It’s amazing how empty this house feels but for a twenty pound mutt. I dropped her off with the Alvarez’s this evening. I got a text from Jack saying that she and their 70lb rottweiler are getting along swimmingly (which is a bit of a surprise, since when they usually see one another, Lisby growls the other dog into submission).

I will be leaving tomorrow. Clancy is slated to leave on Friday. I’ll be picking her up and we’ll be going to the Corrigan Compound (a group of houses on a private drive owned by her extended family on her mother’s side) for a couple days. I will be staying in Colosse for several days after she gets back. It’ll be a bit of a working vacation, as I have some Commodus stuff on my plate. Or I should, anyway. Also possible: Clancy can’t make it at all and I spend the entire time in Colosse. Also possible: I go on a business trip and spend little time in Colosse at all. Everything is in flux.

I posted just today about airline fees. By coincidence, we had to change out her flight and got dinged with the penalty. My criticism doesn’t really apply, though, since we’re only a couple days out. Charging us $150 is more than fair under these circumstances. Less fair is Delta not being up front about the cost of the new flight, throwing in an additional $250 at the end of the call because the price they gave us didn’t include the return trip (??!!). She will be flying US Airways. We never want to give Delta our business again (this is not the first Delta-related incident), but they have our money. So we’ll have to fly them again at some point. While I don’t begrudge them their $150, it’s annoying that they keep that and the money. On the other hand, Delta is a difficult airline to avoid out here with Deseret’s capital being one of their hubs.

The Atlantic has a list of the worst airline fees. I agree with the commenters, that some of them aren’t bad. In fact, some of them improved. Others, though are quite aggravating.

1. Pet aboard fee – In some cases, it costs more to fly the dog than it is to fly me. That strikes me as a bit excessive. On the other hand, It’s something that they’re very up front about and that you can make arrangements accordingly. Charging a fee for pets is definitely fair. And not something new.

2. Unaccompanied Minor – I am sympathetic to this one. You have liability concerns, for one thing. And kids require more attention and are more likely to make flights unpleasant for others (dealing with complaints costs money). Is $100 fair? Not sure. Like the dogs, though, you know well ahead of time.

3. Carry on Baggage Fee – I’ve commented on this one before. The long and short of it… I have no problem with it. It’s easier to plan around and the financial incentives should be towards checking, and not carrying on, baggage.

4. Pillow/blanket – Rubbish. I have never even taken advantage of this “service”, but still: rubbish.

5. WiFi fee – How quickly the world owes us something.

6. Non-alcoholic beverages – At least, unlike sporting events and the like, you can bring your own. I think that water of some sort should be guaranteed, but not necessarily soft drinks.

7. Headset fees – This is actually an improvement. Does anyone else remember when you used to have to put down a deposit on a rental that was more than the $3 that Continental is charging? I don’t even blame them for that. As with the WiFi, they need to be able to pay for these things and passing it on to the customers seems fair. I do find the “gotcha” aspect to be irritating (you’re paying $3 because you forgot to bring them from last time and not because you want a second pair). But it’s cheap enough not to be a problem. Especially considering that the pricing is probably in line with what it costs them.

8. Meal/snack fee – If you want to pay for the food they’re selling, you deserve what you get.

9. Preferred seat fee – I do find this one somewhat aggravating, and petty. A sort of “we’re going to intentionally make things difficult for you if you don’t pay up” screw-you sort of thing. Paying extra for exit-row seats is completely fair, though.

10. Ticket Hold fee – I’m not sure about this one. I don’t think “buy your ticket or take your chances” is unfair, though it seems to me that if you’re doing so far enough in advance, it should be a courtesy.

11. Phone booking fee – $25? WTF?

12. Priority seating – Perfectly voluntary pricing discrimination at its best. No problems here.

Here’s what I don’t get, though. How can you list some of these penny-ante things without getting into what I believe is the worst:

13. Cancellation fees – If I cancel at the last minute, I should have to pay them something. If I cancel six weeks ahead of time, though, that’s pretty ridiculous. They have plenty of time to sell the ticket again. Whereas a lot of the others mentioned are completely voluntary, this is a case of turning the screws on someone who simply doesn’t have much choice. Even when no harm is done. It’s the sort of back-end pricing that annoys me. I might be more accommodating if the fees were remotely reasonable, but they aren’t. Change of plans? Screw you! Because we can!

Update: Apparently, US Airways charges an extra fee if you want to sit on the front half of the plane. No extra-legroom, or anything. You just sit near the front. We don’t get it. Last on and first off isn’t work $25, in my book. Not when for $40 you can get decent legroom.

Walter Olson brings back the “Cash For Clunkers is why used cars have become so expensive” argument:

Guess what’s the newest trouble to hit the car business? As news outlets around the country are reporting, the price of used cars has lately soared to a modern-day record, with some cars commanding more used than they sold for when new. News accounts commonly finger the Japanese earthquake and high gas prices as reasons, but there are some problems fitting either reason to the case. While the earthquake affected the supply of new cars, it’s the previously driven kind that has scored the more impressive price jump. And while the rise in gas prices would explain a relative shift in buyer demand from SUVs and trucks toward smaller vehicles — which has indeed happened — the strength of the used-vehicle market lately has been such that even the thirstier vehicles have advanced in price, $4 gas or no.

No doubt there are multiple reasons for the price spike, including the severe general slump in new-auto sales in recent years, which has reduced the volume of newer cars coming onto the resale market. But — as Washington scrambles to take undeserved credit for whatever passes for normalization in the auto business these days — it’s worth remembering that an artificial scarcity of used cars isn’t just bad for the poor as a group: it’s bad in particular for the upwardly mobile poor, since in most of the country landing a job means needing to line up transportation to get to that job. When it suddenly costs $6,000 instead of $3,000 to get wheels, the move from unemployment to a paying job faces a new and discouraging barrier.

At least he points out that there are “multiple reasons,” which is something that a lot of C4C critics have glided over in the past. Even so, he acts like C4C is the driving factor when there is comparatively little reason to believe it’s more than just a contributor. I wrote about C4C here and here. My basic view is that Cash For Clunkers was an idiotic proposal, a poor way to go about reducing emissions and destroying a lot of capital along the way, but that it’s hard to blame all – or most – of the increased cost of used cars on the law. I previously pointed out that some of the cars where the price increase is the highest, late-model used cars for instance, were not the ones taken off the road. While it’s possible that there is a cascading effect (people can’t buy a targeted, fuel-inefficient vehicle and instead buys an ineligible care taking that one off the road) you would still see the biggest impact on the cars that were targeted and more impact on cars from that period and not more recent cars. Instead, it’s the other way around, suggesting that the biggest reduction in used car availability (where increased demand is meeting decreased supply) is a result of people buying late-model used rather than new vehicles and – more likely – holding on to the car that they have.

Olson cites this article, among others:

Bill Visnic, analyst and senior editor at Edmunds.com, said the auto industry went from selling 16.5 million new cars annually before the recession, down to 10.5 million in the depths of the crisis. He said the average age of a used vehicle on the road today is in excess of ten years old, as well, meaning that overall more consumers are keeping their older cars.

“About five million people or so dropped out of the market,” Visnic said. “A vast number of those people would have been trading in a used car when they bought a new one. That’s a big whammy when the replacement rate has been lagging so much.”

Consumers looking to buy used cars will find that prices are up markedly, Visnic said. The Wall Street Journal reports that prices for used cars are up 5% this year at wholesale auto house Manheim. He said the Car Allowance Rebate System, which was introduced in 2009, also set off the price hike in the used market. The government program dubbed “Cash for Clunkers” offers economic incentives to U.S. consumers for turning in their used cars for a newer, more fuel-efficient vehicle. In turn, instead of ending up on the used car lots across the country, those vehicles went to junkyard graves.

So there has been a reduction of 6 million car sales per annum. Cash for Clunkers may be responsible for – at maximum – 1/7th of that. That assumes that everyone who totaled their car in 2009 would have sold it in 2010. Given that a frequent (and valid!) criticism of C4C is that it didn’t even increase the sale of new cars because it merely time-shifted purchasing (they bought in 2009 what they might have waited a couple years to get rid of), it seems likely that a lot of them would still have the car.

Be that as it may, it is likely that it is contributing to the problem to at least some extent. The “lost capital” that I lament is going to have some effect. And it is another reason to dislike this bit of free pudding policymaking. But there are a lot of other factors at work (an economy that went to hell, primarily) that swamp the effects of the policy.

The folks over at The League have kindly given me a forum to talk about why I believe that the end result of increased fuel costs, fuel taxes, or road taxes will result in the strengthening of the suburbs at the expense of cities:

Peak Oil has been right around the corner for decades. Global warming requires a response that is going to make energy – oil in particular – more expensive. Commuters and drivers are subsidized with general funds. The solution to all of this is, of course, to stick it to the commuters. It’s nothing personal (ignoring everything negative we’ve said in the past about suburbanites), but we’ve got problems and it’s going to be up to them to change their lifestyles (which, coincidentally, we’ve never really approved of anyway). They’ll just have to take public transportation and live in walkable neighborhoods, like we do (or would like to, if it weren’t for the car culture making it nigh-impossible).

There seems to be an assumption, on the part of a lot of urbanists*, that solidifying our future (in terms of energy needs and/or the environment) or basic fairness (in terms of taxing negative externalities or subsidizing roads) will lead to a world more of their liking. If we just taxed gas or stopped requiring highways and parking (or if gas simply gets more expensive), the world will simply have to acclimate to their preferences.

As it happens, I do not oppose a carbon tax. I am in favor of increasing road taxes and fees so that the car culture subsidizes itself (though I do worry about it being regressive taxation). But I get off the train when we talk about the effect that these policies are going to have. Namely, while road construction and maintenance (for instance) subsidize suburban residents, they also subsidize downtown business. While the growth of suburbia was assisted by tax policy, now that people have gotten used to it, and now that our urban/suburban infrastructures have been built, I have enormous difficulty seeing mass conversion to smaller abodes, more restricted mobility, and so on. Not without a fight, anyway.

“But whether they want to or not, they’ll have to!”

Except that they won’t. Arguably, they will not be able to.

{Continue Reading…}

First, props to Missouri on this:

Modifications to the bill must be approved by the House before becoming law, but the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) has already begun increasing yellow signal timing with very positive results. In Arnold, the first city in the Show Me state to use automated ticketing machines, yellow timing was increased from 4.0 to 5.0 seconds at three intersections along Missouri Route 141 on February 24. Smaller changes were made on April 15, including a boost from 4.0 to 4.4 seconds at northbound 141 and US 61/67, a 4.0 to 4.5 second change at northbound US 61/67 at Rockport School, and from 4.0 to 4.7 seconds at southbound Vogel Road at Richardson Road (4.3 seconds at the northbound approach).

The impact of the longer yellow at red light camera monitored locations was felt immediately. In January, before any signal timing had been changed, American Traffic Solutions recorded 875 alleged violations in the city of Arnold. At the end of April, that figure fell 70 percent to just 266. Jefferson County Councilman Bob Boyer obtained the ATS statistics after learning that MoDOT had extended the yellow times.

“This recent bit of information goes further to prove the point that there are other safety measures that can be implemented if safety, not money, is the focus,” Boyer said.

Whenever you talk about lengthening yellow lights, there’s always somebody that says that people will simply adjust. And sometimes people will. But study after study has suggested that in the aggregate, longer yellow lights reduce lightrunning as well as accidents. They also reduce revenue, which is part of the problem. So congratulations to Missouri for getting this right.

On the other hand…

[I]n Missouri, it is common that municipal prosecutors will regularly “amend” moving traffic violations, which incur points against one’s driver’s license and potentially raise car insurance rates, to non-moving violations which do not incur said points and insurance rate hikes. Of course, the prosecutor only does so under two conditions:

1) The fine for the “amended” violation is exorbitant compared to the moving violation fine–and compared to the usual fine for the actual non-moving violation, and

2) The victim–er, ticketed person–must have hired legal representation for the prosecutor to negotiate the amended complaint. (Non-lawyers, don’t try representing yourself. Prosecutors won’t do it. I tried…once upon a time when I was younger, drove less carefully, less wise, didn’t inhale, etc.)

Now, one may counter that this behavior is not “extortion” because it is not illegal for the prosecutor to negotiate an amended charge as part of a plea bargain, nor is the prosecutor directly benefiting from the extorted fees. However, this activity is a plea bargain only in the most superficial sense, since a miniscule percentage of moving violations are ever actually contested with a not-guilty plea to begin with and individuals engaging in this ‘bargain’ have no intent to contest the moving violation. In a game theoretic, it’s almost never a credible threat so there is virtually no chance court time will be used or the alleged criminal will go unpunished. And while the prosecutor may not directly pocket the huge fines, those fines comprise a non-trivial portion of many municipalities’ revenues, which do flow back in part to the prosecutor’s budget.

This is not entirely unlike what they’re doing in Delosa, wherein you can avoid having your ticket turned over to your insurance company under certain circumstances. This makes people less likely to contest, but also helps them skirt state laws about how much revenue a town can get from tickets (they can “only” get a third of overall revenue from traffic enforcement). On the one hand, this is great because it helps you keep a clean driving record. On the other hand, it allows them to write up more tickets. In the case of Missouri, it sounds like an odd freebie for lawyers.

As I’ve mentioned before, I got out of a ticket for which I was dead guilty by hiring a lawyer once. If a lawyer knows what they’re doing, they can make it not worth their trouble. Trying to defend yourself, though, is pretty foolish.

The State of Texas is looking at raising speed limits to be the fastest in the nation:

The Texas House of Representatives has approved a bill that would raise the speed limit to 85 mph on some highways. The bill now goes to the state Senate, the Austin Statesman reports. {…}

Texas currently has more than 520 miles of interstate highways where the speed limit is 80 mph, according to the Associated Press. The bill would allow the Texas Department of Transportation to raise the speed limit on certain roads or lanes after engineering and traffic studies are conducted. The 85 mph maximum would likely be permitted on rural roads with long sightlines.

Texas is currently one of the only two states currently allowing 80mph speed limits on a few stretches. Utah is the other.

The two main groups against it are the insurance companies and environmentalists. Though I could have sworn I saw 80mph speed limits on my original move from Delosa to Deseret, I can’t find anything to back me up on that. So I guess I have never driven on an 80mph road. I would think that you would want to be careful about where you put them, but there are some stretches of road that are asking for it. Particularly in the great plains region. When moving to Deseret, I took a route that had me going north through (a tip of) New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming instead of the GoogleMaps approved route that takes you through Kansas, Nebraska, and so on. The main reason for the detour was the scenery, but if the great plains had 85mph speed limits, I probably would have gone that route.

I know that Mike Hunt, Dave Hackensack, and others have suggested that there shouldn’t be any laws against drunk driving. Well, your cause has a champion!

When first tipped to the video, I thought that I might actually agree with him because he was against some new DUI law and I think we already have enough on the books (unless we’re talking about a new law to differentiate between buzzed driving and drunk driving). I don’t typically respond to political stuff on Facebook (or I try not to) anyway, but it’s sometimes after a fair amount of kvetching over what, if anything, I would say in disagreement with the Facebook Friend. I find it interesting that in this case, there was simply no way that I was going to say anything even though I thought I might agree with the video in question. The stigma against “defending drunk drivers” is really that great.

In any event, the law in question is actually a new law I can support. They want to extend prior act consideration from five years to ten. Apparently, Montana’s law currently says that a judge can consider previous offenses in the last five years and this would extend that to ten. I think that extending it to ten is probably a good idea. Caught once and you might have just been unlucky. Caught twice and there’s a good chance that you do it with alarming regularity. I can’t remember the exact statistic, but something like two-thirds of single-DUI arrestees meet the definition for being an alcoholic and when it comes to people twice caught, the number is north of 90%. Those really are the people that we need to be worried about.

Unfortunately, I can’t link to the original article, but a long while back Joan Didion wrote a blockbuster piece on the creation of HOV Lanes. From Jon Last:

Caltrans decided that it would prefer to eliminate 7,800 of those vehicles—that was, literally, their precisely-stated goal—by forcing people to carpool. Thus the Diamond Lanes reserved 25 percent of the available highway space for 3 percent of the vehicles. As you might imagine, pandemonium ensued.

Traffic on the Santa Monica ground to a halt. The number of accidents increased by about 400 percent. The public flipped out. Lawsuits were filed; people scattered nails in the Diamond Lanes in protest. Apparently, people thought that Caltrans was trying to surreptitiously make their lives harder to achieve some statist social-engineering target. Why would they have ever gotten that idea?

Well, for starters, Caltrans leaned on the municipal engineer of L.A.’s surface streets. They didn’t have jurisdiction over these local roads, so they wanted him to create a “confused and congested situation” (their words) on the surface roads so that drivers would be forced onto the gridlocked freeways. And Caltrans knew that the freeways would be gridlocked, because that’s the way they wanted them.

From the other coast (and thirteen years ago), Joe Sharkey wrote:

In New Jersey, many motorists are annoyed because they’re suddenly faced with longer commutes on Routes 80 and 287 and in the newly opened stretch of the Turnpike where the HOV lanes opened in December. But often, their ire is directed at the next lane, not the highway planners.

”People punish others for using the HOV lane,” Mrs. Sanchelli said with a nervous laugh. ”In the HOV, you’re all the way over in the left. And a lot of times, they won’t let you back in. They’re brutal! Usually, I get off at the Morristown 287 exit on 80, but when they don’t let me over, I have to go down to the Lake Hiawatha exit a mile down, which throws me off by 10 to 15 minutes.”

She said she would join a real car pool but, ”I don’t know anybody around me whose hours fit. I couldn’t even car pool with my husband, who goes in at 7 A.M.”

Which really is the biggest problem with carpooling. Especially sprawling cases like Colosse where husbands and wives leave in different directions at different times. Back when I was living in Cascadia and commuting through awful traffic to get from Soundview to Enterprise City, I seriously considered looking into joining a carpooling club. But ultimately, I couldn’t because my hours varied too much. Even in jobs with more standard hours, sometimes I would want to hang around work city a while before going home. There are a whole lot of reasons that our lives cannot revolve around carpooling.

There has been a recent shift away from HOV to HOT (High-Occupancy Toll) lanes. Combining the two seems like a pretty good fit. Allowing those willing to pay more to get through quicker seems like a reasonably good “voluntary tax.” When I was working at Wildcat back in Colosse, my commute involved either driving on a toll-road or sticking to the free access road. Most of the time I did the latter, though when I was running late or in a hurry, it was really nice to have the former option. I am pretty indifferent to the notion of HOV lanes, but if we’re going to have them, stuffing them in with toll lanes seems like a good way to go.

The Trumans are now a two-car household again. I didn’t sell Cray, the 2-door late 90’s Escort that carried me through Cascadia. We didn’t trade it in when we purchased the Forester because I didn’t really want to complicate the sale and that I could do better selling it myself. Also, we didn’t know where the title was. But then I found the title and… every time I was going to sell it, something prevented me from doing so. Typically, it involved a problem we were having the Camry door. Between the constant battery problems we were having with Cray and the Camry’s door problems, we had three cars between us and I was still sometimes having to drive her to and from work. We got the Camry’s door fixed, but even then wanted to wait until the next freeze to make sure that the door was fixed as advertised.

Then the pieces fell into place and the sale began. I put a sign on the door with FOR SALE and $900 OBO in big type as well as more information in smaller type (CD/MP3/Aux player, 120k miles, needs new battery). I just parked it in front of the house, figuring that if it didn’t sell soon I would park it on Main Street. I was about at the point when I got a call about it.

I had envisioned selling to car to either a high schooler as their first car or a struggling college student. The potential buyer was more of the latter, minus the college bit. She took it for a test-drive (the battery fortunately worked) and then a few days later had her boyfriend take a look at it. She didn’t have the money on hand. I told her that if she could put down $100 deposit, I would hold it for her. She was very much the type of person that I wanted to sell the car to. She and her boyfriend looked at the car as though it were positively new.

They gave me the deposit on Sunday and it was as though a switch went off. Suddenly I was getting calls right and left on it. Offers for $900 on the spot rather than $750 as soon as she could scrape the money together. One guy who wanted to buy it for his grandson. Another whose wife apparently knows Clancy. A couple that I didn’t return. But… I’d told the girl that I would hold it for her. It was looking a little spotty there for a while, but she came through by the middle of the next week.

So now Cray has a good home with someone that will appreciate it. I felt better about that when I talked to the guy who was going to buy it for his grandson and he said that his grandson wasn’t interested in anything old or smaller than a pickup. So if I’d sold it on the spot, it would have gone to someone that hated it. I don’t know why such things matter to me, but they do. So long as it actually works. I’d rather give it away to someone that can’t afford it and won’t appreciate it than sell it to someone that would dismantle it. Which is why I have 8 or so desktops in the computer room and a couple of working but not particularly useful old laptops.

It’s common practice in the United States for men to be charged more for automobile insurance than women. Apparently, that’s about to change in Europe:

The decision means that women can no longer be charged lower car insurance premiums than men, and the cost of buying a pensions annuity will change.

The change will come into effect in December 2012, although customers could see premiums alter in the interim.

Representatives of the insurance industry said they were disappointed.

The court was ruling on a challenge by a Belgian consumer group Test-Achats.

It had argued that a current exemption for insurers contradicted the wider European principle of gender equality.

It’s not all gravy for men, though. Men had previously received greater pension annuities on the basis that they are less likely to live as long to collect them. So the end result is that men get less pension for their work, in the aggregate.

I have mixed feelings about this. My natural inclination is to see the first part as being relatively fair but to be outraged about the second. My mental wiggle room on this is that driving is something that each individual has a good deal of control over and so you can take a look at my driving record and compare it to a woman’s driving record of the same age and determine who is a better driver*. On longevity, though, behavior certainly plays a role but biology seems to favor women and so not only do men die younger, but now we leave money on the table when we go!

But really, this is splitting hairs. Either you accept aggregate probabilities as a legitimate factor or you do not. And so I am mixed. In the case of gender, I actually lean towards discrimination being okay within certain contexts. I am iffier on other topics. I’ve complained in the past about some of the criteria that auto insurance companies use (precipitated by a huge increase in my auto insurance rates due to some mythical problem with our credit) such as housing (if you live in a poor neighborhood, you may dinged whether you are a safe driver or not even though the correlation is without causation).

* – Along these lines, I have no problem with discrimination among the young, where driving records are less firmly established. And really, this may undercut my thoughts on the matter because I’m not sure how prevalent the discrimination is as you get older and have established your own driving record.