Politicians are not entitled to holidays, some thoughts on the London Riots

2011-08-09 | David Levinson

Reading about the riots in London, (which have yet to reach where we lived a few years ago in Putney), I see that lots of politicians were on holiday in August

Guardian: Boris Johnson heckled in Clapham Junction over London riots : “The London mayor, Boris Johnson, forced to return from holiday, reportedly in North America, visited Clapham Junction, the scene of some of the worst London rioting, on Tuesday.”

The Sun: PM David Cameron condemns riots after jetting back to deal with riots: “DAVID Cameron today condemned the “sickening” scenes of violence across England after jetting back from holiday to hold an emergency meeting on ending the three-day riots.”

Telegraph: London riots: Theresa May flies back from holiday

Guardian: George Osborne cuts short holiday to deal with stock market crisis

Politicians are not entitled to holidays. I mean, we can’t imagine the President of the United States on holiday out of the country, or even walking the Appalachian Trail. At worst The President is walking the beach or at Camp David, and that isn’t really a holiday, it is tele-work.
It seems the police were too on leave. They increased coverage from 10,000 to 16,000 officers on the third day? How about the second day? If they were available, shouldn’t they have been deployed?
This is best understood in a game theory context. We can build a simple model:
There are three types of players: Never Riots, Contingent Riots, Always Riots. The number of police > number of Always Riots. Number of Contextually Riots > number of police.
Normally the police outnumber Always Riots, so the everyday thugs are in prison.
However, the Contingent Rioter will riot if they think they won’t be caught. And they won’t be caught if every Contingent Rioter riots simultaneously, as then the rioters outnumber the police. Once a signaling mechanism is in place (the police are tied down over there, let’s riot here), the cost of rioting goes down, and those for whom rioting increases personal utility begin to riot.
The rioters must get some value from the rioting, otherwise they would stop. This value may be mercenary (I steal things which I can later use, and stealing is easier than working for it), social (I hang out with my friends), political (I am sticking it to the Man, I am changing policy, I am changing the world), or psychic (I like to watch stuff burn). In this case, there are a combination of things going on, but I suspect politics are the least of it.
Thanks to modern mobile communications (Blackberry, Twitter, etc.) the cost of signaling has decreased. The first signal was the police shooting of Mark Duggan. Now the rioters are as well informed as the police once were with their exclusive police radio.
Perhaps the rioters will get bored. Perhaps the police will get their act together and arrest sufficient number of Contingent Rioters to change the context.
I am also surprise no curfew has (yet) been imposed. This would give the police the authority to arrest anyone on the street. (And the number of arrests also seems quite low).
Wikipedia has a List of Riots. Of course this being wikipedia, there are many more recent riots than ones in the past. However as the cost of rioting decreases, we might get more of this in the future.

Donor-Donee States

2011-08-092019-03-14 | David Levinson

A Political Economy of Access: Infrastructure, Networks, Cities, and Institutions by David M. Levinson and David A. King

GAO: “HIGHWAY TRUST FUND
Nearly All States Received More Funding Than They Contributed in Highway Taxes Since 2005”

This seems improbable. It is because non HTF funds are being redistributed to the states from the Treasury. That is, the money comes from general revenue. That is, it comes from the people and the states. Figure 6 (shown to the right) is probably a more accurate portrayal than the headline quote. The States rich in Senators per capita get an “equity bonus”.

Linklist: August 9, 2011

2011-08-09 | David Levinson

TPM Idealab: Will GM’s First All-Electric Car Be A Chevy Spark Minicar? : “In June, Chevy unveiled the Chevrolet Beat EV in India, an electric conversion of the Spark minicar (called the Beat in some markets). A test fleet of these vehicles is meant to investigate the consumer acceptability of lower-cost, lower-performance electric cars in a country where few vehicles cover long distances, compared to the States with its network of high-speed highways. The Beat EV as shown in India isn’t particularly high performance: Its liquid-cooled 20-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack powers only a 45-kilowatt (60-horsepower) electric motor that drives the front wheels. Chevy says the little electric Beat has an electric range of roughly 80 miles.”

Strong Towns Blog: The ASCE Infrastructure Cult : “The American Society of Civil Engineers has just released a report that should be titled, “Pretending it is 1952.” Like a broken record, ASCE is again painting a bleak picture of the future if American politicians — as if they need to be plied — won’t open up the checkbook for our noble engineers. And in a way that the Soviet Central Committee would have expected from Pravda, the media and blogger world is sounding the alarm. This feels more like a cult than a serious discussion on America’s future.”

You Tube Huntley Film Archives: The Great North Road“A superb amateur home movie in colour from August 1939, recording a trip north from London along the A1.”

A Portfolio Theory of Route Choice

2011-08-092013-05-28 | David Levinson

Trade-offs between travel time and travel time reliability are central to Zhu and Levinson's Portfolio Theory of Route Choice — Trade-offs between travel time and travel time reliability are central to Zhu and Levinson’s *Portfolio Theory of Route Choice*

Working paper:

Zhu, Shanjiang and David Levinson (2010), A Portfolio Theory of Route Choice Presented at 4th International Symposium on Transportation Network Reliability, July 2010, Minneapolis, MN.

Although many individual route choice models have been proposed to incorporate travel time variability as a decision factor, they are typically still deterministic in the sense that the optimal strategy requires choosing one particular route that maximizes utility. In contrast, this study introduces an individual route choice model where choosing a portfolio of routes instead of a single route is the best strategy for a rational traveler who cares about both journey time and lateness when facing stochastic network conditions. The model is then tested with GPS data collected in metropolitan Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. Our data suggest strong correlation among link speed when analyzing morning commute trips. There is no single dominant route (defined here as a route with the shortest travel time for a 15 day period) in 18% of cases when links travel times are correlated. This paper demonstrates that choosing a portfolio of routes could be the rational choice of a traveler who wants to optimize route decisions under variability.

JEL-Code: R41, R48, D63

Keywords: Transportation planning, route choice, travel behavior, link performance

Gas tax opt-out dynamics

2011-08-092019-03-14 | David Levinson

I noted yesterday in Linklist that “A bill was recently introduced by Senate Republicans that would allow states to opt out of the federal highway program.”
So what happens. Let’s assume half the states are donor states and half are donee states.
Day 1: All (25) the donor states opt out.
There are now 25 states in the gas tax pool. Half the states are donor states, half are donee. The funds had to be recalibrated based on the smaller pool.
Day 2: All (say 13) the donor states opt out.
There are now (let’s say 12) states left in the pool. Half the states are donor states, half are donee. The HTF allocation again had to be recalibrated based on the smaller pool.
Day 3: All (6) the donor states opt out.
There are now 6 states left in the pool. Rinse and repeat.
Day 4: All (3) the donor states opt out.
There are now 3 states left in the pool. One more time.
Day 5: All (1) the donor states opt out.
There are now 2 states left in the pool. One last time.
Day 6: All (1) donor states opt out.
There is only 1 state left in the pool. The federal government eliminates the gas tax program.
Opt-out of cross-subsidies leads inevitably to elimination of cross-subsidies.