The case for supporting a rich transportation infrastructure to and from St. Louis or Cleveland isn’t (just) that we wish those communities well like some distant acquaintance. It is because we wish to build and support a vibrant and cohesive nation. The fate of American places is not a private concern of other people. Their struggles are our struggles. Their catastrophes are a cancer on our body politic.
.. he has proposed spreading the Federal government around, which would among other things help blur and heal the divide between “Washington” (an idea more than a place) and the increasing fraction of the country which feels alienated from it. There is a burgeoning industry among pundits for proposals like this, break up the liberal city, spread out the universities, pay a UBI, etc. And that is unironically great. Hopefully we will do some of these things.
.. building transportation infrastructure provides and encourages economic development within far-flung communities, reducing the geographic disparities that now threaten the viability of the United States as an integrated polity. But transportation infrastructure also very directly binds distant parts of the polity together, and reduces the likelihood that dangerous disparity will develop or endure. If Cincinnati has abundant and cheap air transportation capacity that will remain whether it is fully utilized or not, firms in New York and DC and San Francisco will start thinking about how they can take advantage of the lower costs of those regions in a context of virtual geographic proximity.
.. When decisions about transportation capacity are left to private markets, a winner-take-all dynamic takes hold that is understandable and reasonable from a business perspective, but is contrary to the national interest. Private entrepreneurs cannot overcome this. Even if an airline were to “adopt” an underserved city, providing transportation at a loss in hopes that a business renaissance later justifies it, firms will be discouraged from moving in by the ever present risk that the service will disappear or the terms will worsen. Only a commitment at a policy level to abundant and inexpensive transportation can eliminate this risk.
.. It’s a cliché that the government builds “bridges to nowhere” that the private sector never would build. That’s true. And it’s a credit to the public sector. Bridges to nowhere are what turn nowheres into somewheres. We need many, many more bridges to nowhere.
.. the fact that air travel managed by the main domestic carriers in the United States is uniquely awful, and there is no evidence that US travelers are any more price conscious than consumers in other countries. No frills, discount air travel is popular in Europe as well, and it is sometimes awful, but it is on the whole much cheaper than “discount” air travel within the US. Mainstream carriers almost everywhere else in the developed world are notably less awful than the big American carriers, and often just as cheap.
.. Aggregate outcomes are not in general or even usually interpretable as an aggregation of individual preferences. When we learn about the Prisoners’ Dilemma, we don’t interpret the fact that both players rat as evidence that, really, they both just wanted to go to jail for a long time. After all, that is their revealed preference, right? No. We understand that the arrangement that would obtain if they could cooperatively regulate one another’s behavior is in fact the outcome that they would prefer. As isolated individuals, they simply have no capacity to express this preference.
.. No matter how much we pay for extra leg room, we may end up next to the screaming kid.
.. Our “media center” may be malfuctioning even while our neighbors watch an endless series of bad action films, and ultimately there is nothing we can do but nag the flight attendant about it. The wifi may be decent, or it may be crap, however much we pay for it.
.. On an individual level, it is perfectly rational to discount a highly uncertain return in amenity value relative to what one would pay for a reliably enjoyable flight.
The Troubled Oil Business
Yet my team found in 2011 that far more powerful technologies and design methods, enlightened regulation, and maturing financing, marketing, and delivery channels then available could save nearly twice what I originally thought, at one-third the real cost. We showed how the U.S. could run a 2.6-times bigger economy in 2050 with no oil, coal, or nuclear power, $5 trillion cheaper, with no new inventions nor Acts of Congress, led by business for profit. Now, four years later, many of those assumptions look conservative.
.. Leveraging savings in the civilian oil use that’s over 50 times larger, those innovations will ultimately displace our warfighters’ missions in the Persian Gulf and South China Sea — aka Mission Unnecessary.
.. Autos are pivoting from PIGS — Personal Internal-combustion-engine Gasoline Steel-dominated vehicles — to SEALS — Shared Electrified Autonomous Lightweight Service vehicles.
.. Actually, incumbents have even less time than insurgents grant them, because capital flees before customers do.
Our Trouble With Trains
Freight traffic sustains railroads. Amtrak became a kind of corporate vampire. It has to feed on subsidies because it lacks the most lucrative part of rail transportation. When they divided the ledgers Amtrak got the red ink; the private rail lines got the black ink.