Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Are they reading my posts?

Business Week reports:

March 30 (Bloomberg) -- Oregon’s Department of Transportation leads this week’s issues with its first Build America Bond sale as yields on municipal debt rise to a five- month high after a surge in supplies last week.

The department will bring to market $582 million in so- called highway user-tax revenue bonds, including $556.4 million in Build Americas and $25.7 million in tax-exempt securities. The sale will help finance the state’s capital improvement program, which includes road and bridge work, according to James Sinks, a spokesman for Treasurer Ben Westlund.

But is was just yesterday I suggested Oregon issue transportation bonds based on their 30% ROI with E Traffic technology; as part of our plan to exit the Great Recession:

Here is a three point plan:

1) The next step is to move the GM driverless car project up from ten years to five.
2) See if Oregon can float a transportation bond based on E Traffic income
3) Get more technologists and engineers and venture capital folks up to Oregon or Utah to agglomorate a new Silicon Valley.
No, couldn't be, I think we simply have a convergence as to the cause and solution to this recession.

In related news regarding the value of local transportation consider Mark Perry's discussion of Taxi fees in NYC. The return on investment is 20% for a taxi license! The very fact of high metropolitan returns from transportation investment should be a sure sign to economists that we suffer the traditional last mile congestion problem, which I pointed out over two years ago.

These types of recessions should be called Depressions, by definition. All three recent Depressions, the Long Depression of 1870, the Great Depression, and this, the Mini Depression; all caused by technology changes in last mile transportation. And further, the last mile constraints all caused by advances in information technology.

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