Category Archives: Web Article Review

Philadelphia’s comprehensive subway system

Like Boston, New York, Chicago, and many European cities, Philadelphia had a plan to build a comprehensive subway system early in the 20th century. Hidden City Philadelphia describes why most of it was never built.

The “Taylor Plan” outlined creating subway lines along Chestnut, Walnut and Arch Streets, a loop to distribute riders of the Broad Street Subway around City Center, a spur into Northeast Philadelphia on Roosevelt Boulevard, and a line along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to points north. In his plan, Taylor outlined this Parkway line as an extension of the Broad Street Line, which eventually opened with service from City Hall to Olney Avenue on September 1, 1928. The Parkway-Roxborough (or Northwestern) line would have started as an subway at City Hall and then proceed below the Parkway to 29th Street, where it would have continued as an elevated line to Henry Avenue, following that road north past Wissahickon Creek…

The majority of Taylor’s planned routes never came to be nor did Philadelphia’s original transit master plan. Taylor was replaced in 1916 by a more pragmatic transit commissioner, William S. Twining, who took exception to many of Taylor’s ideas. Where Taylor saw transit as a stimulant of growth, Twinning believed that lines should only be built where there was already demand…

The last gasp of an enhanced mass transit system came in July of 1929 when Mayor Harry Mackey signed an ordinance for a ten-year transit program that included the Ridge Avenue subway line, the Locust Street subway line, and several other never-built transit routes. The Mayor authorized a $55,000,000 loan that never materialized. Unlike New York City, Philadelphia did not move forward with subway expansion projects to alleviate the city’s crushing unemployment rate during the Great Depression.

It’s a sad missed opportunity. It could still be done, and in fact it is being done throughout the developing world today. But U.S. leaders generally do not have the vision or imagination to consider even the possibility of picking up a plan like this.

value added tax

Here is a Fresh Air interview with T.R. Reid explaining how great the VAT is.

This is the most important innovation in taxation in the last 60 years. This is a tax that’s like a sales tax on steroids. It’s a tax – our sales tax is called a retail sales tax. The tax is only collected when the retailer sells you the book. But on a value-added tax, a tax is collected when the paper mill sells the paper to the publisher and when a publisher buys ink from an ink company and then the publisher sells it to a wholesaler and a wholesaler sells it to a distributor, distributor to the bookstore and the bookstore to you.

That tax is collected at every level, and every time you pay the tax to the other guy, you report it to the government to get a credit for the tax you paid which means every penny of tax that’s paid is reported to the government. So the VAT turns out to be a very easy tax for government to collect and a very hard tax for taxpayers to avoid. And so if you put in a value-added tax, they’re very steady collections, and it’s hard to cheat on.

And you could use that money to reduce the rate of the corporate or the personal income tax. So 176 countries have adopted this innovation. It’s a great idea. The only countries that don’t have it are a bunch of countries so poor they have no taxes and the United States of America. So I say in my book in taxation, Americans are still banging out letters on a typewriter and dropping them in a mailbox, and everybody else is texting and using Instagram.

So let’s do it. There are actually some signs the Trump administration might consider it. But instead of eliminating income tax, they may be thinking of going after the Social Security payroll tax.

augmented reality and Rainbow’s End

This video is meant to convey a concept of what augmented reality could look like in the not-too-distant future. Which reminded me of Rainbow’s End, a fantastic Vernor Vinge novel set in the not-too-distant future. In Rainbow’s End, people have wearable computing and contact lenses that allow them to project pretty much anything they want onto the world, from basic information to, yes, strange fantastic beasts. The dark side of the novel is that weapons of mass destruction have also progressed quite a bit, and various governments and groups are fighting that behind the scenes unbeknownst to most of the people and their gadgets.

best practices for sidewalk closures

Here are some best practices for sidewalk closures published by the city of Oakland, California. In a nutshell, contractors have to provide a walkway rather than make pedestrians cross the street in downtown areas, expect for very short periods. The walkways have to be ADA accessible. If the walkways take up a bike lane, there has to be a safe place for the bikes to go. Barriers have to be substantial enough to actually protect pedestrians if vehicles hit them. I could walk 5 minutes in any direction in Philadelphia and see every one of these principles violated.

An American Sickness

The New York Times has a review of a new book called An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back. Here’s an excerpt from the review:

Rosenthal thinks the health care market is different, and she sums up these differences as the “economic rules of the dysfunctional medical market.” There are 10 — some obvious (No. 9: “There’s money to be made in billing for anything and everything”); some humorous (No. 2: “A lifetime of treatment is preferable to a cure”) — but No. 10 is the big one: “Prices will rise to whatever the market will bear.” To Rosenthal, that’s the answer to Scalia’s question. The health care market doesn’t work like other markets because “what the market will bear” is vastly greater than what a well-functioning market should bear. As Rosenthal describes American health care, it’s not really a market; it’s more like a protection racket — tolerated only because so many different institutions are chipping in to cover the extortionary bill and because, ultimately, it’s our lives that are on the line…

The difference between the United States and other countries isn’t the role of insurance; it’s the role of government. More specifically, it’s the way in which those who benefit from America’s dysfunctional market have mobilized to use government to protect their earnings and profits. In every country where people have access to sophisticated medical care, they must rely heavily on the clinical expertise of providers and the financial protections of insurance, which, in turn, creates the opportunity for runaway costs. But in every other rich country, the government not only provides coverage to all citizens; it also provides strong counterpressure to those who seek to use their inherent market power to raise prices or deliver lucrative but unnecessary services — typically in the form of hard limits on how much health care providers can charge.

In the United States, such counterpressure has been headed off again and again. The industry and its elected allies have happily supported giveaways to the medical sector. But anything more, they insist, will kill the market. Although this claim is in conflict with the evidence, it is consistent with the goal of maximum rewards to (and donations from) the industry. As a result, Medicare beneficiaries have prescription drug coverage (passed by Republicans in 2003), but Medicare administrators have no ability to do what every other rich country does: negotiate lower drug prices. In January, President Trump said drug companies were “getting away with murder” because they had “a lot of lobbyists and a lot of power,” insisting he would get Medicare to bargain. Should we really be surprised that the dealmaker in chief dropped the subject after meeting with pharma executives earlier this year?

At the individual level, there are really only two things I can think of to do. One is to attempt to shop around for health care. If you call your doctors office or hospital and ask for the price they charge for a particular service you are considering buying, which is how every other market works, they are likely to laugh at you. Your insurance company might actually help though. I have tried this with Blue Cross Blue Shield with limited success, but it definitely takes time and effort. The second option is to go abroad for checkups, lab work, and elective procedures. It’s not that hard to combine a vacation with a doctor or dentist visit. Insurance companies will generally cover it, because it will almost always save them money, but you definitely have to talk to them in advance. Foreign hospitals (I have experience in Singapore and Thailand) will sometimes bill U.S. insurance companies provided you have a letter form the insurance company up front. Otherwise you might have to front the cash and do the paperwork for reimbursement when you get back.

Like I said, all this takes time and effort, but there are significant savings to be had. So why aren’t third parties stepping into the vacuum to make comparison shopping and medical tourism easier for the masses?

the middle seat

I like this idea for making the middle seat on airplanes just a bit more spacious and comfortable than the others, so people wouldn’t mind it so much and might even prefer it.

But if Molon Labe Designs gets its way, that panic could give way to placidity. The upstart Colorado aviation design firm wants to kill the middle seat’s middle child reputation. Its “stagger seat” concept sits slightly below and behind its neighbors, so it can be three inches wider than its window- and aisle-adjacent companions. It has its own armrests.

“Flying sucks, and design makes it suck less,” says Hank Scott, the CEO of Molon Labe, who’s currently in Germany to show off the prototype at the Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg. (BMW Groups’ Designworks and Panasonic Avionics also had a hand in the design.) By extending curved armrest back, the designers ensure the middle seater has access to at least half of its length. (“If you’re in the aisle or window seat, you couldn’t possibly steal the entire armrest—your elbows would be behind your back at a weird angle,” Scott says.) That also gives the middle seat’s in-flight entertainment system room to grow to a whopping 18 inches, compared to the puny 15-inch screens on other seat backs. For all this design prowess, however, this thing gets you nothing in extra legroom.

Climate of Concern

It wasn’t just Exxon that knew about climate change decades ago. But unlike Exxon, which not only denied it but used the foulest of propaganda tactics to confuse the public and delay progress, Shell made an accurate movie about it in 1991 to inform the public, called “Climate of Concern”.

Perhaps there is a parallel universe where Shell developed a sustainable business model, put Exxon out of business, and saved the Earth. Of course that is not the universe you and I are in right now.

Tesla vs. Ford

BBC says Tesla’s market value is now greater than Ford’s.

At the close of trading Tesla had a market value of $49bn (£38bn), compared with Ford’s value of $46bn…

The firm delivered more than 25,000 cars in the first quarter, up 70% on the same quarter last year.

While Tesla’s sales are growing fast they are still a fraction of Ford’s, which sold almost 6.7 million vehicles in 2016.

Tesla delivered 76,000 electric cars last year.

The legacy Detroit car companies could be embracing the new technologies, but instead they are allowing themselves to be creatively destroyed. Their business model, I believe, is to keep cramming pickup trucks into developing countries until they burst at the seams. Meanwhile, Tesla and Google and Uber will pass them by and become the new face of the U.S. auto industry. Then next time Ford, GM, and Chrysler tell us they need a taxpayer bailout or the U.S. auto industry will disappear, we may not have to listen.