Infrastructure Megaprojects: Introduction

The US economy tanked in 2007, and is still lagging significantly behind where we would all like it to be. Right now, I don't want to bicker and argue about who did what to whom. I don't want to argue about what can best be done about it. I'm happy to do those things, just at another time.

Right now, I want to argue from an assumption, as a thought experiment. It's often said that government spending on infrastructure construction is a good way to kickstart the economy. It puts people to work, and the net gains eventually outweigh the immediate costs. So let's start from that premise. If government spending on infrastructure is good stimulus for the economy, what form should that infrastructure spending take?

Oh, there's the obvious collapsing bridges and dams, things that need fixing. But what new could we do? What one-time projects would make the United States a better place to live for centuries to come, like rural electrification or the interstates did? What can we build that is, in a word, awesome?

I'll be talking about several possibilities in a series of posts. Each post will be one answer to the question, "What do people need?"

¿Dónde está mi burrito?

I have to take a break from politics to talk about something that's really serious: who is making the menu decisions at Taco Bell?

Like most people, I have a few favorite menu items. But they keep leaving! Cheesy bean and rice burrito, gone! Beefy crunch burrito, gone! Chili cheese burrito, gone! Volcano burrito, gone! Limeade sparkler, gone!

A couple more menu items, and I could start a restaurant just of the things Taco Bell has lost...

Marsha Blackburn: On Municipal Broadband

Ms. Blackburn issued this press release recently. I'd like to ask the Congresswoman to clarify something. You are defending the states' rights, yes. But which rights, specifically? The rights to override the will of the people of a city or town? You claim to be in favor of small, local government. Yet the policies you are defending seem inconsistent with this. You are, in fact, defending the power of central government over local, and using the power of an even more remote government to do it.

I'd like to better understand how this is consistent. Why is it acceptable for the states to dictate terms to the people of their cities? I understand the legal structures are different, but that's a technicality and a cop-out. As a matter of principle, why should a remote central government be able to override the will of a local government in this one case, but not in others?

Please understand, I'm neither Republican nor Democrat, neither conservative nor liberal. Others may put me in such boxes, but when it comes to politics, I'm simply an engineer. I want things to work, I want to fix broken things. And like any observer, I can tell you that our broadband market is broken. Internet speeds in Tennessee are slow, service is abusive, and there is no market of competition to drive innovation. This map shows that the majority of the state doesn't even have two broadband options; you need far more than that to drive a free market! Further, Comcast is a clear example of regulatory capture and the continuous legalized bribery of our elected officials. We live in a government-sponsored monopoly, not a free market.

So if we live in a government-sponsored monopoly, what's so wrong with admitting that, and doing it right? It's what we do with every other utility, and they operate quite well. Several municipalities in Tennessee built local fiber networks before 2008, when the state legislature was 'lobbied' into making building such networks much harder. All these networks provide vastly better speeds than the state or national average. Some are among the fastest in the country, literally a hundred times faster than the rest of the state, and remain a point of technological pride for our state.

In short, municipal broadband works. Or at least it has some hope of working. It's perfectly clear that our current corporate ISPs don't, and never will.

So I have to ask, Ms. Blackburn, why are you fighting so hard to maintain the status quo? Right now, most of our state is locked into an unresponsive, dysfunctional monopoly, with no hope of competition to improve our lot. Those cities that have acted to improve the situation have succeeded; their citizens have better lives and more options. Yet your actions work to lock us into the same dysfunctional system. Why? What matter of principle could possibly justify such a hurtful act towards the people you were elected to serve? It's clearly not about central government vs. local government, we've established that already.

So what is it? Even if your constituents don't deserve modern utilities, they at least deserve an answer from you on this.

Failed States

The modern state is based on territorial integrity. Here's the cartoon version: we divide the world into regions with clear borders, each region with a government. The government of a region are the only ones allowed to use force in that region. If the government of a region uses force on another region, that's called a war.

But what if a government can't control its territory? What if the people of a region use force on another, without the permission of the government? This describes much of the conflict in the world today. Huge swaths of the world are failed states, areas where no government has control.

Think about what that means for a moment. Civilization as we live it is only possible because life is made predictable. The government guarantees my security, unless you do certain pre-defined things. That allows me to gather wealth without worry about it being stolen by someone with more guns than I have. That in turn allows me to have leisure time, lets me invest, get an education, and not spend every waking moment worrying about bandits taking everything I have and killing me. Removal of chaos improves quality of life. Failed states lack that guarantee.

Further, what if a group in a failed state wants to attack another state? Terrorists, militias, drug cartels, such entities threaten other states. But the usual means of handling such situations don't apply. If you don't like what the Taliban is doing (and who does?), negotiating with the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan is pointless. They don't control the relevant territory. Similarly, the Palestinian government may not be able to prevent all Palestinians from attacking Israel, and the Mexican government clearly can not shut down the cartels shipping drugs into the United States.

The concept of failed states is one of the great geopolitical problems of this century. Their very existence challenges all the rules we've put in place to deal with states. But how do you change it? If other armed groups can challenge the local government, how can this be resolved? Someone has to end up the biggest fish the pond again. Either the borders are redrawn, or one side defeats the other and takes the whole state. The former is usually the kind of civil war that ends up in tens of thousands of deaths, and the latter rarely ends in functioning democracy. Dictatorship may be stable in the short term, but in the long term you can't deprive a populace of what they want forever. Trying leads right back to violence. So unless your state lucks out and gets a particularly enlightened dictator who can successfully transition to democracy, you end up with a succession of dictators and civil wars. (See the above map.)

Surely there must be a better option.

For a region to be successful, security of the people in that region must be guaranteed in a predictable fashion. That guarantee can only be made by a stable power with definite rules, and sufficient force to take on all potential adversaries. In short, an area needs rules and force. Either can be developed internally or externally. Failed states, by definition, can not control their territory with internal force.

What about external force? Well, if an external force enters your country and starts enforcing its own rules, we typically call that an invasion and colonization by an empire. Frowned upon these days. But what if an external force enters a country and starts enforcing local rules? What if you've got (at least by historical standards) a quasi-benevolent empire? That would be state-building. We've seen this happen in a number of cases, with varying degrees of success. Sometimes it's a dismal failure, but it can work.

So take the Marshall Plan to rebuild Germany after the second World War, probably our most successful endeavor. I suggest the world should use that example as a base for a long-term project to restore civilization to these chaos regions, one small sliver at a time. It may take centuries, but it may be the only way to build up a failed state into a successful one that can stand on its own. Someone comes in, kicks out all the armed gangs from one city or small region, and secures the area long enough for economy and infrastructure to be put in place.

So how would this happen? If there's enough government to ask, we can go by invitation. ("Hey, we'd like to come spend a hundred billion dollars fixing your country for the next three generations. Good by you?") But if there's no government to negotiate with, it has to be by external consensus. The UN would have to agree that a region would benefit from (mostly) peaceful intervention, and there would need to be evidence that the local populace would respond positively. Only then would intervention be considered.

But who provides the force? There are two prongs to this, after all. You send in construction workers and educators and bureaucrats and whoever else it takes to train a populace to modernize. But you also have to send military force, because security was the original concern. That force could operate under the UN, but they don't have much of an army. The actual force is most likely provided by nearby neighbors able to spare the materiel. This runs into problems with areas the size of Africa, where it would take literally centuries to work from the outside in. But this is envisioned as a very long-term project.

So either we go in by invitation, or the UN gets together, declares some area to not be part of a functioning state, and takes over administration, security, education, etc. How do we get out? There has to be an exit strategy, a definite series of steps towards internal democratization, with more and more being taken over by locals over the years. There have to be definite metrics and milestones, constant improvement every year, or people will stop believing in the goals. It will start to look like an unending occupation.

Now, there are a lot of failed states. How do we pick one? The one with the richest neighbor? The one with the most destabilizing impact on the world? North Korea is an obvious choice by those criteria, being close to South Korea, China, and Japan. But good luck with that! Haiti is another obvious choice, being practically on the USA's doorstep. Or perhaps the US and Europe should go for broke and fix Somalia, which has been near the top of the list since anyone started keeping track.

Okay, so this is crazy. I know it. But think about it this way: we spent over a trillion dollars destroying Iraq, and half that destroying Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, including thousands of our own. And what have we bought with all that blood and treasure? Nothing. We are no safer. The people of Iraq and Afghanistan are no safer (excepting Kurdistan, they're almost certainly better off). We could have taken that money and multiplied the GDP of Haiti by a factor of ten, and that's just by throwing money at the problem. Education and infrastructure would give vastly better returns than that. That's ten million people whose lives would be permanently improved, instead of millions ruined.

Here's my point: if we're going to spend that much on another country, let's get something for it. Let's be a force for good in the world. Let's build things, instead of destroying them.

Of course, I'm not saying we should spend that much on another country. I'd sooner see us spend it here. That will be my next series of posts.

If you could pass one law...

Someone on Quora asked "If you could pass a law, what law would it be?" My answer got into an interesting discussion, which I'm reposting here.

If "law" includes constitutional amendment, I would pass an amendment giving the federal and state governments power to regulate campaign donations and spending. Our democracy collapsed when the Supreme Court ruled that money was speech in the 70's.
Wolf PAC

Someone questioned why I'd want to hinder freedom of speech for groups. 

I responded that every individual in that group would have exactly the same rights and influence as every person outside that group. In other words, groups don't have rights. Individuals in groups do.

Our goal is to have a stable society. The most stable society is a functional democracy, wherein the collective will of the people is expressed and executed. This is my premise.

Now, observations. Unlimited political donation gives some individuals and groups more influence than others. Looking at what happened in politics since the USSC legalized corporate donations, the will of the people has been utterly ignored by the federal government on most or all issues. This can be statistically demonstrated.

Unlimited money in politics breaks democracy, thereby making our society less stable. On these grounds alone, it should be disallowed. All other concerns are secondary.

Someone then claimed that freedom was more important than stability, and that the most stable society would be dictatorship.

Dictatorship is not stable. Dictatorships are plagued by violent rebellion, even more violent suppression of rebellion, and then state collapse when the dictator falls. Look at the entire middle east to see how that goes. At best, dictatorships give the illusion of stability in the short term. Let's not be fooled into thinking that actually translates to stability.

As an observation about humanity in all contexts, if you try to prevent people from getting what they want, they will fight. Democracy gives people what they want. That's why it's stable, at least within the bounds of what's possible given uncontrollable circumstances.

"Freedom" is an abstract buzzword that many use without conveying useful information. Drop the language, and look at what actually happens. Okay, so I'm not prevented from buying elections, and some claim that that fact makes me free. But what does it make everyone else? It makes them my slave, because I just bought the government! What you're describing as freedom is actually disenfranchisement and slavery of the poor. There's no freedom about it!

In fact, let's go there. Compare it to slavery. People were once free to own other people. That freedom was removed. Slaveholders were made less free. Was that wrong? Of course not, because in so doing, other people were made more free.

No liberties are absolute. They're all games of balance between one person's desires and another's. I'm suggesting everyone should have equal influence over their government, which is the fundamental concept of America. To suggest that campaign donations should be unlimited is to take that premise and throw it out, so the rich have more influence than the poor.

I understand reverence for the Bill of Rights. But unlike some, I also understand its place. The Bill of Rights is a tool that exists for the express purpose of protecting one principle: government by the people. If it fails to protect that principle, we fix it. The Bill of Rights is the servant, not the master.  

Moving Borders

Much of modern geopolitics is based on the idea of territorial integrity. A state has these borders, and they are not to be changed. When we invaded Iraq, our stated goal was to ensure a unified country was left behind. When countries try to change the borders of other countries, the international community freaks out, and often lots of people die.

Territorial integrity, like most political concepts, is a nice fiction. There are still border changes. There always have been, and always will be. We're naive to think that the arbitrary lines we've drawn on the map this century will last the rest of time, as if they're different from the arbitrary lines of the past.

Let's look at Iraq for an example. Why is Iraq falling apart right now? Because fundamentally, Iraq has no reason to exist as a single country. There are three major groups, all with their own interests and territory, and none of whom really have a desire to be unified with each other. (Overly broad general statements, obviously.) Iraq came into existence because foreign powers drew the borders, and it's stayed in existence by brute force of the central government. With that force gone, there's nothing holding that country together. The same phenomenon is pulling Syria apart.

Most border changes come about due to war. And war, we would all agree, is an expensive and risky proposition, best avoided. There may be circumstances where war is the best available option, but when it comes to the kinds of wars that lead to border changes, that's not generally the case. We should try to find a better general solution.

(I should say at this point that I am not, with this writing, advocating any particular instance of border change. I am interested in systems that work, and in keeping people alive, not in achieving any particular political end. This should not be interpreted as commentary on any particular revolution, war, or secession movement, past or present. If I choose to comment on those things, I will do so in an unmistakeable manner.)

There's a correlation between war and border change, but which causes which? Does the war cause the border change? Does the desire for border change cause the war? Or is there some third factor that causes both? Clearly, war is a consequence, not the root cause. In many cases, people resort to violence when all peaceful means of achieving their desires have been cut off. (This is one of the reasons why democracy is more stable than totalitarianism; you can't deny people what they want forever.) To avoid violence, therefore, we need some means for people to have what they want. It must be possible for the will of the people to be recognized and executed, even if that means redrawing the map.

Now, redrawing national borders shouldn't be taken on lightly. We can't be talking about a unilateral, simple majority, one-time vote. If secession is too easy, the world becomes unstable instantly. But the barrier also can't be insurmountable, or the pressure buildup leads to the same instability. Wherever we draw the line, it needs to be fixed, so people on both sides know what to expect, and can't complain about the rules being rigged.

Since self-determination is the principle people are typically fighting over, obviously we need to hold a poll. Suppose a part of a state wants to secede. We poll everyone inside the region in question, to find out what they want. But they're not the only interested party; we should also poll the rest of the country. (For multi-sided issues like Iraq, or areas that want to leave one country and join another, we'd need to expand this. Things can get exponentially complex. Right now we'll just address the simplest case.) We have to be sure that the poll is valid, that votes are counted accurately and cast without coercion. Uninvolved international observers are required. There would also have to be some agreement on who gets to vote, age limits, sex, citizenship, that sort of thing. There's going to have to be some serious negotiation going on before the actual vote is held.

But what are the people actually voting on? Obviously if we're talking about redrawing national borders there are an infinitude of possible outcomes, and while only some finite set of them are of interest, it could still be a very long list. There's going to have to be a lot of discussion beforehand about what possibilities are of interest, and the list will have to include the status quo ante.

That means plurality voting won't work; it's fundamentally broken for more than two ballot options. We need either some sort of ranked-choice system, or approval voting. I prefer approval voting for American elections, but in a case like this a Condorcet system might be more appropriate. However, approval voting has one significant advantage over ranked systems: approval can clearly show when no option is acceptable to a majority of the voters. That's useful information in a situation like this.

So we can hold a vote, and gather the opinions of all relevant people in a detailed and accurate fashion. What now? Obviously you can't just treat them as one big vote; the whole point of this is to give the majority in a region a way to win out over the rest of their country without violence. So we need a system for combining the two sets of preferences into a single outcome, in such a way that the votes in the seceding region are equal to the votes outside that region.

The simplest idea is to weight the regions by population. If the main body of the country has ten times the population of the area that wants to secede, give the area that wants to secede ten times the weight. Then combine all the votes into a single count. Unfortunately, the simple idea leads to some absurdities. By this standard, if a region of one person wanted to secede, it would take a unanimous vote of the rest of the country to stop them! Clearly that's not stable. So we reduce the weight by some negotiable factor. This way the people doing the leaving get more weight, but the people being left still count for something. It tends to force people to find an acceptable middle ground.

(This gets more complicated still if the area that wants to secede isn't clearly defined, and that's one of the issues being voted on! Presumably you'd have to evaluate each choice of borders with different weights, depending on who would be on which side of the line. To fully develop this set of rules for every possible circumstance is clearly impossible.)

And this is all theory. It's nice to have a mechanism that could be implemented. Making people accept it, that's a whole different problem. You can hold all the polls you want, but some people don't really care about the outcome of polls. But not everywhere is like that! If such a system were in place, how many secession movements would we see try it in more peaceful areas? How much better would it be for the central governments in those countries? After all, a successful and popular movement that's suppressed by the government makes that government less legitimate. And an unpopular movement that's clearly identified as just being a few troublemakers also helps. There's no downside.

Unless, of course, you're just particularly attached to keeping the map from changing for the rest of time. I, for one, am not.

The Perfect Voting Machine

Ballots must be physical. The ballot should exist as a physical medium, allowing for recount by multiple independent parties.

Ballots must be machine-readable. The ballot must be marked in such a way that it can be counted by machine, for speed, efficiency, and repeatability.

Ballots must be human-readable. The ballot should be marked in such a way that an average human can read it, in case the counting machines are called into question or unavailable.

Ballots should be marked by machine. This prevents human error in ballot-marking in such a way that the ballot becomes invalid.

Ballots should be confirmed by the voter before final casting. Before the ballot is counted and stored, it must be read by the same machines that would count the votes in a recount. This ensures that the ballot is readable, and reduces the possibility of both mechanical and human error marking the ballot.

Each ballot should have the choices printed in a random order. It's been shown that earlier placement on the ballot conveys an advantage in winning the election. This means that whoever writes the laws defining ballot order can give themselves an electoral advantage, which is a clear conflict of interest. Each ballot should randomize the order of the candidates.

No machine, document, or person besides the voter should possess both the voter's identifying information and ballot contents. The ballot must not be marked with any potentially identifying information such as the user's name or a timestamp with precision finer than one hour. No person should see the marked ballot after it is marked besides the voter. Neither the printing nor reading machines should have any knowledge of the voter.

Ballots must be impossible to counterfeit. Exactly as many valid countable ballots should exist as votes are cast. Voters must be prevented from walking in with a pocket full of blank ballots; similarly, false ballots should be impossible to insert after the election ends. Practically, this means all ballots must be marked on-site with unique information that can be confirmed valid, but which is different on every ballot. As a first-guess suggestion, perform a one-way encryption on a timestamp. Then perform a two-way encryption on that, plus GPS coordinates, using an encryption key that is known only to a few high-level election officials. This ensures every valid ballot is unique, and allows each ballot to be tracked to the polling location it was marked, while maintaining timestamp (and thus voter) anonymity.

Ballots should only be issued to registered voters. It should be impossible to issue a ballot without also marking the name of a single registered voter off the roll. Similarly, it should be impossible to mark a name off a roll without issuing a ballot. Each registered voter should be issued a voting card before arriving at the polling location, containing cryptographically unique information to that voter. Only with the presence of that card will a ballot be issued.

Only one ballot should be issued to each voter. After a voter is issued a ballot, their name is marked on the roll. If that voter determines that their ballot was mismarked, they must turn it back in to receive a replacement. No replacement ballots can be issued without the original being returned.

The design and firmware of all machines involved must be open and inspectable. Maintaining voter trust in the system is paramount. Open-source and open-hardware systems ensure that no back doors or remote access is possible, and allow review for flaws by many thousands of coders and engineers.

It should be impossible to lose ballots. The to-the-minute vote count shall be constantly shared via network with the central election office. This creates a check against large numbers of ballots suddenly "disappearing" before being counted.

So here's the process.

1) I receive my voter card in the mail. The card is marked with a crypto-hash of my personal information, making it effectively impossible to fake.

2) I arrive at the polling location and present my card. My card is scanned, marking me from the roll as having voted. (Optionally, some biometric identification may be performed here, to prevent people from voting with others' voting cards.) A ballot is printed with spaces for all races in my district, plus a unique code identifying the ballot as legitimate and from this polling location.

3) I take that ballot to the marking machine. I insert my ballot, manipulate a touchscreen, and the machine marks my ballot for each race as I indicate

4) I take my marked ballot to the reading machine. I insert my ballot, and it tells me who it thinks I voted for. This machine also confirms that my ballot is properly marked with a valid crypto-stamp indicating a legitimate ballot.
4a) I confirm that my ballot is printed correctly, both visually and by machine. The machine keeps my ballot and counts my vote. I get a sticker and leave.
4b) I find an error in my ballot marking. I return to the poll worker, who inserts my ballot into the ballot-printing machine. The machine confirms that my ballot was valid, marks it with information which renders it invalid (including a human-readable timestamp), and issues a new one with new markings. Return to step 3.

What attacks are possible against this architecture? Obviously we have a problem with running out of ink. Perhaps we mark everything with high-power lasers?

Letter to the Editor: Amp Alternative

Traffic on West End is abysmal, and something needs to be done. The Amp is, indeed, something. But what alternatives are there? I’m not presently taking sides in the debate over the Amp. But I’d like to propose one alternative which I think will be simpler and cheaper.

Amp is projected to cost $4 million a year to operate, plus the $174 million startup costs. Add some for inevitable overruns, divide that over 20 years, and you get about $14 million annually. A comparable BRT system in Cleveland has ridership of around 14,000 daily. So we’re spending (very roughly) a thousand dollars per year to get each individual car off the road.

How about instead, we just pay people to carpool? If someone paid me a thousand dollars a year for my trouble, you can bet I’d be carpooling! Set up a good smartphone-based system to make ride matches, and I guarantee you you’ll get more cars off the road for less money. The result helps all of Nashville, not just one dense strip. And there’s zero construction disruption. If you want to get it off the ground fast, don’t put a fixed dollar value on it. Say “There’s a million dollars in the pot. Whoever carpools splits it.” It will take off instantly.

Obviously there’s a lot of variation possible. Who gets paid? The driver? The rider? Both? How do you keep track and minimize gaming the system? I don’t have all the answers. But it’s worth consideration.

What's better than public transportation?

I'm a big fan of public transportation. The ability to survive without owning a car would lead to a tremendous reduction in cost-of-living. Reduction in traffic is in everyone's best interest. And not having to drive every day would let me get a lot more reading done. (Or more realistically, sleep.)

But here in Nashville, the bus system is more or less a joke for much of the city. I live in the city limits, and I could get to work by bus, but I'd have to spend ninety minutes instead of twenty, I'd get there late, and I'd spend more money. The many thousands in the exurbs are pretty much hosed except for the Music City Star, and even then your options once you reach Nashville are limited.

The more I think about it, the more I think the emphasis on trains and buses may be misplaced. Mass transit as a concept has one inherent limitation: each rider wants to stop at only two places, and no others. The more riders there are wanting different stops, the less convenient it gets for everyone involved. But the fewer stops the bus (or train or whatever) makes, the fewer people the bus is convenient for. You want a very high person-to-stop ratio. This only works for high-density end-to-end traffic paths, like an express from a park-and-ride, a commuter train, or a small local circuit in a high-density area.

But what about those of us (and I'd guess we're the majority) who neither live nor work in high-density areas? By definition, we collectively have more stops to make. To keep a high person-to-stop ratio, you have to reduce the number of people per vehicle. Perhaps to, say, five.

I argue that mass carpooling could have more effect getting cars off the road than any imaginable public transportation system. Say we're comparing three options: 60-person buses, 5-person carpools, and the default single-occupant car. If there are six thousand people commuting from Clarksville (to pick a random number and exurb), that's six thousand cars, twelve hundred carpools, or one hundred buses. Obviously both carpools and buses are vast improvements to traffic. And if everyone would ride the busses, they win over carpools. But not everyone will bus, because of the lack of flexibility.

So the next question is, how many people are willing to bus? How many are willing to carpool? And at what point does realistic carpooling get more vehicles off the road than busing? I won't bore you with my algebraic prowess (maybe later), but in our case the answer works out to be pretty interesting: regardless of the number of people involved, if just 25% more people are willing to carpool than are willing to bus, mass carpooling gets more vehicles off the road. This even though a bus holds twelve times more people! Since a carpool is far more convenient than a bus, I'd expect far more than 25% greater ridership.

Now let's consider cost. If you've got 100 busses, that's at least $30,000,000 in capital expenditure. Probably more. Each bus costs around $100/hr to run. Even if you assume they only run four hours a day (two round trips), that's $40,000/day, or $10,000,000 a year in operating costs. Assuming each bus lasts ten years, that's $13,000,000/year to get 5,900 vehicles off the road. This seems like a lot, but consider that adding a lane of interstate between Nashville and Clarksville would cost something like $150,000,000 and take several years.

How about gasoline? A hundred mile round trip at 25 mpg costs $15 a day. That's $22 million a year in gasoline saved by getting those 5900 cars off the road! That's a number so big I almost want to cry.

Further, consider that traffic can add half an hour to your commute each way. One hour a day saved, times six thousand drivers, is 1.5 million man-hours per year. Figure an average wage of $12/hr, and $13,000,000/year starts to sound cheap.  If we come up with a solution that makes a significant reduction in traffic that only costs, say, a million dollars a year, we collectively are coming out way ahead.

So here's the idea: we should pay people to carpool. But not at a flat rate. Put a million dollars in a pot, and declare that that pot will be distributed evenly among everyone who carpools that year, weighted by how many days they do it. Imagine how people would respond to an incentive like that! If only five people carpool all year, boom, easy $200k each. Pay it out more often than once a year, too. Say every two weeks. Within a few months you should reach an equilibrium point where exactly the right number of people are carpooling for the money being offered. After that you can see just how good the system is and how much it's worth.

As an added bonus, you could let people without cars sign up for the system, and basically turn every driver in the city into a government-provided taxi for the carless. The driver gets paid by the number of passengers, so its a win for them. And the car-free individual gets better service than busses.

The problem is making the matches. If you could get our hypothetical six thousand people to put their schedules in a system, a relatively simple computer program could make matches between them and make a huge dent in traffic. There are already such systems, but there's relatively little data in them. Paying people to participate will fix that. And with smart phones becoming ubiquitous, hitching a ride without advance planning becomes easy.

Now, how does this apply to the Amp? To be clear, I’m not presently taking sides in the debate over the Amp. Traffic on West End is abysmal, and something needs to be done. The Amp is, indeed, something. But what alternatives are there? I think this alternative is better from almost every perspective. Let's run the numbers.

Amp is projected to cost $4 million a year to operate, plus the $174 million startup costs. Add some for inevitable overruns, divide that over 20 years, and you get about $14 million annually. A comparable BRT system in Cleveland has ridership of around 14,000 daily. Each rider represents at most one car off the road, but maybe not even that. Depends on whether they count the same person going both directions as one rider or two. So being generous, we’re spending at least a thousand dollars per year to get each individual car off the road.

How about instead, we just pay people to carpool? If someone paid me a thousand dollars a year for my trouble, you can bet I’d be carpooling! Set up a good smartphone-based system to make ride matches, and I guarantee you you’ll get more cars off the road for less money. The result helps all of Nashville, not just one dense strip. And there’s zero construction disruption.

Obviously there’s a lot of variation possible. Who gets paid? The driver? The rider? Both? How do you keep track and minimize gaming the system? I don’t have all the answers. I can tell you that the system has to be set up well from the start; I've seen far too many systems like this half-complete with clearly zero ease-of-use consideration. The problem isn't trivial. But it is solvable, and I think this is what we should be looking at as an alternative to ripping up West End for a few years.

Footnote:

Suppose you have two forms of transit available to people. Cars, which hold 5 people, and busses, which hold 60. Suppose your goal is to get as many vehicles off the road as possible. For cars to get more people off the road than busses, more people have to be willing to use cars than are willing to use busses. How many more?

Define DB to be the number of people held by a bus, and DC to be the number of people held by a car. The ratio of people willing to carpool vs. number willing to bus must be at least (1-1/DB)/(1-1/DC)

If this criterion is met, more vehicles will be off the road by carpooling, even though each vehicle holds fewer people.

Attempted murder? Early retirement!

Knox County Sheriff's deputy Frank Phillips was fired last month after he was caught on camera choking a handcuffed and unresisting UT student until he passed out.

Let me say that again: the student was handcuffed, was not resisting, and this officer choked him unconscious.

It's just been announced that the Knox County DA will not file criminal charges against Phillips. This is a travesty. The message could not be clearer: a crime that would result in a normal person being tried for attempted murder, results in far less for a police officer. Every event like this helps break down the public trust in the police. We need that trust, or society will eventually fail.

Of course, given the history of police abuse in this country, I'm surprised Phillips even lost his job. Praise to Knox County sheriff Jones for doing the right thing. If he runs for anything anywhere near me, he has my vote. DA Randall Nichols, however, should never hold office again. Perhaps he'd like to explain himself?

Unfortunately, as I understand things no other entity in Tennessee has the authority to press charges against Phillips for his abysmal crime, possibly excepting the US attorney for East Tennessee. The state legislature should consider fixing that. A DA that's asleep at the wheel should not have the power to do that much damage to public trust.