If You Build It, They Will Come, But Only If They’re Allowed to Build More Stuff

Maps are powerful ideas. A map once drawn can be viewed as a contract, a promise to build something. We live with the ghosts of maps drawn long ago. Unbuilt highways queue-up to get built, even when their rationale has disappeared. But lines remain unbuilt for a reason, people perceived the benefit did not outweigh the cost. Of course, conditions can change, a line which once failed a benefit-cost test may now pass it, or vice versa.

READERS may know that I have an interest in urban development issues, and in particular in the economic costs of restrictions on growth. I think that those most involved in city planning are beginning to have a greater appreciation for those costs. Yet the presumption is still that one has to make a positive case for more building in order to justify greater allowance of density. Consider this paragraph by Emily Badger, writing at Atlantic Cities:

Dana Hedgpeth writes up new research comparing metropolitan areas by the efficacy of their transit systems in getting people to work:

A Greater Greater Washington reader named thisisbossi dreamed up an impossibly ambitious scheme for expanding WMATA’s heavy rail network:

Submitted by Simon Black of Sovereign Man blog, In 1919, a prominent socialist named Nicholas Klein addressed the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Convention. And in describing their struggle, he told the crowd: “First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.”

Before Queen’s Park asks residents to dish out more money for transit expansion, it needs to “root out waste” at the provincial government, says Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak.

Improvements in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have unleashed a flow of U.S. oil faster than pipelines can be built to carry it, creating a bounty of business for good, old-fashioned railroads.