Can’t Take the Heat? Attack Your Opponents

What do you do if you are an associate professor of law looking to bolster your resume by writing papers that make bold assertions and someone challenges you on those assertions? If you are Greg Shill, you call them names.

Shill, as noted here before, has written articles claiming that Americans didn’t choose to drive; they were “forced” to do so by the law. The Antiplanner responded to that, and Shill’s reply was to call me a “climate denier.” When asked to respond to my article point by point, Shill said, “There’s no point arguing with climate deniers (or anti-vaxxers, for that matter).”

I thought the question was whether the law forced people to drive, not climate. For what it’s worth, far from being a “climate denier,” whatever that is, I am not a climatologist and so I’ve never expressed a strong opinion on the issue of climate change. Apparently, Shill has no qualms about expressing opinions on subjects outside his area of expertise (which is business law).

In any case, Shill was finally pressed to criticize a couple of my points. First, he says that, in one paragraph, I made “3 false/misleading claims: pedestrian “accidents” are “rare” (deaths alone ??50% in 10 years); insurance sorts it out (un/underinsurance are common); & driving—which kills 1 American every 6 minutes, plus a severe injury every 7 seconds—is safe.” Actually, I said that driving is a lot safer than it used to be and “is safer than cycling, light rail, and many other forms of travel.”

I did say that pedestrian accidents are rare, and they are: Americans drove 2.7 trillion vehicle miles in 2017, leading to fewer than 6,000 fatalities. That’s a pretty small fatality rate per billion vehicle miles. Moreover, the number declined from 2016. While I agree that pedestrian fatalities could be further reduced, Shill’s argument that the failure to impose strict liability on auto drivers somehow “forced” people to drive doesn’t hold water.

His arithmetic is wrong too. There are 525,600 minutes in a 365-day year. If driving killed an American every six minutes, that would be 87,600 fatalities per year. Auto-related fatalities today are less than half that and have never approached that number — the highest was 55,000 in 1969. Perhaps Harvard Law School doesn’t teach arithmetic.

It is viagra sales on line a necessary substance in the body for about 6 hours, thus giving men enough time to perform and last longer in the bedroom. Otherwise, many men get distracted by canada viagra generic the random remedies told by different people. Kamagra is a http://valsonindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Quarterly-Financial-Result-March-2019.pdf cialis without prescription standout amongst the most popular solution to deal with sexual inconvenience. Sildenafil tablets come in different buy sildenafil cheap doses: 25 mg, 50 mg, and 100 mg. it helps to cause an erection by increasing blood flow to the penis. Shill’s second point is even more tenuous. He claims that my statement that all single-family “zoning did was affirm people’s housing preferences” isn’t libertarian enough. That’s debatable, but he never responded to my main point: a majority of Americans have always lived in single-family homes, so zoning didn’t force anyone to live that way, nor did it force people to drive.

Without mentioning me, he then went on to say that zoning is “racist.” While a few early zoning codes were racist — and they were quickly struck down by the Supreme Court — the vast majority were not about race. They were about giving people assurance that a home they bought in a quiet neighborhood would remain free of too much traffic, noise, and industrial pollution.

Historically, zoning was an imitation of protective covenants. I’d be happy to get rid of zoning provided people can create protective covenants for their neighborhoods, which is how it works in Houston (with a 75 percent majority). Otherwise, neighborhoods will fall victim to whatever is the latest urban planning fad.

If ever Shill wants to debate these topics in an open forum, I’d be happy to do it. But when he responds with name calling and by side-stepping the issues, all he does is please people who already agree with him.

Incidentally, one of Shill’s Twitter correspondents, Aaron Naparstek, claimed that I had been so “slapped around” in a recent deposition that I had been forced to “withdraw [my] opinion.” Though I replied that I haven’t been deposed by any attorneys in at least 28 years, Naparstek hasn’t retracted his claim.

I think I know the deposition he was talking about. It was a deposition of someone else that had nothing to do with transportation, and the person being deposed didn’t feel slapped around or withdraw any opinions. Otherwise, it was just like Naparstek said. I tweeted this to him; still no retraction. And people wonder why I don’t use Twitter more.