Afternoon roundup

The worthies, on the closing of the browser tabs:

• The Let's Get Wellington Moving plan for bus-priority looks like it hits a big bottleneck on a key route, with no workaround.  
• National seems incoherent on vaccine passports. 
• Remember the old Discount Brands litigation from 20 years ago where new retail was blocked because it would hurt the amenity value of an existing shopping centre? Still happening. Ashburton Council blocks new retailers from taking up spaces in a new complex because it would hurt existing downtown properties. Meanwhile, the Commerce Commission is running an inquisition into supermarket pricing that will be poring over loyalty programs and weighted cost of capital measures, but won't be getting into regulatory constraints into allowing new entry until Session 8 on Thursday. 
• A hundred specialists call for harm-reduction approaches when the WHO has its own inquisition into vaping. 
• An MIQ shake-up is coming. Still no word on how non-residents might be able to enter. 
• Roger Partridge on the uncertain path ahead for Auckland. 
• An update to the Stats Act. An update's been needed, I hope the framework winds up being more enabling for research. But going through it will take some time. 
• RIP Anthony Downs. I'd set the following question on my take-home exam in my 3rd year Public Choice class, back in the day.

  Some work in economics is called seminal: it is the seed from which springs whole new fields of enquiry. Anthony Downs’ 1957 “An economic theory of political action in a democracy” is one such work. Demonstrate that insights in that paper anticipate at least three major developments in later work in public choice: show me the initial Downsian insights and how they’ve been developed later by others. 

• "Economics is still a discipline where you can put forward non-PC results without being destroyed for it."
• How to protect kids, while the government continues to ban them from being vaccinated. 

Afternoon roundup

The tabs... there are so many of them.

A few notes on the closing of the tabs.

• Tyler Cowen is excellent on herd immunity. Those who urge us not to worry about the virus used to claim that herd immunity would kick in and the virus would burn itself out. Now they tell us not to worry because the death rate has dropped. But herd immunity was supposed to stop case numbers from rising. And even places with lotsa Covid aren't there yet - other than perhaps at San Quenton. 
• Sam Bowman has a neoliberal agenda for the 2020s: YIMBYism, support for immigration, and carbon pricing (he says carbon taxes, but if you've already got an ETS, that'll do the job). Neoliberalism is a bit of a political swear word. Oliver Hartwich goes through the history of the term - the actual neoliberals were more 'third way' types. Whether the term should be buried or reclaimed is a bit of an open question. 
• Steve Ambler and Nick Rowe on NGDPLT.
• Freedom of speech doesn't encourage terrorism. It reduces it. Here's Eskildsen and Bjørnskov in Political Studies. Why? They suggest "(1) more freedom of expression makes it easier for the police and intelligence agencies to gather information on potential terrorists and targets, and (2) freedom of expression works as an outlet for displeased citizens through which they can openly express their discontent instead of resorting to terror."
• Chris Bishop and Phil Twyford had an excellent panel discussion, hosted by Warren and Mahoney, in which they went through urban and transport policy. This kind of thing makes you really appreciate what we've got in NZ. 
• Get yourself a city councillor with a digger. It helps.
• Support for immigration improves, albeit on a bit of a tough to interpret question. If folks recently said that the amount of immigration should increase, are they thinking about policy as it was before Covid, or are they thinking about current border restrictions?
• Helen Clark comes out in support of the euthanasia bill. I agree with her. 
• Superb piece from Colby Cosh on tax and legal cannabis in Canada. It isn't enough just to look at the tax take on cannabis. Is it a complement or a substitute to alcohol or tobacco? What are the general equilibrium effects? 
• Every supporter of circular economies and zero waste should support this initiative.
• Can you build a new tech hub? It's harder than it sounds.
• Razib Khan on Brahmin Privilege
• Keas are awesome
• Arthur Grimes on getting targets back into government.

Transport pandemics

Rather a while before lockdown, I stopped using Wellington's public transport. There were just too many people who'd board busses while coughing or sneezing; I think I got off the bus a mile before our house on my last ride while saying "Nope, not 'till this mess is done."

MIT's Jeff Harris has put up some interesting correlations between New York's most-affected neighbourhoods and public transport.

He also offers this caution:

A Bunch of Garbage 

While we’ve got a few more maps up our sleeve, we’re already at a juncture where some readers may react with extreme skepticism. We’ve already admitted we don’t have a cleanly designed natural experiment. None of Dr. Snow’s successors– He died of a stroke at age 45, four years after the handle came off the Broad Street pump. – managed to get the Flushing Local and the rest of the MTA abruptly shut down at the end of February. Without such evidence, the naysayers will assert that any diffuse, multitentacled network that traverses most of the city could be correlated spatially with the spread of coronavirus infection documented above. To be sure, serious critics won’t point to the electromagnetic signals from power lines, but they could argue that the path traced in Figure 6 could just as well represent the stops of sanitation trucks. Put bluntly, the critique goes, the evidence presented thus far would be consistent with contaminated garbage as the vehicle for the massive spread of deadly COVID-19.

Except for one thing – namely, we know that the garbage hypothesis is entirely implausible. We know that close contact in subways is fully consistent with the spread of coronavirus, either by inhalable droplets or residual fomites left on railings, pivoted grab handles, and those smooth, metallic, vertical poles that everyone shares. We know that the flattening of the epidemic curve in Manhattan two weeks after that borough had cut its subway ridership by 65 percent adds tellingly to the circumstantial evidence. We know that we can’t dismiss out of hand our finding of reciprocal seeding from the periphery of the Flushing local line to Manhattan’s only hotspot in Midtown West, and from that central hub back to the periphery.

As lockdown eases here, I won't be considering public transport unless masks are required.

I've really not had time to blog much lately. The past month has been a blur. I've been active on the Twitter feed, and we've put out a pile of reports, notes and columns on the pandemic response. Hopefully I'll be able to get back to blogging those bits as they come out.

Bad Bus Equilibrium

I don't see any way of fixing this one, but maybe you do.

Current Wellington bus rules have cheaper fares for students for a reduced class of carriage: if the bus is full, full-fare passengers get to sit and students get to stand.

That's all fine, but the resulting equilbrium isn't. Students clog up the path near the rear exit of the bus. Empty seats are behind them. Adults queue up in front of them, unable to reach the empty seats. And then the driver sometimes breezes past bus stops because, from the driver's perspective, the bus is full.

There are ways of solving it, but none of them work:

• Simplest would be a norm where adults sat at the back first, kids sat at the front first, and then kids start yielding to adults (starting near the back door) as the bus fills up. I don't know how you get there from here. Also, some adults would resent having to walk past the kids. I wouldn't because efficiency, but others might. 
• If high school kids weren't idiots, they would get out of the way by sitting in closely adjacent seats, let the adults move to the empty seats at the back, then resume their prior position. And we would all have ponies too.
• If kids had to yield to adults on request rather than having to stand if there are adults unable to take a seat, that could simplify things - and especially if adults were sensible and made the request of kids at the back first. But it would conflict with Kiwi politeness norms around asking them to yield their seat, which then in a politeness-jamming equilibrium with the kids standing anyway to avoid having to be asked to yield, and we're back where we started from. 

File under "Trivial but sad and likely non-remediable imperfections of a world that's still rather good on the whole". Or First World Problems. But it was frustrating watching the usual mess unfold from the back of the bus this morning. 

In related Helpful Efficiency Tips for a Better World: unless you have good reason not to, always choose the seat that is currently most difficult to reach when entering a room or bus if the table/room or bus is likely to be close to capacity. Your sitting in any other place means somebody else has an even more difficult time of reaching the currently most difficult to reach seat. 

Monorails

From today's Christchurch Press:

A light-rail network for Christchurch will be investigated as part of a package of measures to revitalise the central city.

Public-private funding deals and putting social housing closer to the city centre and key suburban areas will also be explored if a report is adopted by the Christchurch City Council on Thursday.

The ideas came from a North American study tour last year by Mayor Bob Parker, council chief executive Tony Marryatt and strategy and planning manager Mike Theelen.

The 16-day trip included visits to San Francisco, Vancouver, Seattle and Portland and cost ratepayers about $30,000. A light-rail system was mooted by Parker late last year.

Theelen said that despite the high initial costs of rail, the cities visited said a rail network's carrying capacity and durability outweighed bus systems.

Sigh. For those who recall...

Lyle Lanley: Now I'm here to answer any questions you children may have about the monorail.

Ralph: Can it outrun The Flash?

Lanley: You bet!

(other kid): Can Superman outrun The Flash?

Lanley: Eh, sure. Why not.
(crouches at Lisa's desk)
Hello little girl. Wondering if your dolly can ride the monorail for free?

Lisa: Hardly. I'd like you to explain why we should build a mass transit system in a small town with a centralized population.

Lanley: Ha ha. Young lady, that's the most intelligent question I've ever been asked.

Lisa: Really?

Lanley: Oh, I could give you an answer, but the only ones who'd understand it would be you and me. And that includes your teacher. (Lisa giggles) Next question: you there, eating the paste!

Light rail always seemed more of an ... Ashburton idea....

As for Portland as example, see the Cascade Institute's withering analysis.

There's no way that there would be enough traffic on a Rangiora - Christchurch - Rolleston line to cover the costs. And that's the only run where it could make sense. I'd suggest reading Liberty Scott on light rail issues in NZ, but his blog's currently doing a strange auto-redirect to his RSS subscription feed if you use Chrome, so be warned.

If I voted, and if Anderton came out against this potential boondoggle while Parker supported it....

Update: Dave Guerin points me to his coverage of a shonky-looking proposal for a gondola linking Massey University to Palmerston North. See here and here, and here.