Skip to main content

Krugman on Public Transit

I love reading Paul Krugman's The New York Times blog. His attempts to make sense of the world using hard economic data appeals to the "numbers guy" and "amateur economist" in me. While almost everything Prof. Krugman posts is noteworthy, I will share his comments on public transportation today.
By Paul Krugman
Published: May 11, 2008
In case you’re wondering, I didn’t write about public transit for tomorrow. But I did some homework on the thought that I might, and might as well put it here. So here’s Exhibit A for the proposition that even in a nation with low overall population density, where the antelope roam and the skies are not [...]
It is amazing how little most US cities have done to make public transportation a more feasible option. I think one of the major ways the US can minimize its dependence on oil is to invest more in urban public transportation infrastructure. The 2000 US Census shows that 58% of the US population is concentrated in urban areas with 200,000+ people. If that population starts using public transportation with regularity, the US could be much less dependent on oil.
By Paul Krugman
Published: May 10, 2008
We’re #1 OK, I knew that US public transit was pathetic compared with Western Europe; but if you try to talk about Europe, people start going on about population density, as if we all lived in Montana or something. Anyway, Canada has lots of open space, too — and it doesn’t even have $8 a gallon gas. [...]
Thanks to personal automobile accounting for 89% of the US transportation modes, the US, which constitutes 5% of the world's population, consumes 25% of the world's oil production. I envy the Dutch and Scandinavian lifestyle of riding bikes, walking, using windmills to generate power ...
By Paul Krugman
Published: May 10, 2008
The Times reports that ridership on mass transit is surging thanks to high gasoline prices. Good. But … as of 2005, only 4.7 percent of American workers took mass transit to work. So even a 10% surge in mass transit ridership would take only around half a percent of drivers off the road. The point isn’t that [...]

Public transit accounts for only 4.7% of the transportation modes in the US. The more startling number is probably the 77.0% of the people who drive alone!! There is a lot of room for people to make sacrifices to carpool or use public transportation. It appears the rising cost of gas might push people to consider those options.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Slow Acroread Startup in OpenSuSe 11.0

It takes more than 30 seconds for acroread to load on my Opensuse machine the first time and the startup time gets shorter in subsequent attempts. Why? This is not the first time I have come across this problem of slow application startups in OpenSuse. Apparently a lot of people had encountered this problem and they found a simple solution - uninstalling the version of acroread that comes with OpenSuse and installing one from Adobe site yourself. Fortunately, that prescription seems to have solved the problem. My acroread startup time is a few seconds now. Why does a very good Linux distribution like OpenSuse with its wide support and following make so many of these mistakes?!?! Over the years, I have seen Suse/OpenSuse sending buggy distributions that make you wonder if they do much testing before releasing their distro. Here are a few bugs I have come across: The extremely slow startup of Openoffice in OpenSuse 10.0 was one of the reasons I switched to Fedora Core for a while...
1 comment
Read more

Online Storage Solutions

Problem: I often need to have some files readily available online so that I can access them from any computer. There are many ways to go about solving this problem and each comes with its set of shortcomings: Yahoo! Briefcase - 30MB limit Online storage services like Box.net, Xdrive, MediaMax - usually cost money; signing up is cumbersome Email to myself as an attachment - enough said there It's time to find a home-made solution. The solution I am about to suggest is intended for -- A *NIX user someone with access to a *NIX web server Solution: I am a linux user and I have user level access to a web server. The web server is configured such that the public does not have access to directory structure. So, I would need to write a script that copies my files to the web server and creates an index listing my files. Password protection of the storage would follow after that. Client Side: Use the following script to transfer file to server, make the file readable by public and execu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tax-and-spend Liberal My Ass

This is a continuation of my earlier posts on economic performance of democratic and republican administrations. My earlier posts include: Politics of the Federal Minimum Wage Democrats Have Kept Unemployment Low Democrats care about poor people Truth About Economic Performance of Political Parties I like to think I have shed light on some facts and debunked some conventional wisdom. In this post, I will attempt to examine the tax-and-spend liberal label put on democrats. Republicans often try to label democrats as tax-and-spend liberals who are soft on national security. While the latter point is based on anecdotal evidence, the earlier is amenable to empirical examination. So, I set out to prove or disprove the notion that democrats often tax and spend in a way that does not yield economic growth. The implication of tax-and-spend liberal is one that puts excessive tax burden on its population and finds inefficient (think socialistic) ways of spending that tax reven...
Post a Comment
Read more