Sorry! I misunderstood your posts to mean we didn’t need to worry about spending – we’ll just inflate our way out of the problem.
I’ll do my best to read your posts more closely before commenting on them.
I guess your Darwin comment fits me better than I thought.
Not really unless you consider 2% inflation to be deliberate. That’s been the de facto policy for nearly all countries since the 80s/90s. That rate was set because before that inflation was in double digits because central banks had no targets.
If one country decided to use a 0% target instead it would face a continuing strengthening currency even if they set interest rates to 0%. That might sound good at first until the citizens realize they can’t export anything.
Also the primary reason to target 2% is to allow an interest rate below the 2% inflation if inflation falls unexpectedly below 2%. Otherwise you’d have to set negative interest rates. Would banks pay interest to borrowers and depositors pay interest to banks? I think not.
Here’s a graph of debt versus GDP. You can see it went down pretty much continuously through the 70s and then it started to go up in the Reagan 80s. It went down in the Clinton 90s and then it’s been going up until it started going back down in the Biden 20s.
Transit is safer than driving. However, most Americans do not use it to commute or for any other purpose. Moreover, the percentage of people nationwide using it has been sliding.
According to American Community Survey Reports, U.S. Census Bureau, in 2019 approximately five percent of commuters use public transit to get to and from work: 46.3% bus, 37.7% subway or elevated rail, 11.8% intercity or commuter train, 3.2% light rail or trolley, and 1% ferryboat. According to a recent update of the report, which is less robust than the study performed in 2019, approximately 3.1% to 3.5% of commuters use public transit.
The percentage of people using public transit for work varies significantly by region. In the Northeast 14.3% commuted by transit vs. 3% in the Midwest, 4.4% in the West, and 2% in the South. Within regions, large cities accounted for a significantly higher percentage of commuters using public transit. For example, in the New York City metropolitan area, 32% commuted by public transit; in the city it was 55.6%. The New York metropolitan area accounted for 38.5% of the country’s public transit users.
According to the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) 2024 Annual Financial Report, system ridership decreased by 21.6% between 2015 and 2024. However, it saw a rebound of 9.6% from 2021 to 2024. The numbers for bus riders were 20% and 49.7%. For the light rail they were 25.9% and 52.6%. For commuter rail they were 41.6% and 59.7%.
In 2024 53.1% of DART riders took the bus, while 40.4% rode the light rail trains and 2.3% hopped about a commuter train. The remainder were Demand Response, Demand Response – Transit, and streetcar.
Transit typically takes more time than driving, especially where places of work are spread out and that’s if transit options are available. Where it does work well is where jobs are concentrated enough to make parking problematic and/or expensive.
If I were commuting to the Loop, Metra would be faster than driving and parking (and cheaper). Plus I could read, do crosswords or even play cards on the train.
The “Loop” is a good example of “where jobs are concentrated” making transit a viable option.
In my area, Downtown San Diego, SDSU and UCSD are places where thousands of employees are traveling to relatively compact destinations. After the SD Trolley’s El Cajon line was put in place, the next major project was connecting the malls in Mission Valley, the stadium and SDSU. The most recent project was service to UCSD - now if there was a good connection between the Coaster and the Trolley near UCSD…
To some extent it depends on how regional rail is ‘fed’. In the Philadelphia area there are many areas developed around heavy suburban service, where it is common to have people dropped off at the train and then be picked up at night, rather than drive to a lot and park. On the other hand, something that killed passenger service on the Erie-Lackawanna Northern Branch was better buses – there were TWO competing services with air-conditioned buses running on 20-minute headways during the day to the Port Authority terminal at 40th St. in Manhattan, plus another from Englewood across the Palisades to the 178th St. terminal (of course on the IND A subway line but easy connection to 1-2-3). The closest thing rail could offer was the Susquehanna Transfer bus from its dark little platform under the Rt. 3 viaduct … through the pre-counterflow Lincoln Tunnel traffic… if you didn’t want to be backed up through the Palisades tunnels (this was fun for railfans but tedious for commuters). I suspect there were similar considerations for the NYC West Shore commuter trains, which were gone about the time our family moved to Tenafly.
As a little kid on visits to my mom’s:relatives I recall us meeting my uncle at the Ho-Ho-Kus station. Not sure if it was Erie or Lackawanna.
Ho-Ho-Kus was Erie. Main line to Suffern, north of Glen Rock where the old main line and the Bergen County line come together.
I think they lived in between, in Ridgewood. Then they moved out to Setauket on the LIRR (Stony Brook station).
Ridgewood is a major station but parking near it is a pain, whereas Ho-Ho-Kus has had enormous lots since the first time we railfanned it circa 1971.
Amusingly if you are into ‘society’ matters, Englewood and Ridgewood were individually too small for a cotillion, so there was a Junior League of Englewood-Ridgewood’. The two cities are something like 17 miles apart…
It was hysterical to watch some of the more ambitious debutante moms arranging cheap Manhattan rentals the requisite number of years ahead so their darlings could come out at the Manhattan cotillion instead…
Not my style, for sure, nor Uncle Robin’s, a Princeton lad from the 1920s.
It’s how the Amish refer to non-Amish…
Where is non-discretionary Defense Spending in your listing.
