Environmental Economics
The cromulent economics blog
recent posts
Category: Transportation
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I don't want to take all of the credit but were started this blog in the middle of last decade: For six decades, Americans have tended to drive more every year. But in the middle of the last decade, the number of miles driven — both over all and per capita — began to drop, notes…
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Stephen Dubner: Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “The Downside of More Miles Per Gallon.” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.) The gist: the Federal gas tax is a primary source of infrastructure funding but, politically, it has proven a hard tax to…
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I'll be making a site visit to these trees over the holidays: After more than a decade of work by Kentucky highway officials and more than $850,000 spent in federal and state money redesigning U.S. 42 in Prospect, city officials now say they don’t want the project as it stands. There is something they want…
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One of my favorite T/F questions is: "If you can't do something right, then you shouldn't do it at all." The answer, if you interpret "doing something right" as maximizing benefits (i.e., doing it until marginal benefits are equal to zero), is false. Most activities should be done a bit inadequately, where marginal benefits equal…
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Typically, cars and gas are complements. On the other hand, according to the rules of introductory micro, when gas prices are rising, gas and hybrids are substitutes: Americans are buying record numbers of hybrid and electric cars as gas prices climb and new models arrive in showrooms, giving the vehicles their greatest share yet of…
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Louisville C-J: Already awash in red ink, the massive Olmsted Dam project on the Ohio River west of Paducah will be even more expensive — with a total cost approaching $3 billion. The Army Corps of Engineers has a new cost estimate that adds $800 million to Olmsted’s bottom line, based on its continuing with…
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Louisville C-J: Tolls of $1 to $10 per crossing will be used for far more than just paying for construction of two new bridges over the Ohio River, Kentucky and Indiana officials say. The millions of dollars in annual revenue the tolls are expected to generate will also pay for maintaining and repairing the new…
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In a perfect world, building and maintaining road ways would be free: [redacted name*] of Raleigh wants to know why she and her husband got bills in the mail from the N.C. Turnpike Authority, illustrated with photos of their license plates, for trips on N.C. 540 near Research Triangle Park. The bills were for $0.00.…
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