Bay Freeway Update: No Traffic Snarls

Will the tanker truck accident that destroyed a key part of the San Francisco Bay Area freeway network cost commuters millions of dollars a day? Will those commuters respond by switching to public transit? So far, the answers seem to be “no” and “maybe.”

Flickr photo by Thomas Hawk

The closure of a freeway interchange that normally sees 80,000 vehicles a day did not result in huge traffic jams yesterday or this morning. Many people may have used the free public transit offered by the state, but so far no reliable reports have said how many. (Transit was free yesterday only; today it should be back to normal fares.) Continue reading

Fire Season Begins: New Cato Paper

Wildfire season has begun with nearly half a million acres burned so far this year, mostly in the South. And so it is time for the armchair generals to pontificate on problems with U.S. fire policy and how those problems can be fixed.

When it comes to the Forest Service, few have as much experience at armchair generaling as me, so it is timely that the Cato Institute should publish my paper on wildfire, The Perfect Firestorm. The paper shows that Forest Service fire expenditures are growing out of control, having increased by 450 percent in the last 15 years.

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