets' by curtailing trips by pay-period.) 

We want more people to choose transit. If you want people to do more of an activity, you can make it cheaper. But you can also make it seem cheaper by hiding the cost from them: 1) reduce the marginal cost of a journey to zero, 2) put a lump-sum payment on auto-renewal (with unlimited use), 3) make someone else pay for it.

Transit agencies should also get rid of 'monthly' passes, and start selling '31 day' passes, so someone who can't buy the whole loaf on the first of each month isn't screwed, and so there is never a reason anyone should delay buying a bundle. Which also enables households to budget to all the main expenses (rent+ & transportation) aren't falling due on the same day an in the same paycheck. 

And for every transit agency with space capacity (and that's every agency, some time of the day), there should be dynamic pricing. (Once you're running a vehicle-trip, there's almost no marginal cost to letting more people on the bus). An economist will tell you to charge a premium for the peak, but an advertiser will tell you to offer a discount for the off-peak--when prices change unexpectedly, people should get a pleasant surprise.  

Is urban water distribution a natural monopoly?

 Arguably, for water, it's a natural monopoly. Public streets typically provide easements for both water and sewer. Both leak, especially with age. So there is a clear need to separate them, so cities put water lines on one side, and sewer lines on the other. Water lines have to be buried below the local frost line, so a second set would need to be even deeper, and provide structural support for the first set previously provided by undisturbed soil. The same is true of sewer, which must be low enough to drain into.

Notes on Parking for Railvolution

Parking as a 'common property resources'

-rivalrous, non-excludable

-Tragedy of the commons results

-Almost all parking management is based on shifting it from being a common-pool resource to a public good, by increasing excludability.

1) Exclusion through 'club lists' (resident parking permits)

2) Exclusion through pricing (metered parking)

The first is generally seen as more equitable, but the latter is understood to be more efficient. The ethical acceptability ties into the political acceptability. There will be a political backlash against any policy that makes some some people better off while making others worse off, especially if the harms are concentrated and the benefits diffuse. Right now, in Utah, Brigham Young University started to charge to park on campus. Suddenly, all the on-street parking just off-campus is jammed. Residents who were using it are enraged-their free available parking is gone, through no action of their own. 

After a few mobs-with-torches situations, politicians get gun-shy about parking. And hence cautious, doing so in limited cases. Rare indeed are cases like Britain (where minimum parking requirements are now forbidden, nation-wide) or the city of Buffalo (where minimum parking requirements have been eliminated city-wide). This sort of disjointed incrementalism should be welcomed: Better some than none. And better to discover potential problems during a test-case, rather than everywhere, all at once. 

The 'equitable' approach itself has serious equity issues of its own. Limited passes to those currently parking is unfair, as that is to the detriment of those who are not currently using the parking--it seems only fair that everyone should get an equal number of passes. Doing so vastly undermines the effectiveness of the program. Current parking use is responding to the actual supply of parking. Over-providing permits swamps the supply, doing little to ensure parking availability. It is also inefficient, as residents 'loan' unused parking permits to friends and family, which is neither efficient nor equitable. 

Pricing parking efficiently has problems as well. My dad refused to drive downtown, because he wasn't willing to pay for parking. When we did, we parking in strange marginal lots, many blocks from our destination. Berkeley, California, has one of the best, where on-street parking (the most available) was made more expensive, while off-street parking was made cheaper. This both increased the perceived availability of parking, and provided an incentive to go to the (cheaper) garages. 

Gets My Goat

Articles like this never fail to get my goat:
"Your city bus costs more per mile than a first class overseas flight"

...it claims.

But the devil is in the details:

PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION:
These public transit systems charge a flat cash fare to go one mile within the center of their cities. So if you're using one for a quick trip, you'll pay the following:
New York Subway, Boston T: $2 per mile
Chicago El: $2.25 per mile
Atlanta MARTA: $1.75 per mile
Los Angeles subway: $1.25 per mile
San Francisco MUNI: $1.50 per mile
London Tube: £4, or $5.63 per mile (plus more if you travel beyond the central city)
Paris Métro: €1.60, or $2.01 per mile
Cairo metro: 1 Egyptian pound, or 18¢ per mile
Hong Kong MTR: HKD$7.7 or 99¢ per mile

The author assumes that the default fair is for ONE mile of travel. Nevermind who uses that same transit fare to travel much further. UTA's default fare was $2.50 for a bit...but that provided 2.5 hours of travel time, enough to get from one end of the system to the other. Which takes 2.5 hours, and covers (fully) 83.1 miles of distance, or 0.03008423586 cents per mile. Given that the IRS allows you to deduct 57.5 cents per mile for driving.

Long story short, this points out two things:

FIRST: Short trips are more expensive than long ones.
Airplanes are different than buses.  Air resistance increases with the square of velocity. The faster a vehicle travels, the more air resistance opposes it, and the more power is needed to overcome it. An airplane traveling at 640 mph generates 16 times as much air resistance as an airplane traveling at 160 mph, despite the fact that it's only going four times as fast. To minimize this effect, airliners fly very high (39,000 feet) where the air pressure is much lower. (For reference, Mt. Everest is 29,000 feet at the peak). For a flight, all the cost is in getting up in the air, to cruising altitude (after which, the plane largely just maintains a semi-ballistic glide through the thin air of the upper atmosphere, all the way down. Most of the flight is spent at 'cruising altitude'. The cruising altitude is selected on the basis of algebraic equation containing the costs per unit of vertical travel at a given height, and the cost of getting to that height. The way the math works out, its always cheaper to go to where the air is thin, so the cost of a flight is largely invariant to the distance traveled.

SECOND:
It's not how good something is, it's how good it is compared to its alternative. Every trip takes time, and costs money. The default alternative for short trips is walking, which can be very time consuming, but costs (effectively) nothing. Whether it's worth spending money for higher speed depends on your own personal cost of time. If your time is worth $10 an hour, saving 1/2 hour is the same as saving $5. So every 6 minutes of your time is worth a dollar. If the bus fare is $2, take the bus anytime doing so will save you 12 minutes, or anytime you have to walk over 6/10 of a mile.

Neighborhoods & Amenity

In abstract, a house can be understood as a bundle of characteristics that determine its value. The value of a house is not determined solely by the characteristics of the house, but also by its location. These characteristics represent sources of amenity. Two broad classes of amenity exist: Amenity of structure and amenity of location. Structural amenities are typically defined by number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, square footage, and other characteristics of the house. Amenities of location are typically characterized in terms of proximity to sources of amenity (shopping, recreation) and dis-amenity (air pollution, crime, noise). 

The importance of location is widely recognized in real-estate. All property occupies a unique location in space, and thus all real estate is unique and non-replicable. Nearby locations sharing similar characteristics often act as complements.

But there exists an additional package of amenities of location not contingent on proximity, typically characterized in terms of ‘neighborhood’. The concept is poorly defined, formally referring to a geographic area, but also referring to a less well articulated set of aspects associated with that that. Neighborhood membership is typically defined by proximity, but the boundaries of neighborhoods are rarely well defined, and may change over time.  

Neighborhoods are important because geographic proximity implies more frequent interaction. Whether interaction represents an opportunity or threat depends on the compatibility of residents. Does not imply social conformity, but rather social compatible—norms about the use of space, social presentation, privacy, and behavior do not conflict. Desirable neighborhoods are characterized by compatible socio-demographic groups. ‘Areas in transition’ represent shifts in the socio-demographic characteristics of a neighborhood, as different groups move and in and out.

Houses in a similar neighborhood already share amenities of proximity and amenities of neighborhood, so that neighborhoods with houses with similar amenities of structure also show highly uniform prices. This affects housing affordability, and results in a strong association in socio-economic status with neighborhood.

Economism

The ongoing expansion in housing units square footage per person and acres per housing unit is usually justified using the 'Economistic' idea that humans are rational self-interest maximizers, capable of gauging the marginal value of an additional increment. In reality, humans are not rational optimizers, but rational satisficers and irrational maximizers. People make decisions on the basis of meeting perceived needs. Once those perceived needs are met, they act to maximize any offered considerations, regardless of their desirability.