Frank

King Street Station and downtown, Seattle by Curtis Cronn My fellow readers, I’m very exited to announce that Matt the Engineer and I are going to be joining the excellent blogging crew over at Seattle Transit Blog. I’ve always had great respect for the STB team. In fact, our blogs started at about the same [...]

Roger Valdez doesn’t want to debate anymore, he wants to win.  Apparently it’s Scarface, final scene, f**king bazookas under each arm, “say hello to my little friend.” Okay then! In the interest of being solutions-oriented, let me offer something positive. Compared to, say, most of Europe, Seattle falls short when it comes to building dense, [...]

Kevin Drum links approvingly to this idea from Ed Glaeser: DE-FEDERALIZE TRANSPORT SPENDING: Most forms of transport infrastructure overwhelmingly serve the residents of a single state. Yet the federal government has played an outsized role in funding transportation for 50 years. Whenever the person paying isn’t the person who benefits, there will always be a [...]

A related thought I had while attending last night’s meeting is that Baumol’s cost disease is a killer for bus service in the long run. If you’re not familiar, Baumol basically says that the cost of wages in unproductive sectors of the economy go up because those works are living in the same world as [...]

Eric de Place writes about the Governor’s proposed “barrel fee” on oil to pay for transportation projects: Now, let’s imagine a hypothetical barrel of oil under the proposed barrel fee. Perhaps 70 percent of it would be refined into transportation fuel, half of which would be sold to Washington’s consumers and half of which would be [...]