Discussion with several co-bloggers and Friends of Crescat impels me to make a bit clearer my real complaint about the NYC transit system. It's not about the time it takes to get from place to place, or the dirtiness or the grittiness of the experience. I understand that these are values being imperfectly optimised subject to important budget constraints, and I don't ask urban politicians to be miracle-workers.

My complaint about manhattan transit is largely the lack of transparency-- maps aren't always available until after you're through the turnstile, but if you're a midwestern rube like me, you have no idea until you find the map whether you want to go uptown or downtown in order to be able to connect with the J or the 6 or whatever it is you're pursuing. And since you frequently have to decide which way you're going before you can go through the turnstile . . .

And of course it's all the worse if the express trains are running local, or the local trains are running express, or the R is running as the Q, or whatever other chaotic reformulations seem to happen daily. Those who know the system well can easily adapt and adjust, but it punishes planning and newcomers.

This is particularly frustrating given the very welcoming layout of the streets of much of Manhattan. 53rd and 3rd. 12th and 1st. The grid makes it easy for even a novice to get from place to place, so long as he stays out of the West Village. But the sheer opacity of the train system is really quite exhausting.

[Not nearly as exhausting as missing your train to New Haven from the Harlem station because as you were standing up to board your once-beloved canvas bag manages to lock itself onto the bench, strapping your shoulders to the bench and immobilizing you as the train pulls away. Eventually I wriggled free, but I will never trust the bag (or the bench) again.]

Some time ago Raffi and Amber and I blogged our thoughts about the ideal system of public transit (here, here, here, and here). Libertarianish folk that we both are, neither of us got into the dirty questions about whether governments manage mass transit systems well, whether they ought to manage them at all, and if so which governments ought to manage them.

Enter the following:

1: Seattle has voted out their monorail boondoggle.

2: Lior Strahilevitz has some reflections, chiefly that federal money is good for mass transit and that administrative process and direct democracy are bad for it.

3: Geoff Manne has a scathing rejoinder.

4: The comments to Manne's post have produced an all-star lineup-- more thoughts from Manne and Strahilevitz as well as entries by Christine Hurt and Bill Henderson.

A few thoughts of my own-- my dim recollection of some back-of-the-envelope cost/benefit analysis in college was that buses were nearly always superior to trains, even given my own preference for trains and the increased street congestion caused by buses. Trains are incredibly capital-intensive and incredibly inflexible. Bus routes can change with the needs of the neighborhoods.

A sidenote to this result is that while trains pretty much have to be run by the government or a government-sponsored monopoly common-carrier, buses most certainly do not. Taxicabs, jitneys, city buses, and small private bus companies can all run in competition, if the city is willing to let them, which it almost never is. Under current constitutional understandings I am pretty sure that the department of transportation could issue regs pre-empting almost all municipal barriers to competition here, but as a political matter this is unlikely unless somebody accidentally makes me secretary of transportation. No discussion on this score would be complete without a link to Nicole Garnett's piece in the Harvard Journal of Legislation which I previously blogged about here.

So. I tend to agree with Strahilevitz's argument that direct democracy can lead to too many projects being started because they seem "cool!"-- this is probably true of government building projects generally, not just monorails. But the fact that direct democracy eventually leads to shutting the projects down strikes me as a benefit, not a cost. A better idea might be to allow referenda to cancel mass transit projects but not to start them up in the first place.

But I disagree about federal money. Massive amounts of federal money already flow into state and local development coffers because interest on state and local bonds is free from the federal income tax. This operates as a large subsidy of would-be federal-tax dollars to inefficient state and local boondoggles. (A local government project that earns only a 4% actual return beats out a private project that earns 5%, meaning that people are encouraged to chase bad money rather than good.)

I happen to think that we need less federal money to go to silly local monorails rather than more, but in any case if we do send federal money to local projects we ought to be forced to do it in cold cash payments rather than the current back-door.

So in the end I am unwilling to condemn all state involvement in public transportation. The network effects, public good problems, and so on are real. But we should wear our public-choice hats and remember that problems of government monopoly, confused public intervention and captured technocracy are very real, so a system that admits of lots of private competition with the public provision ought to be preferred to one that places all of our hands in one dubious basket. In this case, I think that means that a big network of jitneys, taxis, buses, and shuttles is probably superior to a train system if we are starting from scratch. We aren't, but this still means that in existing cities like Chicago or D.C. or NY we ought to spend more time cracking open the automobile transport market and less time worrying about constructing the Circle Line.

To sum up: I think we should decriminalize jitneys, have more ground transport, eliminate the tax-free-municipal-bond, and revamp referenda for public projects.

I'll open comments.

Amanda: internal debate it is then.

The question is not so much how street harrassment does in an up-or-down poll or referendum-- badly, I would think. The question is how many dollars for police officers, how many streetlights, how much governmental supervision of street life, how much possibly-overzealous persecution of marginal populations, how much money for first and fourteenth amendment lawsuits, and how many social welfare dollars for those with no other place to go the city is willing to put out.

As with all things, the answer is that with scarce resources and opportunity costs we might decide to make some areas more orderly than others. [This is importantly different than making some areas dramatically safer than others-- of which I do not approve.]

One trouble with uniformity is that there is disagreement about what sort of uninvited banter constitutes harrassment and what amount of such harrassment ought to be shamed or punished. And if there is a uniform standard there is no particular reason to believe it will be yours, unless you are lucky enough to be the median relevant voter. So think of the Ellicksonian solution as a sort of second-best-- given uncertainties, misunderstandings, pluralism, and scarcity, I think it is likely to be better by almost anybody's lights.

[I will give the last word(s) to the two of you unless one of you says something particularly egregious.]

In response to Amanda's and PG's posts on street harrassment, I offer a few thoughts on my own. For predictable social reasons, I tend not to be propositioned on the street as often as the other two are, but I hope my comments are not worthless, even if they are not original.

I agree wholeheartedly with my boss Robert Ellickson's argument that we should have pluralism in street culture. Some people want very orderly, quiet, streets where nobody is out of line. Some people like skid rows, and the comparatively low degree of official or unofficial rulemaking. Still others prefer something in between. What Ellickson proposes is basically a system of zoning, where red-, yellow-, and green- zones would divide the city into comparatively less- and more- intrusive regimes of public order-keeping. See Robert C. Ellickson, Controlling Chronic Misconduct in City Spaces: Of Panhandlers, Skid Rows, and Public-Space Zoning, 105 Yale L.J. 1165 (1996).

While I share the practical and constitutional misgivings that some critics of the article did, and also the concerns about how to lay the zones down in a satisfactory way, I nonetheless think a regime like this is probably better than any attempt to impose uniform legal rules or social norms on one polis. It is far better to know that walking from 96th to 110th street means confronting a concentration of come-ons than to have the same folks distributed randomly up and down all of Broadway. This helps both the brassy and the uptight order their lives as they like.

Put differently, while I, like Amanda think that street harrassment might be a sign of "fray" in a community, different communities within the same city might reasonably tolerate vastly different degrees of fray. It doesn't bother me that the homeless guys urinate on Sunday mornings in Farragut Square so long as they don't do the same thing on the Mall.

UPDATE: The categories each Crescatter picks for their own posts are typically inscrutable but I note with amusement that PG, Amanda, and I have filed our posts into three different categories-- New York, Feminism, and Urban Policy-- that may say quite a bit about our outlook here.

The argument about whether or not to shoot the looters cannot be removed from the question of institutions.

Glenn Reynolds and Dave Kopel support armed response to at least some looting activity. Eric Mueller describes the idea as "reprehensible" but without much argument as to why. Ted Frank attempts to defend the shoot-the-looters program, but concedes that there may not be enough law enforcement on the ground to do the job and Orin Kerr points out the corollary to this concession, that without an adequate law enforcement organization, vigilante defense of law-and-order may be anarchy, not law.

To sum up: The concrete question of whether looters in New Orleans ought to be shot in order to preserve what little order remains cannot be abstracted from the question of 1, who is to do the shooting, and 2, how they are to know who the looters are. The basic paradox is that the more the social order is put in peril, the harder it will be to find a trustworthy and transparent group of people to save it. Strong anti-looting social norms might help here, but it will be difficult to develop them via internet in the next 24 hours, however hard Professors Reynolds and Kopel try. I suppose the obvious institutional alternative would be comic-book superheroes, but they are in short supply.

I am rationally ignorant about the ultimate details of the new transportation bill but Clay Risen of TNR is against it while Carole Brown of the Chicago Transit Authority (who, yes, has a blog) is for it. Much as I depended on the CTA when I was a Chicago undergrad, this strikes me as being on the whole a bad sign. Still, if public funds are to be blown on massive boondoggles, it is far better that the boondoggles be things like big urban trains than things like documentaries about Alaska.

(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.

Robert McNamara at An Inclination to Criticize writes:

Find me another city on Earth where I can find (a) people who want to sell me drugs, (b) people who want to play chess for money, and (c) people who want to discuss complex issues of constitutional law all within three square blocks, and I willl move there.

Via Tyler Cowen I see Bryan Caplan's suggestion that before you get government housing assistance you ought to be required to take on some roommates, share a bathroom, and otherwise live the life of a college student. In principle I suppose this is fair enough, although I share both of Tyler Cowen's concerns-- that policing the living arrangements of people is generally undesirable and that the amount of money involved is so trivial as to hardly be worth the fire.

That said, I think Caplan is on to something bigger-- the relationship between welfare payments and hard bargains. If libertarian-types wish to cut government housing assistance, I think it's only fair to also lift government housing restrictions. People who need to live cheaply are sometimes forced to make hard bargains, bargains that political majorities find "unthinkable". Many jurisdictions limit the number of unrelated people who can live together, or the number of people who can live in X amount of space, or require certain amenities to be furnished. In much of New Haven, for example, it would probably be illegal for a person to live "like a college student" (multiple unrelated people sharing a single room and a hallway bathroom). I happen to think this is bad, and that we ought to make it easier for people in tough circumstances to make tough tradeoffs (and I think this is true regardless of whether we cut housing subsidies).

But it is interesting to me that most municipalities don't worry as much about a different tradeoff-- namely price and physical safety. The de facto situation in many urban areas, (e.g. Chicago) is that people who need cheap housing can find it by picking parts of the city where police protection is almost nil. It is interesting that we don't particularly encourage college students to make this tradeoff.

I suppose the near-anarchist types who want to privatize the police force think this is a good thing, but I don't. Presumably there are reasons having to do with enforceability and psychological bias that we do this, but that doesn't make it wise. So, if we are to take Mr. Caplan's suggestion-- that the poor should live like college students-- seriously, why not pursue it both ways, and also make sure that they are entitled to at least the level of physical security one can expect on or near college campuses?

Reihan has waxy praise of this article by Joel Kotkin over at The American Scene. While everyone should be reading TAS constantly for the extended fingertapping style solos of Menashi, Salam, & Douthat, the article itself is fairly poor. The only reason anyone should be interested in it is for the conception of "framing," but as Henry Farrell notes: see William Riker's work on heresthetics ([this] is not a new bag).

To wit: Kotkin's article seems to have three serious flaws. The first is the lack of distinction between growth and sustainable growth. The second is his massive and unrestrained (to the point of intellectual dishonesty [subnote: which frankly, coming from The Weekly Standard is a little tired]) conflation of liberal policy and leftist lunacy. The third is his misunderstanding of who actually lives in the cities he is describing, that is, a fundamental misapprehension of both Americans and immigrants to America. All three errors represent a lack of discrimination, rooted in an illogical and ahistorical economic determinism, which is the fundamental error of the piece.

Now, sustainable growth is often used as a buzzword by the sort of environmentalists who fly private jets and bitch about development near their condos in Aspen. That said, anyone who has driven in Los Angeles and Atlanta, or seen catastrophic sprawl in Houston or the other new surbanopoles of the South, understands that zoning is not the morally arbitrary concoction of beret-wearing Europhiles. Traffic regulation is a big part of the story of sustainable growth, especially given the Braess' paradox of highway growth producing its own traffic [hat tip, Seabrook] (we won't discuss the inherent contradictions involved in a magazine like The Weekly Standard praising a lifestyle that worships SUVs while simultaneously urging energy independence for foreign policy reasons), but there are many other zoning regulations that act as a brake on growth. There are important cultural reasons for this, but one just needs to look at Detroit or Newark or Cincinnati to see earlier horizontal cities in which large sprawling neighborhoods literally died in economic downturns. Part of this has to do with the loss of the industrial base and white flight (ironically to the aspirational [and largely white] cities Kotkin is talking about), but many cities suffered from these revenue (tax base) and cultural losses in the 1970s. Much of the aforementioned cities’ failures have to do with the inability of each city to govern such a wide area with such little civic attachment. By and large, geography and tribal affiliation trump governance and policy (Flint and Detroit were nearly zero-tax zones during the height of their decline); Manhattan survived the seventies because it was an island, and because its islanders had such a fiercely inculcated love of their cosmopolitan urbanity.

Moreover, Kotkin's celebratory view of the unrestrained growth of a city is so weirdly Spenglerian and intellectually inconsistent that it boggles the mind:

a) "Right now the demographic, economic, and political momentum belongs to the aspirational cities, places like Reno, Boise, Orlando, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake City. They attract the most new migrants from other parts of the country, and an increasing number of immigrants from abroad. [This is factually correct, but misleading. Suffice it to say that a significant increase in the immigrant population of Boise (or Charlotte, NC [which actually serves Kotkin’s point better]) is not significant in demographic terms (at least not before part b)] They have experienced some of the nation's sharpest increases in their numbers of new families"

sits with

b) "As places like even Phoenix, Houston, and Reno grow, become congested, and attract refugees from Euro-America, a powerful lobby against economic expansion will start to develop"

without any semblance of thought that the two states of a city might operate, if not causally, at least in some historic contingence, and that the negative consequences of the latter are at least partially related to the policies of the former. (Unless Kotkin suggests that we should love congestion and fear culture.) Perhaps his rise and fall need not happen if his rise didn't produce such bloated cities?

The horizontal city, besides its large environmental footprint, doesn't produce the sort of density that creates cultural institutions or a "civic sense” vital to a city’s survival: where is Death and Life of the Great American Cities when you need it? Not to sound too David Brooksian, but a lot of the appeal of these "aspirational cities" must surely be located in their homogeneous barrier against and yet cruel replication of a social anomie many residents thought they were fleeing as they ran from the last failing city in which they lived. It’s a vicious cycle, which is part of the reason Kotkin’s joyous vision of his “restless” suburbizens fleeing ever further (on Donner, on Blitzen: to Boise, to the Salt Lake Valley!) is so depressing. This restlessness is the antithesis of conservatism, and his radical embrace of deracinated capital sounds like so much reheated Das Kapital.

That's right. I'm dissing the 'burbs and calling Kotkin a Marxist. But in a semi-serious way. I take large exception to Kotkin's dismissal of New Urbanism and efforts in New Mexico and Phoenix to build cultural centers. He misses the key fact that these residents are residents of the aspirational cities he's been flogging. They’re not being held at gunpoint by members of the Met. (“Look here ‘Zonan. Build an acoustically sound Gehry designed concert hall or we’ll move in and build greenbelts all through your highway system!”) Here Kotkin's slavery to a weak determinist economic thinking becomes most transparent, as he attributes all of the desire by "local business leaders" [emphasis mine] to create cultural zones in their cities as a desire to increase growth. Well, sure. But they also are trying to create a civic community (perhaps to combat the restless anxieties of their citizens, externally fleeing an internal crisis of spirit [cue Heidegger]). Kotkin acts as if every opera house and museum were an anti-American expression of anti-growth Europhilia, rather than a desire by people for something other than material fulfillment and atomized suburban fortresses. Yes, it is nice to have a house and a yard, cities are riotously expensive, and public schools are so much better in Greenwich. But much of suburban flight is ideological (it is an ideology of material, which makes it easy to confuse with purely “rational” / economic thinking) as well.

Many people don’t react particularly well to modernity. I doubt that this is a controversial statement, although it is amusing that the radical-techno-libertarian right (Glenn, that’s you!), is contained within the same party as the people who have been most damaged by technological change. For all of Kotkin’s bluster, how many biotechnology or Internet ventures are being set up in the Midwest and Sunbelt—and he should see comparative murder rates, divorce rates, per capita income, government spending per capita, and government net per capita before toting his paradise; or more locally should observe the unfortunate dislocations [a soft word for a much harder fall] that have happened in many ex-urban and rural areas as manufacturing and agribusiness plants shift from city-edge to edge-city, from greater tax break to greater pollution abatement, leaving strained (although generally more integrated) cities in their wake. And what’s particularly bizarre about Kotkin’s analysis is that while it centers on job growth, it doesn’t look at the quality of that growth (again, sustainability); Kotkin encourages home ownership but decries city home owners as “landed gentry” (elsewhere, more bizarrely, “rentier liberals”); he encourages continual capital flight from his edge cities while decrying efforts to keep them from leaving; in short he encourages wealth creation while everywhere attacking the pursuits of the people who have created that wealth. This is a particularly schizophrenic materialism. It is better known as Marxism (when someone says “rentier,” I get out my Marx-Engels Reader). I can find no other ideology to contain Kotkin’s attacks on both luxury housing and on “inclusionary zoning,” on people who have “given up on improving education for middle class families” and on people at the “top universities,” on the media and on the financial services industry. This is a pretty large list of Bogeymen, and when Harvard and Salomon Brothers and high housing prices and wealthy house owners and the “hip and cool” (and the Hartford Convention and Henry James and Henry Miller) all are conflated as aspects of the city, well then, you haven’t explained the city, you’ve reproduced it with all of its endless variations (to crib from Leon Wieseltier). And what is this nonsense about “skimming the cream” from the global economic crop? "Control of the means of production," anyone?

Ultimately Kotkin’s screed gets tiresome, especially when he uses nuts like Jeremy Rifkin and an obviously election-sore Stranger editorial to serve as the straw men for not just the Left but for “Euro-American” (Must we use his asinine term? No.) Cosmopolitanism in general. (One also detects in Kotkin a hint of the puritanical strain of Marxism, distrusting of non-utile art and non-productive people: “cultural elites, singles, and gays.” And Kotkin discusses the American city without any mention of race? There is color-blindness and then there is blindness.) As for a more coherent account of Cosmopolitanism, I’d rather be represented by Martha Nussbaum. In the midst of this maelstrom, there is some sense, but it comes in the form only of Kotkin's recognition that a wacko on the left thinks the American Dream is dying (this time accurate, if non-representative) and that unfortunately, this observation seems to be fairly convincing to many of those people who seek out “Aspiration” (it infects their cities while they work). I wondered why Kotkin doesn’t interrogate the premise, and then I realized it was because he thought the American Dream itself was a super-structural myth, although he professes to love it. For the American Dream is not to have lower taxes than your father did, in a slightly less fulfilling job, in Boise. Surely it has something to do with the notion of America, a country not just of laws, but of localities. And like many blowhard right-populists, Kotkin is stuck hating both left-economic solutions to the problems of wealth and hating the wealthy. This is not a recipe for restrained pluralism, or traditional affirmations of virtue. No wonder he enjoins us to flee our homes in perspiratory aspiration; Kotkin acts like he is talking to burghers, but he believes he is talking to serfs. Prepare for the dictatorship of the commentariat.

Now, I’m generally pro-business (although anti-rapaciousness); but the market is not a savior, and for many unskilled Americans real-income growth has remained stagnant. This is surely fine: we’re a wealthy nation, and by no means is someone “voting against their economic interest” (especially since the left has largely abandoned their economic interests anyway) when they take a political stand on abortion or homosexuality or the place of divinity in our lives (although they are getting screwed by their party: see FMA, &c.); these are legitimate and noble choices about the dignity of man, and the left needs to stop prattling from such fragile positions of presumed intellectual and moral superiority. What these are not are choices that are in any sense confirming of liberalism or modernity. And big ‘L’ liberals, and conservatives interested in preserving the charming American democracy of de Tocqueville (rather than say, the reactionary recommendations of de Maistre) should sit up and take notice.

The heartland’s rejection of much of modernity (admittedly not the Kenmore, Expedition part) cannot be perpetually justified by classically liberal economics in a cultural vacuum. Suburbizens of Phoenix who move to Boise will not be doing so solely in search of a lower tax burden. In part, they will be seeking relief from a perceived cultural anomie. Sociologists of the 1980s often liked to examine white-flight in terms of economically freed white racism, but the search for culturally homogenous populations has always seemed to me to have less to do with racism and far more with anxieties about the progressive narrative for Americans, not only as white working class individuals saw real economic stagnation, but also as they felt culturally threatened (nota bene: I am not some joy-filled flaneur looking down my nose at the countrified rubes [if so, I’d be writing for The National Review]). Moreover, the resurgence of other non-material sources of meaning (super-churches, evangelical Christianity, Pentecostalism) does signal a societal turn towards more traditional sources of value (God, family, and nation). These values seem to be less than successful at staving off the wake of dissolution and dislocation that the cultural and economic engines of our age have produced (see the above implied statistics concerning regarding divorce rates, for example: far lower in Massachusetts than Alabama).

But these values aren’t penetrable or dismissible or in any way strange (which is to say that they are not ephemera): they are natural reactions to the continuation of an Enlightenment arrogance which drives a progressive American narrative creaking at the seams. Moreover, for many people, these value provide answers—ones that are as livable in New York City as they are in Salt Lake City (“God is in the City!” Psalm 46:5). They are emblematic of a culture in retreat as much as it is racing ahead. We drive bigger cars, we build miniature suburban fortresses, we flee into culturally homogeneous enclaves, we inhabit a synthetic past-present; we drive Priuses, we live in gentrified vertical islands, we stratify by talent and class, we inhabit a syncretic future-present. But while there are distinctions between us, they are fluid, not defined by policy, the market, or genetics. They are about perspective. This is far from Kotkin’s Aspirational / Europhilic divide, or any other attempt to paint Red and Blue America as an emulsion starting to separate into dissimilar components. We are instead an American Janus, a two-headed coin living on the edge of the same hermeneutic circle, straining backwards and rocking forwards. In this heady, dislocated time, there is much virtue in doing both.