| measurement difficulties |
[Oct. 17th, 2006|10:31 pm] |
I had a very tough time with the articles for this week. I do believe that a valiant attempt was made at quantifying the causes of sprawl, but I could not get past some of the flaws of the articles. More specifically, most of my problems are with the Persky and Weiwel article. The fundamental question is an important one in the context of both sprawl and economic development. "What difference will it make if a new manufacturing plant picks a greenfield location rather than a site in a central city?" (50) It is refreshing to see someone look at the problem in terms of both private and social costs, but not at the expense of quantifying social costs in a relevant and responsible manner. I know this may sound harsh and that it is a very difficult task to quantify social costs, but every indicator I read about in this article seemed to have a different assumption made that I could not rationalize with my own views about that indicator. If the congestion externality is born more by the middle and high income groups, might this be not just because they get paid more for an hour of work but also because they were able to make a choice to incur those costs?
In measuring the social costs of pollution, I understand that wind patterns can effect pollution, but more often than not it is the low income people living next to the freeways (as we saw in oakland) and I cannot understand why the authors would just assume for assumptions sake that everyone in the equation will be exposed equally.
I don't want to go on about this, but what I do want to do is bring up the idea of choice. This idea of having the ability to choose your externalities be they good or bad. The Voith article also made me think about the role choice plays in sprawl and development. He writes about how lower income folks are concentrated in inner cities and therefore have lower transportation costs. His article stresses the relationship between land prices and transportation costs. The problem now is that it has become so commonplace for wealthier and often more skilled people to live on the outskirts of town that jobs are locating there as well. This means that the poorer people who should be spending less on transportation are often forced out of the city to jobs that they either can't afford to get to, or just can't get to because the infrastructure is not set up that way. There was a lot of talk about the free market this week, but as Jane mentioned, a free market depends on everyone having choice. My qoute of the week is from place matters:
"Our car dominated transportation system was premised on individual choice, but in many ways it has reduced choice. Most Americans have no choice but to use the automobile" (117).
There was also a great deal of discussion of public choice theories early in the Place Matters chapter. I find it difficult to compare choice in clothing taste to choice in city location. As we learned in the rest of the readings there is a great deal of federal intervention that leads to constrained choices in place that just doesn't exist for clothing. |
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