You know that politicians waste money. You guess that they waste a lot of time.
But did you know they deliberately waste our time?
Transportation scholar Randal O’Toole regales us with the fix that California’s overlords have put themselves in. Merely assuming that dense city living decreases commuting, California’s legislators cooked up a law requiring local governments to increase population density.
But it turns out “transportation models reveal that increased densities actually increase congestion, as measured by ‘level of service,’ which,” O’Toole informs us, “measures traffic as a percent of a roadway’s capacity and which in turn can be used to estimate the hours of delay people suffer.”
So what to do? Golden State’s august solons have exempted cities and municipalities from calculating and disclosing the bad effects of their own legislation. They offer other standards, all of which, O’Toole explains, demonstrate only “that planners and planning enthusiasts in the legislature don’t like the results of their own plans, so they simply want to ignore them.”
The gist of the new standards of “regulation”? “[T]hey ignore the impact on people’s time and lives: if densification reduces per capita vehicle miles traveled by 1 percent, planners will regard it as a victory even if the other 99 percent of travel is slowed by millions of hours per year.”
It’s quite apparent that politicians are willing to sacrifice our time to get what they — not we — want. Time is not money. Time is more important than money.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
2 replies on “Planners Cover Up Waste”
Lib-prog fudge-factor: multiply times zero and then add the desired answer.
Real results, like consequences, are for haters.
The density thing is small potatoes next to the results that are being ignored with global warming. No profit or ability to massive tax dollars kickbacks to your cronies if you have to have real results. Like the massive unbid Obamacare website contract that happened to go to Michelle’s college buddy.
It’s quite apparent that politicians are willing to sacrifice our time to get what they — not we — want.
So what are we going to do about it? Unless and until we take matters into our own hands — and remove these people from office, permanently — we have no business complaining.