Podcast appearances and mentions of randal o'toole

Randal O'Toole is a Cato Institute Senior Fellow working on urban growth, public land, and transportation issues. He has authored four books in these areas starting with The Best Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, And Your Future; Gridlock: Why We're Stuck In Traffic And What To Do About It; American Nightmare: How Government Undermines The Dream of Homeownership; and Romance Of The Rails: Why The Passenger Trains We Love Are Not The Transportation We Need. Episode Notes Randal O'Toole Antiplanner Website Reducing Poverty Through Auto Ownership Romance Of The Rails: Why The Passenger Trains We Love Are Not The Transportation We Need Amazon On Road Lending Web Related Episodes Mariya Frost | Washington Policy Center John Kett | IAA, Inc. Upward Social Mobility Home Is Where You Park It *****Wisco Weekly***** Invest in mobility systems that create wealth

Today, I sat down with Randal O'Toole from the Cato Institute to talk about public transportation. This is in light of SANDAG's proposed $177 billion transportation plan.  Randal O’Toole analysis of urban land‐​use and transportation issues, brought together in his 2001 book, The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths, has influenced decisions in cities across the country. In his book The Best‐​Laid Plans, O’Toole calls for repealing federal, state, and local planning laws and proposes reforms that can help solve social and environmental problems without heavy‐​handed government regulation. O’Toole’s latest book is Romance of the Rails Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need. 

Randal O'Toole on Rethinking Public Transit post-COVID

Randal O’Toole is a land-use and transportation policy analyst who works with a variety of think tanks including Colorado’s Independence Institute, Hawaii’s Grassroot Institute, and Oregon’s Cascade Policy Institute. He has written several books on the follies of government planning including American Nightmare: How Government Undermines the Dream of Homeownership. He has also taught environmental economics at Yale, UC Berkeley, and Utah State University.

What's a "road diet"? Randal O'Toole comments. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The case for transit would seem to rest on its ability to cheaply get low-income Americans to work. Randal O'Toole argues that it's not that simple. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

There tends to be cost overruns when the government undertakes a grand infrastructure project. This is exactly what happened when the government contracted companies to build the railways across the United States in the 19th century. Randal O’Toole stresses that with the introduction of the automobile to America, it allowed everyone to travel. Prior to the automobile boom, only the middle-class & the wealthy could afford to travel via railways. Today, there is a misperceived notion that European passenger trains run more efficiently than American trains, but that is not actually the case. Even though trains are not more energy efficient than cars, the United States actually has the most effective rail system in the world because it is privately owned. What was the biggest financial & political scandal of the 19th century? Did the First Transcontinental Railroad help settle the West? When was the golden age of railroad travel? Have train rides always been overpriced? What role does nostalgia play in maintaining our rail systems?Further Reading:Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need, written by Randal O’TooleWhy Passenger Trains Don’t Work in Europe, written by Randal O’TooleThe Coming Transit Apocalypse, written by Randal O’TooleRelated Content:Is Public Transportation Worth It?, Free Thoughts PodcastRandal O’Toole Discusses Privatizing Transit, Capitol Hill briefing held on July 14, 2011 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Like many Americans, Randal O’Toole loves passenger trains, yet he acknowledges that intercity passenger trains and — outside of the New York region — urban rail transit play little role in American life today. The replacement of passenger trains with cars, buses, and airplanes is similar to many other recent technological replacements: word processors replacing typewriters, calculators replacing slide rules, telephones replacing telegraphs, and cell phones replacing land lines. However, only for passenger trains has the government spent billions of dollars a year attempting to turn back the clock and slow that replacement. O’Toole’s book Romance of the Rails asks why this is so and whether passenger rail has a significant role to play in the future. Art Guzzetti, an advocate for urban rail transit; Jim Mathews, an advocate for intercity passenger trains; and Marc Scribner, an advocate for free-market transportation, will offer their comments on the book. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In Romance of the Rails, author Randal O'Toole details the rise and fall of trains as a mode of transportation why it's quite likely we can never go back to it. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

American mass transit systems face challenges from demographics, how people work, and ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft. Randal O'Toole discusses what agencies should do to respond. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Transit ridership is declining nationwide despite billions of dollars in federal subsidies, observes Randal O’Toole, one of the nation’s leading critics of the transit industry. He argues that the federal government should stop subsidizing a dying industry. Jarrett Walker — one of the most innovative thinkers in the transit community — disagrees, arguing that public transit has a vital role to play in urban transportation and urban growth. Join us to hear these two experts debate the appropriate role of federal funding in urban transportation. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Listen to the introduction from Randal O'Toole's new book Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need.Read the Introduction from Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Driverless cars will change where you live, how you work, and will reshape whole industries. And they'll be here before you know it. Randal O'Toole comments. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What infrastructure fixes would deliver the biggest economic boost? And why isn't that the focus of any revamp of American infrastructure? Randal O'Toole comments. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What is the “Statrix”? How does government warp our perception of the world around us? How does it disproportionately affect the poor?Trevor Burrus talks about the “Statrix,” a portmanteau of the state and the concept of an artificial world made popular in the 1999 action/sci-fi movie The Matrix. Show Notes and Further ReadingTrevor mentions the recent spate of track problems and fires that have been plaguing Washington D.C.’s metro system, which led to the creation of this website, ismetroonfire.com. He also explains this song by the Kingston Trio, which was meant to a protest fare increases on Boston’s public subway system.Here’s a series of articles by Megan McArdle on Washington D.C.’s streetcar project, written in 2009, 2014, and 2015 (the project was originally slated to be completed in 2006 and is still not fully rolled out today, in 2016).Trevor also mentions our podcast episode with Randal O’Toole, “Transportation, Land Use, and Freedom,” James Tooley’s book “The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People are Educating Themselves,” and NeuCare, a new way to think about medical care. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Without pricing the various uses of land, the feds manage to turn land-use disputes into bitter fights. Randal O'Toole comments. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Henry Ford’s mass production of the automobile ushered in a new era of human mobility, one that public planners always seem to be attempting to steer the American public away from. How is transportation important to human freedom and flourishing?How much are we spending on public transit? When, if ever, does public transportation make sense?What will driverless cars do for traffic congestion? Are driverless cars going to cause people to drive more? Less? Are there any potential roadblocks to driverless cars?Show Notes and Further ReadingO’Toole’s books on various topics: The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths: How Smart Growth Will Harm American Cities (2001), The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future (2007), and American Nightmare: How Government Undermines the Dream of Homeownership (2012).Randal O’Toole blogs at The Antiplanner.Trevor mentions this article from The Onion (satire): “Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A podcast preview of the upcoming week including introducing Jason Schaefer, the new Member Support Specialist at Strong Towns, a trip to Lafayette with Joe Minicozzi, a debate with Cato fellow Randal O'Toole and a success story in Waco.

…or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Inequality. David R. Henderson (http://www.davidrhenderson.com) is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a professor of economics at the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy, Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century (http://amzn.to/1LT9jLG) managed to do something unprecedented among equation-dense economic tomes, it became the #1 selling book on Amazon.com. The book tapped in to a hot topic among politicians and the general public: the high (and possibly rising) wealth and income shares of the top 1%. However, David points out that although the book was a best-seller, it wasn’t actually a best-reader. Amazon logs the sentences people highlight, and the top five most-highlighted sentences in Capital all appear in the first 26 pages (www.wsj.com/articles/the-summers-most-unread-book-is-1404417569). It seems that, at least among kindle readers, most people didn’t make it past the introduction. It appears that people buy the book to back up the views they already hold. David thinks that the huge interest in economic inequality in general and the wealth of the 1% in particular was sparked in the 1990s by politicians, including Al Gore, and picked up by journalists like Sylvia Nasar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Nasar), before influencing the economics debate. Piketty has been able to ride this wave of public interest at what appears to be its crest. David distinguishes between inequality of wealth, inequality of income, and inequality of power. Income inequality is the difference in the amount of income we each take in in wages, interest, dividends, and government transfers (e.g. welfare or social security payments), the four main sources of income for most people. Wealth should ideally include the total value of a person’s assets in addition to the stream of income he is likely to earn in the future, though this stream is more often ignored in wealth statistics. Wealth inequality is not the same as income inequality. Critically, since people earn variable income throughout their lives, income inequality doesn’t capture what we think of as the gap between “rich” and “poor.” Retired people who own two-million-dollar homes might have low incomes, but they certainly aren’t poor. Or, to use an example that’s relevant to myself, as a PhD student my income probably sits in the bottom quintile, and yet I can expect a much higher income after I graduate. The major factor in both income inequality and wealth inequality (measured by current assets and not expected earnings) is age. Teenagers earn little or nothing, but they grow into adults and gain skills and education, their incomes rise, and they gain wealth through savings. Even if everyone had the same lifetime earnings, there would still be significant inequality in any given year since some people would be young low-earners, while others would be older, wealthier high-earners. And since the older people would have had the chance to accumulate wealth over a lifetime, they would have twenty times the wealth of their younger counterparts. While there is a correlation between wealth and power, that correlation is by no means perfect. David gives the example of Bill Gates who discovered the hard way that when you have too little political influence, it can be costly. Gates was hit with a long and costly antitrust suit, after which he greatly expanded his lobbying efforts; he had learned his lesson. David agrees with Joseph Stiglitz’ argument (http://amzn.to/1LT9dDC), to some extent, that large accumulations of wealth are the result of rent seeking. Local governments restrict the building of new homes and developments that could expand the supply of housing. Thus, they keep real estate prices artificially high to the benefit of those who already own their homes. This is an example of successful rent seeking by homeowners to the detriment of non-homeowners. However, while Stiglitz would argue that this justifies a higher tax rate on the wealthy, David prefers the more direct solution of simply reducing or removing these restrictions. The following are also mentioned in this episode: Wealth Inequality in America (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM) Piketty and Saez vs. Burkhauser and Cornell: Who’s right on income inequality and stagnation? (https://www.aei.org/publication/piketty-and-saez-vs-burkhauser-and-cornell-whos-right-on-income-inequality-and-stagnation/) Income and Wealth by Alan Reynolds (http://amzn.to/1LOy1Ma) The Boskin Commission (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boskin_Commission) Myths of Rich and Poor by W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm (http://amzn.to/1NOvEYR) Mark J. Perry on individual income inequality (https://www.aei.org/publication/sorry-krugman-piketty-and-stiglitz-income-inequality-for-individual-americans-has-been-flat-for-more-than-50-years/) Greg Mankiw’s favourite textbook (http://amzn.to/1Rihq8j) Bernie Madoff (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Madoff) The McCulloch chainsaw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_P._McCulloch) Lyndon B. Johnson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_B._Johnson) David’s review of Capital in the 21st Century for Regulation (http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/2014/10/regulationv37n3-9.pdf) David’s (unexpectedly) controversial EconLog post about ordinal utility (http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/05/tyler_cowen_on_14.html) Robert Solow’s review of Capital in the 21st Century (http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117429/capital-twenty-first-century-thomas-piketty-reviewed) Matthew Rognlie’s response to Piketty (http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117429/capital-twenty-first-century-thomas-piketty-reviewed) and Randal O’Toole’s comment on Rognlie’s response (http://www.cato.org/blog/housing-wealth-inequality) Branko Milanović’s blog on global inequality (http://glineq.blogspot.ca/) David’s article on The Bottom One Percent (http://www.hoover.org/research/bottom-one-percent) Peter Jaworski (http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/pj87/?action=viewpublications&PageTemplateID=360 Is Government the Source of Monopoly? By Yale Brozen (http://amzn.to/1HdvyI0)

The law authorizing federal highway and transit programs expires on May 31, and Congress is currently debating where the money will come from for a new transportation bill and where it should be spent. But a third question is even more important: what are the incentives created by federal transportation spending and how can they be improved to provide Americans with faster, cleaner, and safer transportation? Randal O'Toole will describe the perverse incentives that currently govern federal transit programs; Baruch Feigenbaum will discuss federal policies that make infrastructure unnecessarily expensive; and Marc Scribner will explore other incentives created by federal regulation and ask, "Is there a future for federal transportation policy?" See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Federal provision of "new start funding" for rail transit projects may lead local governments to spend more on shiny new projects and less on maintenance of existing transit. Randal O'Toole comments. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

December 2014 featuring Michael F. Cannon, Trevor Burrus, Adam Smith, Randal O'Toole, Christopher A. Preble, Neal McCluskey, Hon. Diane Sykes See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Congress needs to reauthorize the federal gas tax and decide how to spend federal surface transportation dollars in 2014. Unfortunately, argues Cato’s Randal O’Toole, too much spending in the past has gone to obsolete transportation technologies. Author Scott Beyer argues that the federal government’s role in funding infrastructure has stripped both money and decision-making power from localities, particularly major cities. Emily Goff, of the Heritage Foundation, will present ways reauthorization can embrace future technologies rather than be stuck in the past. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

August 2012 featuring Ilya Shapiro, Michael D. Tanner, Tom G. Palmer, Neal McCluskey, Randal O'Toole, Diederik Vandewalle, John Hospers See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

September 2011 featuring Neal McCluskey, Adam B. Schaeffer, Sen. Rand Paul, Jason Brennan, Randal O'Toole, Jeffrey Miron See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This conversation was recorded one day before James Howard Kunstler was scheduled to debate Randal O'Toole at Brown University in Providence, RI. O'Toole is a well-known advocate for the suburban living arrangement. Host Duncan Crary chats with JHK about the pro-suburbia arguments in preparation for the debate. JHK refutes some of the major arguments used by sprawl defenders, including the notions that sprawl is good because people choose it and that sprawl represents liberty. JHK also notes that while the infrastructure required to deliver suburbia is extremely subsidized with government money, many sprawl defenders argue against public transportation because it is subsidized. Sponsor: www.CNU18.org

September 2009 featuring John Samples, Steve Simpson, Pat Nolan, Sally Pipes, Randal O'Toole, Christopher Calabrese, Tom G. Palmer See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

May 2009 featuring Christopher A. Preble, Benjamin H. Friedman, Douglas Macgregor, Rob Kampia, Randal O'Toole, David Boaz See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.