Words to Remember
Pay attention: Using Federal Highway Administration statistics, Subsidyscope has calculated that in 2007, 51 percent of the nation’s $193 billion set aside for highway construction and maintenance was generated through user fees—down from 10 years earlier when user fees made up 61 percent of total spending on roads. The rest came from other sources, including revenue generated by income, sales and property taxes, as well as bond issues. Going back further, the trend is more pronounced. Forty years ago, user fees amounted to 71 percent of revenues spent on roads. Today, user fee revenu

What’s Going On With Me
No doubt you are all wondering what’s up in my life. The answer, as it happens, is kind of a lot. Some details! First, I will soon be taking on a new role at The Economist, as Online Economics Editor. I will still be blogging at Free Exchange, but I’ll also be setting up and running an Economics channel page and doing some other writing for the print paper. I’m very excited about the change, but it will mean some reduction in writing for other outlets; I recently ended my relationship with Streetsblog to focus on my new Economist responsibilities. I will keep writing and thinking about cities, just not on a daily basis. Second, the new role will also mean

Creative Funding
From Bloomberg: Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said his goal to speed up construction of 12 transit projects and ease congestion in the second-biggest U.S. city requires “creative” funding help from Washington. Villaraigosa is pushing a plan to complete about $20 billion of subway and rail-line work by 2019, 20 years sooner than an initial estimate by Los Angeles County’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The mayor said he’ll seek a funding advance from the U.S. government against future local sales tax revenue, along with federal grant money.

Crime in DC
I think this post by Ezra gets things wrong in a lot of different ways: On Saturday night, much of Columbia Road was blocked off by sirens and tape. It says something about Washington that this didn’t strike me as particularly abnormal. Another shooting, probably. And that’s exactly what it was. But this time, it was a 9-year-old boy who’d been shot through a door after his family had rushed inside their apartment to escape a robbery attempt. It is appalling, of c

Boo
Has S&P really taken historical Case-Shiller data offline? Really? Someone tell me I’m wrong. Information wants to be free, jerks.