It’s a still-fairly-new year, and I’m already behind. But I want my 2009 to be more bloggy, so here are a few items:

Alert reader Froggie sent along a heads-up to this New York Times blog post from last week about the environmental benefits of roundabouts. It includes a link to a Strib story about some of the ones in Minnesota (my photo above is of a roundabout under construction in Richfield in November). Froggie also included this link to an Insurance Institute of Highway Safety page about how roundabouts boost safety and fuel efficiency. I also noticed today that another NYT blog has this fresh post extolling the virtues of variable-priced tolling on highways, and our 394 lanes get a mention.

This morning, alert reader Prof. S alerted me to this Wall Street Journal article about a transit system that Roadguy has a special interest in: Beijing’s subway. When I visited China in 2000, the Beijing subway basically looked like this:

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There were two lines, one straight, one a circle. It was more than a little underbuilt for a city of its size. The Prof writes:

The story is an example of the “if you build it, they will come” aspect of these lines. The development of these subways has created opportunities for new businesses. Even for anti-LRT/pro-road people, this story talks about how the building of new subways made traffic much more bearable. People forget that there is overlap between LRT and roads — not a perfect overlap, but certainly a large one and enough of one to bring benefits to road drivers as well.

The fact that there are other benefits is also important. We could create a new high-paying job by taxing people $200,000 to pay one person $100,000 dig holes and another person $100,000 to fill them back in. But that means taking $200,000 out of productive activities to do something unproductive. It’s the Parable of the Broken Window economic fallacy.

In this case, even if the LRT lines cost $1 billion or more, the ROI is likely >1 because of the amount of time freed up for all commuters — both on the rail and not on the rail. This will only be more and more true as we build a network of lines.

The Prof should be writing items for the New York Times blogs, methinks.

Our last item pertains to an e-mail received yesterday evening from a California production company that made a one-hour documentary about the building of the I-35W bridge. Roadguy contributed a few photos from his vast digital archives and did an on-camera interview, but no word yet on whether I made the final cut. We’ll all find out next week when “Twin City Bridge: After the Collapse” has its premiere Thursday at 7 p.m. on a National Geographic Channel program called “Man-Made.” I’ll be inviting myself over to the home of some friends with cable so I can tune in.

That’s all for the moment. Your comments, as always, are welcomed below.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.