(Via Lawrence Solum) I see that Professor (and former IJer) Nicole Garnett has a long and fascinating paper in the Harvard Journal of Legislation about the regulation of cheap and informal urban transit. Basically, "jitneys" and cheap ad hoc buses were banned in the 1910s because the streetcar monopolies argued that they were both inefficient and likely to drive the established monopolies out of business. A network of monopoly-driven interest-legislation at local, state, and federal levels keeps the jitneys mostly or totally illegal in almost all cities.

Garnett's insight is not just to combine the history of jitney suppression with the modern policy problems, but also to tie all of this to welfare reform and efforts to fight poverty. Public transportation is particularly bad at serving many poor residential areas, working parents are likely to have domestic errands to run on the way to and from work, and an automobile is out of reach for many of the urban poor. Thus, the transportation suppression causes people to have to work worse jobs and spend more time getting to them, if they can manage to work at all.

I suppose it will surprise few readers of this blog to learn that I think no government-- local, state, national, or international-- ought to be banning informal urban transit. Safety concerns (which are empirically dubious here, especially given the dangerousness of urban bus stops) could be easily handled without anything close to the bans we have now. But what Garnett's paper points up well is that there is no morally defensible reason that anybody can have to favor total bans on urban jitneys.

The aforementioned eulogy, 84 Yale L. J. 200 (1974) to Alexander Bickel by Charles Black is fascinating, but also a bit opaque. It contains, among other things, the following passage:

There came a day when a question was asked him, and when a "yes" might, at the very least, have made possible further movement down the road toward what must have been a much-desired (I dare say the most-desired) goal. The question, mark you, was a close one; an honest and competent man might easily have concluded that the right answer was "yes." Alexander Bickel had come, on balance, to the opposite conclusion. He said "no," and a door closed; "no" was not the right answer, not the wanted answer. His name, by low men for low reasons, was doubtless crossed off a list. But it stayed, it stays, on another list-- the list of those to whom courage (and therefore honesty) is first. Bickel must have felt rather wry about this, but I don't think there can have been any conflict in his mind. By that time the habit of honesty ran through the man's whole grain.