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Traveling by car in Manhattan has slowed down 27 percent in the last 5 years, from a slow running pace of 6.5 mph on average to a fast walking pace of 4.7 mph (nytimes).

“The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth” (nytimes) says the same thing as New Yorker magazine (the U.S. spends 5-6X what it costs other developed countries to build infrastructure), but supplies details on the no-show jobs, the $400/hour for union construction workers, etc.

As the U.S. population grows (due almost exclusively to immigration) and our successful cities reach Chinese-style population densities, I wonder if it is time to abandon the idea of travel by road or rail. Instead of trying to relearn how to build major infrastructure projects, why not arrange cities into walkable sub-cities in which the primary mode of transportation is via foot? To speed up travel-by-foot time, New York could build catwalks about 15′ above the streets. This is a pretty simple project that should be within an American local government’s capability and it would speed up travel times tremendously (no waiting for lights; no fighting for space on sidewalks that have become crowded).

Details: compensate building owners for the compromised view from the second floor windows by reducing the property tax rate on those floors.

Readers: Thoughts?

Related:

• How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure?
• U.S. versus German infrastructure spending and results
• Danish happiness: bicycle infrastructure

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The forecast for our local airport (Boston suburbs) is a high of 4 degrees F on Saturday with a low of -12.

Tomorrow will be toasty warm by comparison with a high of 29. Time to celebrate? I just got this email from the airport operations folks:

Tomorrow, Thursday 1/4, we are expecting 10-15” of snow with blizzard conditions, followed by high winds gusting over 50mph and frigid wind chills down to -25F through Saturday 1/6.

To better assist you, we ask you to advise us of any planned flight operations on Thursday 1/4 or Friday 1/5.

(The airport almost never officially closes, but sometimes a runway will be closed for snow-plowing and also sometimes runways are in marginal condition, e.g., covered with an inch or two of snow.)

From the school on Monday:

As you know we are experiencing extreme cold temperatures with dangerous wind chills. This is a reminder to ensure that your children are properly dressed for the conditions as they prepare to return to school tomorrow. … Our principals, including the preschool coordinator, will be working with faculty to ensure the safety of children throughout the day. As always, you should make the decisions that are best for your family regarding transportation to school and school attendance under severe weather conditions. [emphasis added]

(As it happened, the school building, slated for a $100 million identically sized replacement, was so thoroughly heated that students and teachers ended up opening windows to obtain a comfortable T-shirt temperature in the classroom.)

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One of our local public radio stations (see this previous post on the finances), WBUR, ran an article (“2 Firms To Investigate Allegations Against Tom Ashbrook”) about unhappy times among staff members of the On Point show. I.e., the news organization is reporting on itself. This makes sense because WBUR is packed full of journalism professionals who are great as investigations, right?

But then it seems that they are going to spend listener donations on hiring a $1,200/hour law firm, Holland & Knight, to figure out who had sex (or wanted to have sex? or talked about sex?) with whom. They’re hiring a separate contractor to look at “allegations of name-calling” (why not give the cash to local 3rd graders? That’s where I would go to find expertise in this area!).

I could understand WBUR not wanting to write about its own internal dispute and also leaving any investigation to outsiders. But if they are going to investigate this sufficiently to write the article, why can’t they finish the investigation internally? Why not simply have the reporter who wrote the above-cited article continue interviewing people and deliver a full account to management?

Related:

• What do we do with all of these leftover middle-aged accused sexual harassers? (about another NPR employee and including my question “Who will scold the scolders?”)

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Over the past 10-20 years I have noticed an increasing percentage of young people seeking to spend their careers in non-profit enterprises, e.g., universities or public radio stations. Americans also now seek government jobs as avidly as 15th century Chinese did. Now that the tax code has been revised to make starting and operating a business more financially rewarding, I wonder if 2018 will be a year in which more Americans become interested in the (formerly?) dwindling for-profit sector of the economy?

Readers: What do you think? If for-profit corporations get to keep more of their profits, will that enable them to compete more effectively with non-profits for the next generation of workers?

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Happy New Year to the weblog faithful!

We couldn’t make it to Times Square this year so Greta (age 8) came up with the idea of a suburban New Year’s ball drop.

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Happy New Year!

How about a resolution to learn something new in 2018?

Under the time-honored medical school principle of “See One, Do One, Teach One,” I am preparing to help medical students use the R programming language. This post is to share what I’ve learned about learning R.

Set up your PC: download R and then download RStudio.

Advice from a friend who teaches machine learning at Harvard… “For a traditional procedural programmer”: read R Cookbook (O’Reilly); “For someone with low-level or Lisp knowledge”: read Advanced R (CRC).

[Somewhat tangentially, he recommended An Introduction to Statistical Learning, with Applications in R (James, et al; Springer), or The Elements of Statistical Learning (Springer), which can be used to awe friends with all of the equations and graphs.]

If you’d rather watch lectures and take short quizzes, start with the free edX course Data Science: R Basics. The next step on edX is Statistics and R, part of a seven-course series.

Separately, I’m not sure that I love R so far. “Like APL without the special keyboard” seems like a fair description. All kinds of magic happen with just a character or two and I worry that code won’t be readable, maybe even by the original author!

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“Two heterosexual Irish men marry to avoid inheritance tax on property” (Guardian) neatly combines two recent media sensations: same-sex marriage and whether there should be taxes following death.

[Separately, though of course any marriage is a beautiful event it is unclear why this one was necessary. If you inherit a house that you live in, you may be exempt from taxes under Irish law (source). But perhaps one has to be a blood relation?]

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Our 2007 Infiniti M35x is on its last legs with about 85,000 miles on the clock. The latest issue is a disconnection in one of two mufflers that, absent craft welding skills, requires $1,300 in third party parts ($2,500 in official Infiniti parts?) to repair. This follows failures in the radiator, brakes, A/C coolant hoses, etc. Nissan is not up to the challenge of New England winters and roads!

We are considering saving the planet with a Honda Clarity plug-in hybrid.

Let’s assume that lease numbers are the best guide to the actual cost of owning a vehicle since that is the price at which an arm’s length transaction for three years of ownership occurs.

We got a quote from the same dealer at roughly the same time for $0 down 36-month leases.

• stripped Honda Clarity: $556/month (residual value 46 percent)
• stripped Honda Accord LX CVT: $376/month (residual value 60 percent)
• upgraded Honda Accord EX CVT $434/month (residual value 59 percent)

As noted above, the Clarity Hybrid has a much lower predicted resale value than the gas-powered Accords. This, plus the higher list price, leads to $6,480 in extra costs over three years.

What about fuel cost savings that might offset this? Suppose that we drive 25,000 miles at 25 mpg in the Accord. That’s 1,000 gallons of gasoline at $2.75 per gallon = $2,750. The Federales say that the Clarity can go 100 miles on 31kWh of electricity (about $6 at Massachusetts electric rates, delivered, of 20 cents per kWh (nationwide rates)). We assume that we can go 12,000 miles on electric at a cost of $720. The other 13,000 miles in the Clarity will happen at 30 mpg? That’s 433 gallons = $1,192. So the fuel savings are $952.

Readers: Did I make any mistakes above? Or is the cost of lording it over neighbors in the Greener Than Thou department roughly $5,500?

[Note that I updated the electricity-related arithmetic, above, to reflect the real cost of electricity in Massachusetts, including the various delivery charges.]

Related:

• Have we reached Peak Reliability for internal combustion engine cars? (camshaft sensor) describes the Infiniti’s failure on Interstate 90
• How to get a free car: lease an electric car (but sadly, not a Tesla) — middle class taxpayers in California will buy rich residents free cars

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Hosting a New Year’s celebration for a mixed group of deplorable small business owners and righteous W-2 wage slaves? Here is a suggestion for wines to serve:

 

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As 2017 winds down I want to recommend The Russian Revolution: A New History by Sean McMeekin, very likely the only Bard College professor who is not impressed with Socialism.

I had always thought of Bolshevism as a kind of logical next step in the political development of Russia. Professor McMeekin presents the success of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin as almost an accident. The Tsar followed bad advice and entered World War I. The Germans, with whom Russia was at war at the time, financed the Bolsheviks with as much as $1 billion in today’s money. The provisional government that took over after the February Revolution got distracted by a fight with a popular general (the Kornilov affair) and failed to do the obvious thing of arresting all of the German-financed traitors. McMeekin’s point of view does not seem to be the consensus among historians, but it is an interesting perspective.

The history is also relevant for our time due to the debate that we’re having about whether we can make the average American better off by having the government grab money from rich Americans. The Soviets were the masters at this, according to McMeekin. They looted out the world’s largest gold reserves. Then they took all of the property from wealthy private citizens, some of whom were among the richest people in the world. Then they took all of the accumulated wealth of the churches in Russia, which yielded literally tons of silver. Then they took a lot of wealth from the rest of the world by defaulting on the country’s debt. Russia had been one of the world’s most successful economies in the years leading up to the revolution so there was a huge pile of loot to draw down. Nonetheless, the loot didn’t go that far and people ended up starving. What the Russian/Soviet experiment teaches McMeekin is that a growing economy is more important than grabbing accumulated wealth from rich bastards.

McMeekin closes out the book by noting that modern politicians who promise the same stuff that Lenin promised and use the same tactics are likely to rise to power in roughly the same way.

Related:

• Hugo Chavez: Great politician; poor administrator
• Book review: Piketty’s Capital

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