Category: Travel

Low Income Drivers Gain from Congestion Pricing

Cody Cook and Pearl Li write:

….there is disagreement about the distributional effects of highway toll lanes. On one side, policymakers refer to dynamic tolling as “value pricing” and emphasize that it provides choice to drivers (Samdahl et al., 2013). On the other side, opponents are concerned that “Lexus lanes” enrich the wealthy at everyone else’s expense (Astor, 2017; Rosendorf, 2018). Evaluation of these perspectives depends on two empirical objects: the distribution of driver preferences and what we call the “road technology”—the relationship between traffic quantities and travel times. When one lane becomes tolled, drivers substitute from the newly priced lane into the remaining unpriced ones, increasing travel times in the unpriced lanes. High peak-hour prices may also induce drivers to substitute toward driving off-peak (or not at all), which can increase average speeds when the road technology is convex. Finally, since tolling changes the predictability of travel times, having the option to take the priced lanes can serve as insurance against worse-than-expected traffic conditions.

In this paper, we study the aggregate and distributional impacts of dynamic tolling. To do this, we bring together data on toll transactions, historical traffic conditions, and driver characteristics from the I-405 Express Toll Lanes in Washington State. We begin by presenting two sets of descriptive facts: first, aggregate speed and throughput increased after the introduction of tolling on this highway, and second, low-income drivers face advantageous trade-offs between price and travel time savings in the toll lanes. Next, to quantify the equilibrium effects of tolling, we build and estimate a model of driver demand, the road technology, and the pricing algorithm. In particular, the demand model incorporates the features of dynamic tolling highlighted above: choices of where and when to drive, as well as uncertainty about prices and travel times. Using the estimated model, we find that low-income drivers in fact gain the most from status-quo tolling, and we explore how equilibrium outcomes would change under counterfactual pricing policies.

Pearl Li from Stanford is on the job market.

Good Developments in Africa

The Guardian: Visas to visit Kenya are to be scrapped for other African nationals from next year as part of a movement towards opening up trade and travel within the continent.

“By the end of this year, no African will be required to have a visa to come to Kenya,” Kenya’s president, William Ruto, said at a climate change conference in Congo-Brazzaville.

Costly and time-consuming visa requirements, as well as high air fares, have long created barriers to inter-African travel for African passport holders; 32 out of 54 African countries still require the nationals of half or more countries on the continent to obtain a visa.

Good. Kenya should also scrap visas for US and European citizens!

This is part of Africa’s move to free trade with the The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the largest free trade area in the world measured by the number of countries participating. Eventually AfCTA will cover 1.3 billion people across 55 countries.

Visas can have very high costs in reducing travel and trade. Africa is moving in the right direction. The US and Europe in contrast are adding visa requirements and the wait times to get a US visa are an absurd embarrassment.

My Conversation with Harriet Karimi Muriithi

This is another CWT bonus episode, recorded in Tatu City, Kenya, outside of Nairobi.  Harriet is a 22-year-old waitress.  Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Harriet is a 22-year-old hospitality professional living and working in Tatu City, a massive mixed-used development spearheaded by Jennings. Harriet grew up in the picturesque foothills of Mount Kenya before moving to the capital city as a child to pursue better schooling. She has witnessed Nairobi’s remarkable growth firsthand over the last decade. An ambitious go-getter, Harriet studied supply chain management but and wishes to open her own high-end restaurant.

In her conversation with Tyler, Harriet opens up about her TikTok hobby, love of fantasy novels, thoughts on improving Kenya’s education system, and how she leverages AI tools like ChatGPT in her daily life, the Chinese influence across Africa, the challenges women face in village life versus Nairobi, what foods to sample as a visitor to Kenya, her favorite musicians from Beyoncé to Nigerian Afrobeats stars, why she believes technology can help address racism, her Catholic faith and church attendance, how COVID-19 affected her education and Kenya’s recovery, the superstitions that persist in rural areas, the career paths available to Kenya’s youth today, why Nollywood movies captivate her, the diversity of languages and tribes across the country, whether Kenya’s neighbors impact prospects for peace, what she thinks of the decline in the size of families, why she enjoys podcasts about random acts of kindness, what infrastructure and lifestyle changes are reshaping Nairobi, if the British colonial legacy still influences politics today, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: How ambitious are you?

MURIITHI: On a scale of 1 to 10, I will say an 8.5.

This episode is best consumed in combination with the episode with the village elder Githae Gitinji.  The contrast between the two perspectives is startling.  And here is my CWT episode with Stephen Jennings, concerning Tatu City itself.

My Conversation with Githae Gitinji

This is a special bonus episode of CWT, Githae is a 58-year-old village elder who mediates disputes and lives in Tatu City, Kenya, near Nairobi.  Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

In his conversation with Tyler, Githae discusses his work as a businessman in the transport industry and what he looks for when hiring drivers, the reasons he moved from his rural hometown to the city and his perspectives on urban vs rural living, Kikuyu cultural practices, his role as a community elder resolving disputes through both discussion and social pressure, the challenges Kenya faces, his call for more foreign investment to create local jobs, how generational attitudes differ, the role of religion and Githae’s Catholic faith, perspectives on Chinese involvement in Kenya and openness to foreigners, thoughts on the devolution of power to Kenyan counties, his favorite wildlife, why he’s optimistic about Kenya’s future despite current difficulties, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: What do you do that the court system does not do? Because you’re not police, but still you do something useful.

GITHINJI: What we normally do, we as a group, we listen to one another very much. When one person reaches that stage of being told that you are a man now, you normally have to respect your elder. Those people do respect me. When I call you, when I tell you “Come and we’ll talk it out,” with my group, you cannot say you cannot come, because if you do, we normally discipline somebody. Not by beating, we just remove you from our group. When we isolate you from our group, you’ll feel that is not fair for you. You come back and say — and apologize. We take you back into the group.

COWEN: If you’re isolated, you can’t be friends with those people anymore.

GITHINJI: When we isolate you, we mean you are not allowed to interact in any way.

COWEN: Any way.

GITHINJI: Any business, anything with the other community [members]. If it is so, definitely, you have to be a loser, because you might be needing one of those people to help you in business or something of the sort. When you are isolated, this man tells you, “No. Go and cleanse yourself first with that group.”

If you find his Kikiyu accent difficult, just read the transcript instead.  This episode is best consumed in a pair with my concurrently recorded episode with Harriet Karimi Muriithi, a 22-year-old Kenyan waitress — the contrasts in perspective across a mere generation are remarkable.

What should I ask Fuchsia Dunlop?

Yes I will be doing a third (!) Conversation with her.  She has written some of the best books and cooked some of the best food.  Here is her Wikipedia page.  Here is her home page.

Here is her new book — self-recommending if anything was — Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food.

Here is my previous podcast with Fuchsia, and here is my first podcast with her.  This time around — what should I ask?

My excellent Conversation with Stephen Jennings

Recorded in Tatu City, Kenya, not far from Nairobi, Tatu City is a budding Special Enterprise Zone.  Here is the transcript, audio, and video.  Here is the episode overview:

Stephen and Tyler first met over thirty years ago while working on economic reforms in New Zealand. With a distinguished career that transitioned from the New Zealand Treasury to significant ventures in emerging economies, Stephen now focuses on developing new urban landscapes across Africa as the founder and CEO of Rendeavour.

Tyler sat down with Stephen in Tatu City, one of his multi-use developments just north of Nairobi, where they discussed why he’s optimistic about Kenya in particular, why so many African cities appear to have low agglomeration externalities, how Tatu City regulates cars and designs for transportation, how his experience as reformer and privatizer informed the way utilities are provided, what will set the city apart aesthetically, why talent is the biggest constraint he faces, how Nairobi should fix its traffic problems, what variable best tracks Kenyan unity, what the country should do to boost agricultural productivity, the economic prospects for New Zealand, how playing rugby influenced his approach to the world, how living in Kenya has changed him, what he will learn next, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Just give us some basic facts. Where is Tatu City right now, and where will it be headed when it’s more or less finished?

JENNINGS: Tatu City is the only operational special economic zone [SEZ] in the country. It is 5,000 hectares of fully planned urban development. It is at quite an advanced stage. We have 70 large-scale industrial companies with us, including major multinationals and many of the regional leaders. We have 3,000 students come on site every day to our four new schools. We’re advanced in building the first phase of the first new CBD for the region. We have tens of thousands of core center jobs moving into that area, together with other modern office amenities. All of the elements — we have many residential modules, thousands of new residential units at a wide range of price points — all of the elements of a new city are in place.

COWEN: How many people will end up living here?

JENNINGS: Around 250,000.

COWEN: And how many businesses?

JENNINGS: There’ll be thousands of businesses.

And delving more deeply into matters:

COWEN: What do you think is the book [on economic development] that has influenced you most?

JENNINGS: It’s a very good question. I think I’ve read just about everything in development. There’s nothing I really like very much. Development is a black box. I don’t think there’s anything that has much predictive power. There’s a lot of ex post explanations, whether they be policy settings, location, culture. I think 90% of them are ex post; very few of them are predictive. Some of them are just tautologies. I really like factualization.

It’s descriptive more than analytical, but it just makes it clear that most of the world has been on a very similar development trajectory. It’s just not sequenced. Sweden started early; Ethiopia started late. But the nature of the transition and the inevitability of that transition, other than very extreme circumstances, is kind of the same.

COWEN: What do you think economists get wrong?

JENNINGS: I don’t think we really understand development at all, because if we could, we could predict it. We can predict virtually nothing. It’s just too complicated. It’s too connected with politics. I think there’s a lot of feedback loops and elements of development that we don’t understand properly. We certainly can’t quantify them because the development’s happening in such a wide range of settings, from communism dictatorships through to very liberal systems and with all different kinds of industrial — on every dimension, there’s a huge range of variables.

Excellent and interesting throughout.

What should I ask Ami Vitale?

Yes I am doing a Conversation with her.  From Wikipedia:

Ami Vitale is an American photojournalistdocumentary filmmaker, educator and speaker. In 2018, she published a photo book titled Panda Love which captures pandas within captivity and being released into the wild…

In 1994, Vitale joined the Associated Press (AP) as a picture editor in New York and Washington, D.C.[5][6] She self funded her travel through her work with AP and left for the Czech Republic in 1997.

She moved to Prague, Czech Republic, and spent a year covering the war in Kosovo, traveling back and forth to Prague, and spending a month at a time in the war zone. She later traveled to Angola, and then to the second Intifada in Gaza and Israel. In 2000, she received an Alexia Foundation grant to document a small village in the West African nation of Guinea Bissau.

Vitale currently photographs wildlife and environmental stories in order to educate about global conservation issues. She is a visual journalist working as a photographer for National Geographic, a documentary filmmaker, and a cinematographer. Her recent still photography focuses on wildlife conservation in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. As an ambassador for Nikon and a contract photographer with National Geographic magazine, she has documented wildlife and poaching in Africa, covered human-wildlife conflict, and concentrated on efforts to save the northern white rhino and reintroduce pandas to the wild.

She has traveled to more than one hundred countries.  Here is her home page, which includes links to her documentaries.  Here is her Instagram.

So what should I ask her?

My excellent Conversation with Jacob Mikanowski

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Jacob Mikanowski is the author of one of Tyler’s favorite books this year called Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land. Tyler and Jacob sat down to discuss all things Eastern Europe, including the differences between Eastern and Western European humor, whether Poles are smiling more nowadays, why the best Polish folk art is from the south, the equilibrium for Kaliningrad and the Suwałki Gap, how Romania and Bulgaria will handle depopulation, whether Moldova has an independent future, the best city to party in, why there are so few Christian-Muslim issues in Albania, a nuanced take on Orbán and Hungarian politics, why food in Poland is so good now, why Stanisław Lem hasn’t gotten more attention in the West, how Eastern Europe has changed his view of humanity, his ideal two week itinerary in the region, what he’ll do next, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Why isn’t Stanisław Lem more popular in the West today as a writer?

MIKANOWSKI: That’s interesting. I grew up on Stanisław Lem like some people grow up on the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. My dad’s a computer scientist. His father set up one of Poland’s first computers. The world of Polish science and science fiction: he used to read the Tales of Pirx the Pilot and the Ijon Tichy stories — the robots, the short, fun ones — like they were fairy tales. I grew up with them.

I think — actually I have trouble going back to those. I’d go back to Solaris, and I think Solaris is a real masterpiece and I think it’s had lasting influence. But there’s something pessimistic about them. They don’t have that thing that Asimov does, or even Dune, of world-building and forecasting the human future far in advance. They are like Kafka in space, and that’s absurd situations, strange turns of events — I think a pretty pessimistic view of progress. Maybe that makes them hard to digest. Also a kind of odd sense of humor with the short stories. Almost a childlike sense of humor that maybe makes them hard to take.

I think there’s been a little bit of a Lem revival, though. I know technologists, some people like them; futurologists like him. I like him.

COWEN: Some of the cybernetics tales, they seem weirdly close to the current state of LLMs. And I think I’ve seen this mentioned once, but it’s not generally known: the idea that you use them to talk to, that they’re weird, they might be somewhat mystical, they serve as therapists or oracles — that’s very much in Lem, quite early.

MIKANOWSKI: I think people should go back to them. I think — I was just thinking of Solaris, which I always thought about as this story about contacting a truly alien alien. Now it’s like, well, this is a little bit of what we’re doing with virtual reality and AI. It’s like, what would happen if you could actually talk to your dreams, if you could revive people? You could have the mimicry of consciousness, the appearance of consciousness, without anything behind it — without a consciousness.

There’s something seductive about it, and there’s something monstrous about it. I think he was there way ahead of anyone else, and people should be going back to them. Maybe they will.

Of course we talk about the Suwalki Gap as well. And this: “Given all your study of Eastern Europe, what is it you feel you understand about the current war in Ukraine that maybe other well-informed people would not?”

Recommended, interesting throughout.  Again, here is Jacob’s new and excellent book Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.

What should I ask Patrick McKenzie?

I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Patrick is a phenomenon of the modern age.  He writes the excellent Bits About Money, which focuses on money, banking, payments, and more.

His blog is Kalzumeus.  He has lived most of his adult life in Japan, and has many excellent posts about Japan.  Here are his greatest hits on the blog.  He has run national shadow vaccine location information infrastructure.   On Twitter he is @patio11.

So what should I ask him?

What I think

From an email I sent to a well-known public intellectual:

I think the chance that the bodies turn out to be real aliens is quite low.

But the footage seems pretty convincing, a way for other people to see what…sources have been telling me for years. [Everyone needs to stop complaining that there are no photos!]

And to think it is a) the Chinese, b) USG secret project, or…whatever…*in Mexico* strains the imagination.

It is interesting of course how the media is not so keen to report on this.  They don’t have to talk about the aliens, they could just run a story “The Mexican government has gone insane.”  But they won’t do that, and so you should update your mental model of the media a bit in the “they are actually pretty conservative, in the literal sense of that term, and quite readily can act like a deer frozen in the headlights, though at some point they may lurch forward with something ill-conceived.”

Many of you readers are from Christian societies, or you are Christian.  But please do not focus on the bodies!  I know you are from your early upbringing “trained” to do so, even if you are a non-believer.  Wait until that evidence is truly verified (and I suspect it will not be).  Focus on the video footage.

In any case, the Mexican revelations [sic] mean this issue is not going away, and perhaps this will force the hand of the USG  to say more than they otherwise would have.

My Conversation with the excellent Jerusalem Demsas

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

In this special episode, Tyler sat down with Jerusalem Demsas, staff writer at The Atlantic, to discuss three books: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, and Of Boys and Men by Richard V. Reeves.

Spanning centuries and genres and yet provoking similar questions, these books prompted Tyler and Jerusalem to wrestle with enduring questions about human nature, gender dynamics, the purpose of travel, and moral progress, including debating whether Le Guin prefers the anarchist utopia she depicts, dissecting Swift’s stance on science and slavery, questioning if travel makes us happier or helps us understand ourselves, comparing Gulliver and Shevek’s alienation and restlessness, considering Swift’s views on the difficulty of moral progress, reflecting on how feminism links to moral progress and gender equality, contemplating whether imaginative fiction or policy analysis is more likely to spur social change, and more.

An actual conversation!  This one is difficult to excerpt, and unlike many I suspect it is better to listen than to read the transcript.  Nonetheless here is one short excerpt:

DEMSAS: Yes. The only walls on the anarchist planet [in The Dispossessed] are the ones that surround the space travel, the launching pad or whatever it is. That’s something that’s said very early on, but then you discover throughout the book how much there are all of these other “invisible walls” that he’s discovering. That’s made very explicit at times, sometimes maybe too explicit. [laughs] But I think it’s also a lesson in how much you have to have an other to compare yourself to in order to even understand yourself.

He’s alone for a really long time, and when he’s doing his studies at the beginning or in the middle of the book, and he can’t get these scientific breakthroughs that he inevitably does get to — it’s when he starts interacting with other people and rebuilding those bonds with other humans that you do actually get these breakthroughs. I think that’s also another point in favor of Le Guin pointing out that communitarianism is important.

Recommended.

How to travel in India

An MR reader asks me:

….what have you found to be nonobvious activities with high return on time invested in India?

Perhaps it is all obvious, but here is my list:

1. Make sure you visit a bunch of smaller temples, not just the famous, very well known sites.

2. Never turn down a trip, or side trip, to any particular part of India.  Never say “Nah, it is not interesting there.”  Because it is.

3. Along those lines, try to see many different parts of the country.  Think of India as more culturally diverse than say Europe.

4. Most of the typical “sights” are overrated, the best sight is India itself.  I enjoyed the (Indian) visitors to the Taj Mahal more than the Taj itself.

5. The very best food is often in mid-tier restaurants, smallish, often with lines, find out when you should arrive.  There isn’t a good enough reason to risk street food, given the quality available elsewhere, though in many other countries I do recommend street food.

6. Try to visit residences from all income classes.

7. Noise pollution still matters.

8. You cannot expect people to be on time, or to be able to avoid social pressures to join situations, spend more time somewhere, see another family member, and so on.

9. Unless you have been to India very recently, the infrastructure is much better than what you might be expecting from a previous trip.

10. India has the world’s best hotels, and many of them are less expensive than you might think, especially in off-season.

11. When choosing when to visit, do look into issues of heat, monsoon, and air pollution, before making concrete plans.

What else?