Austin Contrarian

Gimmicky site of the day

This site uses your blog to determine your psychological "type."

Don't use it as a substitute for solid couch time with a professional. It claims I'm a "doer," which would draw a laugh from my wife:

The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them . . .

No.  Notoriously no.

. . . and often full of energy, . . .

No.

. . . talking, joking . . .

I'm a pathological introvert, so no.

. . . and engaging in physical out-door activities.

Yes, if walking to the bus counts. I don't think that's what they mean.

Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus.

Perhaps scrambling to meet a briefing deadline is "action." And the closer the deadline, the better I focus, so this one gets a "sorta".

They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through.

Yeah, okay.

They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

No.

It did get the thinking/sensing/feeling/intuition thing more or less right.  

Fairness

In Armchair Economist: Economics & Everyday Life economist Steven E. Landsburg posed the following:

"Suppose that Jack and Jill draw equal amounts of water from a community well. Jack's income is $10,000, of which he is taxed 10%, or $1,000, to support the well. Jill's income is $100,000, of which she is taxed 5%, or $5,000, to support the well. In which direction is the policy unfair?"

Jack and Jill are getting exactly the same amount of water but the government has decreed that Jill pay five times as much for it.  Doesn't seem fair.  But Jack must pay a larger percentage of a much more modest budget to get the water; the tax is more of a hardship for Jack than Jill.  Maybe Jill should be paying more.

Carpe Diem says an honest person will admit that this question has no indisputably right answer. Prof. Landsburg himself asked "If I can't tell what's fair in a world of two people and one well, how can I tell what's fair in a country with 250 million people and tens of thousands of government services?"

Let's assume we agree that this taxing scheme is fair.  Consider a simple twist:

The well produces 2,000 gallons.  The government taxes Jack $100 for each 100 gallons he draws from the well.  Jack would be willing to pay $200 for the first 100 gallons, $190 for the next 100, and so forth, so that he would be willing to pay $100 for the tenth barrel of 100 gallons.  Because Jack will keep buying water until the marginal price equals the marginal value to him,  he will spend a total of $1,000 for 1,000 gallons.

The government taxes rich Jill $500 for each 100 gallons she draws from the well.  Jill values the first 100 gallons at $590, the second 100 gallons at $580, the third 100 gallons at $570 and so forth; she is willing to pay $500 for the 9th barrel of 100 gallons and only $490 for the 10th barrel.  Jill keeps buying water until marginal price equals the marginal value to her so she spends $4,500 for 900 gallons; she's not willing to buy the last 100 gallons.  

100 gallons remain in the well.  Jack could buy that last 100 gallons for $100, but he doesn't value them that much.  Jill is willing to spend $490 for that 100 gallons, but that is not the tax we agreed was "fair" for Jill.  

Is this tax scheme still fair if it wastes 100 gallons of water?

Economics can't answer this.  All it can do is identify the dead-weight loss from the tax policy (here the 100 gallons of water left in the well).

I imagine 80% of political arguments are isomorphic to one of these two examples.  Which is why I try to stay out of political arguments.

How many condos downtown?

Jude Galligan of Downtown Austin has completed a comprehensive inventory of downtown's condos and apartments (nearly 4,000 total).  Methodical and very interesting -- the kind of stuff I'll likely plagiarize some day.

Fact of the day

In 2000, downtown Austin had 12,841 surface parking spots.  (That was just surface lots.  Downtown also had 4,670 street-parking spots and 20,575 garage spots.)

See here (Figure 4).

Bad sportswriters can now exhale

If you love baseball, stats, and the spectacle of Hollywood writers gleefully shredding bad sportswriting, too bad:  the Fire Joe Morgan guys are calling it quits.

It will be a long, sad baseball season.

Parking study

M1EK immediately pointed me to a 2000 City of Austin survey of downtown parking.  According to this chart, 42% of the total available garage spaces sat empty during the peak hours.  That's good evidence the problem is one of coordination and not supply.

That was eight years ago.  Has average utilization gone up or down?  My guess is down because of the large amount of parking mandated for new high-rises.

Parking census

At any downtown Austin conference, particularly a conference attended by out-of-towners, one invariably hears complaints about the lack of parking.  Downtown retailers complain, too.  As do weekend shoppers and bar hoppers.  I attended a CLE land-use seminar a few weeks ago and one of the city planners touted the benefits of establishing maximum parking limits (as opposed to the minimum parking limits we have now).  That one statement generated more discussion -- heated at that -- than the rest of the presentations put together.  

But downtown is brimming with parking.  There are six multi-level parking garages in the small area bounded by 6th, Guadalupe, 10th and Colorado.  I know because I'm staring at them and their unused, roof-top parking spaces.  

I would be surprised if downtown doesn't have plenty of excess parking.  Our city code mandates excess parking.  While lots of buildings were built before code-required parking, they are small.

So why do we have a parking problem when we have excess capacity?  One possibility is that it is a pain in the ass to open a private garage to the public unless there is enough excess capacity to make it worth the trouble.  My building's parking garage is open to the public, but it has lots of excess capacity.  There are garages, though, with just 40-50 empty spots; it's not cost-effective to set up a booth and attendant for just a few spots.

There are problems on the demand side, too.  Nothing keeps employers from renting space for their employees -- employers know who their employees are and capture the benefits of giving their employees a place to park.  It's a different story for retailers and bars, though.  If I'm a retailer, I can rent space for my customers but nothing prevents my customers from hopping around to other stores.  Other stores will freeload off my investment.  Consequently, no one does anything, and excess parking within walking distance remains locked up.

If this is the problem, then the solution is for the city to step in to match supply and demand.  The city might charge retailers a monthly parking fee which it could use to rent excess parking.  Or the city could create a mandatory retailers' association to do the same thing.  Freeloading problem solved.

But maybe there really is a shortage of parking.  My birds-eye survey isn't very scientific.  A true shortage of parking calls for a different solution.

This issue can't be resolved abstractly.  We need data.  I'd like to see the city take a census of downtown parking.  We need to know how many parking spots there are downtown and precisely where they are.  We also need to know each garage's average and peak occupancy.  Only then can we diagnose and solve the problem.  

If the City has already completed this kind of detailed census, I'd appreciate a pointer.  The City's been floating the idea of building public garages downtown so perhaps it has.  I haven't seen it, though.

And yes, I know that some will argue that the shortage of parking is good because it encourages bus ridership.  This deserves a separate post, but my take is that we're after the marginal downtown visitor -- the one who would visit if there were parking but who will not take the bus.  I assume that garages will charge for downtown parking even if the coordination problem is solved (I hope so) and that visitors who don't want to pay for or fool with parking will still take the bus.   An extra parking space does not automatically mean one less bus rider.  

Update:  M1EK points me to this study.  

Suburb-city differences in gasoline consumption.

Last in this series . . . 

Kahn and Glaeser have also estimated the difference in carbon emissions between cities and suburbs for 48 MSAs.  I've again converted that to gallons of gasoline.  (See the last post for their methodology and caveats.)

Nashville, surprisingly, tops the list:

Note that suburbanites are not always much worse off than central city residents when gas prices start rising.  A $1 increase in the price of a gallon of gas will cost Kahn/Glaeser's hypothetical Denver suburban household an extra $123 per year in gas relative to their cousins living in an apartment in town. $10 bucks  a month. Suburban Austinites must pay an extra $210 per year because of the 210 extra gallons they consume. 

These are pretty crude estimates.  Others have attempted more finely-grained estimates down to the census block level.  Both methods rely on a snapshot of the data; as gas prices rise, drivers adjust their driving by switching vehicles, chaining errands, or simply going out less.  These adjustments will narrow those differences some, but the fact remains that a $2 increase in gasoline makes our hypothetical Austin suburbanite a few hundred dollars poorer relative to the those living close to downtown.

Why do Southerners drive more?

As I noted in my last post, Kahn and Glaeser found that Southerners drive more than people in other parts of the country even after controlling for metropolitan area and census tract density.  I've been puzzling over that.  Here are some possible explanations:

1.  Southerners just like to drive more.  The South birthed NASCAR, after all.

2.  Southern cities tend to be less dense than cities in other parts of the country.  Kahn and Glaeser supposedly controlled for that.  But they assumed a linear association between density and driving -- i.e., an X% increase in MSA density leads to a Y% decrease in driving.  The relationship may not be linear.  Denser areas of course support better mass transit.  But density surely offers increasing returns to scale to mass transit.  Doubling residential density, for example, supports a denser network of bus routes, which makes buses more attractive and increases the probability that a given resident will ride the bus.  Put differently, doubling residential density might increase ridership by 120% rather than just 100%.

3.  Southern cities tend to be poorer, which means they have less money to spend on buses.  (Of course, this also means their residents have less money to spend on cars.  But of course their housing is cheaper so their residents have more money to spend on cars.  And so on and so on.)  

4.  It's a legacy of racial discrimination.  When I lived in Jackson, Mississippi, I noticed that bus riders were overwhelmingly black; I assume that whites abandoned buses once the ridership mix tipped decisively toward blacks.  (The same dynamic operates in public schools).  This likely has three consequences:  (1) Most obviously, almost all whites drive; (2) because almost all whites drive, there is poor bus service in predominantly white neighborhoods, which reinforces whites' disinclination to ride the bus; (3) because bus service is mainly used by blacks, whites aren't inclined to vote much money for it.

I'm sure I'll come up with others five minutes after I hit the "Publish Now" button.

How gasoline use varies among metropolitan areas

Back in March, I wrote about economists Matthew Kahn and Ed Glaeser's work comparing carbon emissions among metropolitan areas.

Among other things, they estimated how carbon emissions from driving vary across metropolitan areas.  The variation in gasoline use is just as interesting, though.  Kahn and Glaeser did not explicitly calculate this, but I did the simple arithmetic to convert their estimates of carbon emissions to estimates of gasoline use.  

In my last post, I was working from their relatively short, "popular" article, which provided data for just ten MSAs.  I have now put my hands on their full paper[1] (gated, unfortunately), which provides estimates for 66 MSAs.  I've again converted their estimates of carbon emissions to estimates of gasoline use.   

What's neat about Kahn and Glaeser's approach is that they've tried to make an apples-to-apples comparison.  Simply calculating gasoline use per household is misleading because some metropolitan areas are wealthier than others, and wealthier people tend to use more gasoline, all else being equal.  Also, households tend to use more gasoline as they increase in size; thus, a metropolitan area with lots of large households will use more gasoline than a metropolitan area with lots of one-person households.  Kahn and Glaeser have tried to fix this problem by estimating how household income and size affect gasoline consumption.  They then estimated gasoline consumption for a household with 2.62 members earning $62,500/year.

They also estimated the impact on gasoline consumption of MSA density, census tract density, and distance from the Central Business District.   And they found that gasoline use varies across regions; Southerners simply drive more than people out West, for example, even after controlling for things like density.  Using these estimates, they predicted, for each MSA, the "standard" household's gasoline consumption. 

The results are below.  Just for fun, I compared gasoline consumption in Austin to gasoline consumption in other MSAs.  Austin does not fare well under their methodology, mainly because it is not very dense and a large percentage of the population lives relatively far from the CBD. 

(Here's the spreadsheet on Google Docs) 

Note that this allows a rough estimate of the relative amount of pain inflicted by gas price increases.  For example, using their estimates, a $1 increase in the price of gasoline costs the standard household in Houston $60 more per year than the standard household in Portland.  (Remember that these are aggregate MSA estimates; they don't permit comparisons between the residents of Houston's suburbs and the residents of central Portland.  They also have not explicitly factored in the effect of transit on gasoline consumption, although that will be captured to some extent by their adjustment for density.)      

[1] Kahn & Glaeser, The Greenness of Cities: Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Urban Development August 2008 NBER Working Paper #14238 www.nber.org.