The New York Sun reports that gas may hit $10 a gallon before too long, putting it in line with European prices. The ground is already shifting. Employers find that getting employees out of their cars and onto company-owned, Wi-Fi-enabled buses boosts productivity and morale. Fewer and fewer teenagers are getting driver’s licenses, and public transportation ridership is at its . . .
Advertisements like this one, meant to win people over to congestion pricing, just sound bitter after the death of New York’s proposed plan last week. And New Yorkers will likely continue to see Varick Street as I did at 7:00 last Thursday evening: Varick Street, 7 p.m. But even while the debate was still raging, many of the plan’s particulars . . .
London has successfully instituted congestion pricing for private vehicles, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been trying very hard to do the same, but ran into stiff opposition from the public as well as political players. New York magazine reports, however, that Bloomberg has just gained an important ally: New York’s new governor, David Paterson. According to New York: . . .
Watch Dubner’s “Good Morning America” appearance from Wednesday, Aug. 8, in case you missed it the first time.
On August 6th, 1941, the U.S. government imposed a nightly curfew on gas stations to reduce fuel use in anticipation of entering World War II. By the way, oil sold at the time for an inflation-adjusted $12.75 a barrel.
For a long time I have felt the price of gasoline in the United States was way too low. Pretty much all economists believe this. Greg Mankiw blogged back in October about the many reasons why we should raise gas taxes. The reason we need high gas taxes is that there are all sorts of costs associated with my driving . . .
There was a very nice piece in the New York Times the other day about Mike Nolan, the manager of Metro-North Railroad’s lost-and-found department. Via the article: Since joining Metro-North in 1994, Mr. Nolan has applied the analytical skills he honed as a Wall Street analyst to a tracking system that once depended on pen and paper and that in . . .
A blogger named Ganesh Kulkarni discovered that the commuter trains of Mumbai serve six million passengers daily but the system isn’t equipped to check everyone’s ticket. Instead, Kulkarni writes, ticket agents conduct random ticket checks. This has given rise to a form of cheating that is elegantly called “ticketless travel.” Although it’s probably not very common to get busted for . . .
A few days a week, I bring my daughter to nursery school on the East Side of Manhattan. (On the other days, I bring my son to kindergarten; next year, they will blessedly attend the same school.) We live on the West Side, and usually take the bus across town. It is a busy time of day. At the bus . . .