[daviddennis]

You've probably seen this before, but I thought the Thoureau Institute and its book 'The Vanishing Automobile' were quite interesting. They listed Houston as the epitome of a livable city - it acknowledged that most people wanted to drive, and sensibly accomodated them.

You live around there, don't you? Would you tend to agree?

He has a bunch of policy prescriptions at the end of his book, including variable road pricing based on demand. Personally, I think this would increase the cost of driving to too high levels, while giving our governments a boatload of cash to waste, neither of which I consider to be particularly desirable goals.

I think he was mostly spot on, but road pricing annoys me as a concept due to both low costs and privacy implications for the modern toll collection systems.

I certainly wouldn't consider Gray Davis the last word on any subject, for fairly obvious reasons, but I suspect he's correct, at least for Southern California. The reason is that I think it will be politically impossible to displace anyone from their homes.

Freeways into undeveloped regions are another matter entirely, of course.

D

[Dog Gone]

Houston is a very liveable city. The whole place is an example of the free market in action because there are no zoning laws. It's the very opposite of micromanaged urban planning like we see on the West Coast.

What Houston lacks is charm. It essentially has none. It's functional, and if the market demand is for a fast food restaurant or an office complex in your area, that's exactly what is going to happen.

The congressman who replaced veteran Bill Archer in Congress, John Culberson, has made it his number one goal to do something about the freeway entering it from the west. We call it the Katy Freeway, but you probably know it as the Santa Monica Freeway. It's a bottleneck because of the explosive growth of the city to the west.

He championed an expansion of the freeway from its current three lanes of thruway in each direction to 24 lanes in total, wide enough to land a Boeing 747 on with plenty of room to spare. Groundbreaking will start in a few months unless the last-ditch efforts of the coalition of leftists stall it.

It is going to be a combination of unrestricted lanes, HOV lanes, and toll lanes, the first time a toll lane has ever been included in part of the interstate highway system. It's a way of rationing access and paying for the project.

I'm not keen on the toll lanes, although I'll glad use them at times if they are substantially faster than the other lanes. The concept is actually quite consistent with the prevalent attitude around here of providing what the market demands.

Interesting link, by the way. I've bookmarked it for further reading.