The Missing Middle, the Jones Act, Utility Death Spirals, and How to Be Unhappy

Off-Ramps for 19 December 2024

Welcome to Off-Ramps! Today I’ll highlight four interesting pieces that I think you will enjoy reading. Please enjoy these on your morning commute, or save them for your weekend.

And a quick programming note: Changing Lanes will continue to publish in the dying days of December, but given the holidays, we will be less serious and more whimsical. Our regular tone and subjects will resume in January, but we hope you enjoy the Christmas and New Year’s gifts soon to arrive in your inbox!

1. E-Bikes, Robotaxis, and Eight-Storey Buildings

Andrew Burleson of Strong Towns wrote some kind words about, and an interesting response to, my series on Progress and Public Transit. He agrees with me that one of the solutions to getting transit out of the Endless Emergency is more density. But how much more density?

The Missing Middle of Transportation

There is a term of art in urban planning: the “missing middle”. North American cities have lots of low density zones: think single-family residential and high streets. They have some high-density zones of skyscrapers. What they tend not to have, or not as much of, is middle-density zones of four to eight storeys. These zones are so conspicuous by their absence that they have earned their own name. The rarity of the missing middle is well known to planners, and thanks to the YIMBYs their lack is increasingly noticed among regular people also.

Burleson’s contribution is to point out is that one of the reasons that middle-density zones are rare is that there’s no mobility form that suits this level of development well. In missing-middle zones,

There are a lot more destinations in close proximity so walking is easier and bus rides are shorter. Not everything is close, so driving would still be the best option for many trips. But at this level of development there’s no longer ample parking, so driving door to door becomes iffy. Will you be able to park anywhere near where you’re going? Or will you be able to park near your own home when you come back? It just depends! The overall transportation situation is less predictable and therefore less convenient.

In Burleson’s view, missing-middle zones are too dense to serve private automobiles well, but not dense enough to support higher-order transit. Accordingly local service is poor, and most people rationally choose to drive; but their isn’t enough parking nor road space, so everyone suffers congestion and Hobbesian struggles for street space. Crucially, those pains aren’t just borne by newcomers, but by the existing residents, who can predict what will happen, and mobilize against it.

So such neighbourhoods are not built in the first place, contributing to our ongoing housing shortage.

Enter technology! Burleson says, and I agree, that shared bikes, shared scooters, and robotaxis are newish-to-genuinely-new modes of urban transport that can fill this gap well, connecting residents to destinations that are just too far to walk but are nonetheless close; particularly higher-order transit nodes. In this way, an area can accommodate more residents without sinking everything into a traffic nightmare.

YIMBYs take note: advocating for these approaches to mobility is a tool to overcome neighbourhood opposition and get the missing middle built.

2. Industrial Policy Is Hard

For a while now,

Noah Smith

of

Noahpinion

has been talking up the need to build domestic industrial capacity in the United States, in order to keep pace with China: this piece from two weeks ago is only his latest. He writes:

So now I want you to imagine what happens if the U.S. and its allies get in a major war with China — as analysts say is increasingly possible. In the first few weeks, much the two countries’ stores of munitions — including drones and the batteries that power drones — will be used up. After that, as in Ukraine, it will come down to who can produce more munitions and get them to the battlefield in time. At that point, what will the U.S. do if neither we nor our allies can make munitions in large numbers? We will have to choose to either 1) escalate to nuclear war, or 2) lose the war to China. Those will be our only options. Either way, the U.S. and its allies will lose. Now realize that the U.S. and its allies aren’t just falling behind China in drone and battery manufacturing — we’re falling behind in all kinds of manufacturing.

I’m sympathetic to Noah’s views, which is why I want to take seriously the best argument against them.

Enter

Zvi Mowshowitz

and his thorough demolition of the Jones Act:

Repeal the Jones Act of 1920

What is the Jones Act? It’s a law, now in place for more than a century, that requires that ships carrying cargo between two American ports be American built, American owned, American crewed, and American flagged. It’s the most restrictive cabotage law in the OECD.¹ Its ostensible purpose is to ensure that the United States has a robust shipbuilding industry, by reserving all domestic shipping routes to domestic ships.

In practice, it has destroyed American shipbuilders. They were already cost-uncompetitive with global producers, and shielding them from international competition inflated their prices even more. Consequently, rather than paying too much for domestic ships, everyone makes alternative arrangements. Trans-shipping to foreign ports en route to domestic ones is common, but even more common is just avoiding shipping goods between American ports at all.

Europe ships 40% of its domestic freight via water, while the United States, blessed with long safe coasts and extensive internal waterways, moves just 1%… despite the fact that maritime shipping is, by volume, the cheapest and most environmentally-friendly form of goods movement in the world, and dramatically so.

I agree with Mowshowitz that the USA would be far, far better off by repealing the Jones Act. But, as per Noah Smith, how will the USA retain a domestic shipbuilding industry? Friend-shoring may work: it would be far less costly to the American economy to buy all the ships necessary from South Korea and other nations that excel in it. Alternatively, ending the Jones Act may lead to an explosion of domestic marine shipping, meaning that domestic shipbuilders would finally have an incentive to compete.

I have to admit I’m unsure about this. I’d welcome a dialogue between Zvi and Noah on the subject.

3. Utility Death Spirals

You are probably most familiar with the concept of the ‘death spiral’ as it affects transit agencies. Many operators faced a death spiral during the pandemic: riders stopped using the service, which meant less fare revenue, so operators cut back on service, which made the service less useful, discouraging more riders from using the service, which meant less fare revenue. And so it went.

Sean Fleming

points out that California is poised to experience a death spiral: not for transit operators, but for electrical utilities.

Grid defection is coming to California

How would this one work? Households or businesses buy cheap solar panels and batteries, and provide for their own electrical needs without reliance on the grid. Not needing the grid any longer, they ‘defect’ from it and cease to pay electrical bills. Utilities now must spread their large fixed costs (to maintain power lines, towers, transformers, and other elements of the grid) over a smaller base of customers, who perforce must pay more. Faced with those higher costs, more households and businesses make the economically-rational decision to buy solar panels and batteries to defect themselves. And so it will go.

On one side, this outcome is good for those Californians able to defect, who will get more, cheaper, greener power. On the other, it’s bad for the Californians who will not be able to defect: urban households, large institutions that absolutely require the resiliency that a grid connection offers (think hospitals, for instance), and certain industrial users.

Will this happen? Sean admits he’s unsure, but with solar panels and batteries getting cheaper every year, the chances of such a death spiral increase. If it does happen, the effects are hard to predict. “In their last energy crisis, Californians recalled their governor. Pacific Gas & Electric has already gone bankrupt once from wildfire damage. Should it come to pass, the disruption from grid defection could prove more painful than either.”

4. How to Be Unhappy

Finally, a gem from the archives.

Oliver Burkeman

is a longform self-help writer. I enjoyed his book Four Thousand Weeks, on how to practice time management in a way that recognizes human finitude (in Burkeman’s estimation, the average human lifespan is eighty years; which is only four thousand weeks). I pre-ordered his latest book, Meditations for Mortals, but have not read it yet; my spouse grabbed it upon its arrival at our home and enjoyed it so much that she has yet to give it to me.

Before writing these books, Burkeman was, for years, a columnist for the Guardian, and his archives remain available. One of my favourite pieces there is this one, in which he offers guidance on how to be miserable.

Oh, you think that nobody wants to be unhappy? Nonsense, says Burkeman:

Consider your friend who's always getting involved with unavailable men, or that colleague who goes hunting for things to get annoyed by; consider the way you're always taking on more tasks than you'll get done in the time available… We spend much of life making ourselves miserable. Mightn't we benefit from some expert guidance on doing it well?

Here’s a sample:

Take dating. To be maximally unhappy, second-guess yourself. If someone likes you, there are two options: if your self-esteem is low, reflect on how anyone who'd condescend to be with you can't be worth your time; if your self-esteem's high, speculate instead on all the more attractive or wittier people you might meet. Ideally, find someone whose problems you think you can fix, or who you believe can fix yours. That way, heartbreak's guaranteed: either the fixing will fail, curdling the relationship, or it will succeed, in which case the relationship will fall apart because it has lost its meaning.

Personally, as a writer, my favourite way to be unhappy is to put myself in a quadruple bind. Like all creative people, I want to say things that are true, insightful, memorable, and original. And like all creative people, I typically don’t achieve all of these at once. This means that no matter how good any piece was, there’s always at least one register in which it falls short; meaning that I always have something to reproach myself with.

Enjoy Burkeman’s column, and remember, no matter how unhappy you are, there’s always room for improvement. Or, to put it more in the spirit of things: if you’re not completely miserable, you just aren’t trying hard enough.

1. Listen all y’all, it’s a cabotage law if it restricts the right to operate sea, air, or other transport services within a territory.