Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…It’s not as bad as you think. “Why is it that you seem to dislike measures to make practical cycling in cities safer and more comfortable?” You’ve had a number of posts where you say that the idea that people — I think, correct me if I’m wrong, but the way I would summarize you is, you think it’s without evidence, installing bike lanes and these things — that the ROI is not there to you. Is that fair? Correct. As far as I can tell from the numbers I’ve seen, use of DC bike lanes has been declining. I suspect it’s not the future. It’s a relatively slow and late-19th-century mode of transport. If you look at downtown Washington, it’s much harder to drive around in. I get that’s partly by design, but there is a real economic cost to that, and the bike lanes are mostly empty. It does seem to work for much of Manhattan. I think one should be an empiricist. I know Amsterdam and Copenhagen quite well; it works great there. Houston decided not to do it; that was almost certainly the correct decision. One should be an empiricist, and I think bike lanes are, by the people I come into contact with, very much overrated. If you ask the simple question, “Where’s the cost-benefit analysis that adds up all the costs?” I never see it. No one has ever sent me one, ever. I did a long post; there were a large number of comments. People would say things like, “Oh, you dummy, don’t you see Copenhagen is a great city?” Yes, it is. It’s worked well there. But at the margin, how many American cities should make big investments in this direction? I still want to see the cost-benefit analysis, and no one’s coming up with it. All right.…

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