Capita, the company that set up the system and operated it for the Mayor, was said to have been given a £250 million contract over five years, but the Mayor refused to reveal the details. Then it emerged an extra £31 million was paid to Capita in the first year, raising concerns that costs would reduce revenues promised by the Mayor. Last year Capita was paid £130 million, more than 60 per cent of the money taken in by the charge over the year.

What about congestion? TFL’s own spin figures suggests that congestion is down by a paltry 16 percent overall. However, as The Bow Group has shown, most of this relates to a drop-off in people entering London after 11am. There has been precious little effect on congestion in the rush hour. And journey times - where the real economic benefit of reduced congestion should appear - have not been affected.

Once again, an environmental tax, disguised as a market mechanism, has failed to achieve its own objectives, while making some people rich at the expense of commuters. Diffuse costs, concentrated benefits, indeed.

Cross-posted from The Really Inconvenient Blog.

As Independence President Jon Caldara put it in another video, “The train is coming. The question is, are you going to be on it, or in front of it?”

Why are FAA bureaucrats requiring this, and causing thousands of people to wait for days on end in airports across the country?  They are overreacting to earlier stories in the news media about FAA inspectors being too lax in enforcing safety regulations.  (Never mind that airline fatalities are now at an all-time low in the U.S.).  Congress then held a hearing where politicians bloviated before lots of news cameras about how terrible airline safety in America is.

What this illustrates is that mindless adherence to bureaucratic rules can be crippling.  Unions have long recognized this.  That’s why there’s something called a “work-to-rule strike,” where employees show up for work but then paralyze their employer by ”applying to the letter rules that are normally set aside or interpreted less literally to increase efficiency,” all “in order to cause a slowdown.”

The thousands of grounded flights across the country result from the FAA’s version of the work-to-rule strike.  But instead of the FAA deliberately paralyzing itself, it’s unintentionally paralyzing America’s airlines and throwing a monkey wrench into the gears of our air transport system.  And that’s probably costing lives — people who travel by road to avoid canceled flights and flight delays have a higher mortality rate than airline passengers.

As Virginia Congressman Tom Davis noted in the Washington Post, while “Metro keeps hundreds of thousands of commuters from having to clog our already overburdened road system each day,” “Metro is teetering on the brink. It’s 32 years old, and many of the original components are beginning to break down.”  Moreover, legislation is pending in Congress that would provide federal matching funds for Metro, provided that Virginia, Maryland, and D.C. enact laws earmarking at least a small fraction of their transportation revenue for Metro.

Other immigrants deemed “terrorists” by immigration authorities “include U.S. allies that fought against” the ”Taliban government in Afghanistan” – a regime that aided and abetted Osama Bin Laden — as well as ”Montagnard tribesmen who fought with U.S. forces in Vietnam,” and members of minority groups subjected to massacre and rape by ”Burma’s military junta and Sudan’s Islamic leaders.”

Belatedly, the immigration bureaucracy has now changed course, and will “temporarily stop denying green cards to refugees and other legal immigrants tied to groups that sought to topple foreign dictatorships, placing their cases on hold while it determines more ‘logical, common-sense’ rules for judging them.”

The prior policy of deporting opponents of repressive and genocidal regimes was only partly the result of bureaucratic rigidity, mindlessness, and incompetence.  It also owed much to the very broad definition of “terrorist” in the immigration laws Congress passed, which were ”written so that the definition of a terrorist organization and activity is very, very broad.”  This sad situation demonstrates that legislators should not unthinkingly vote for so-called “anti-terrorism” provisions without considering their full implications.  Legislators are frequently thoughtless and illogical when it comes to immigration.

Meanwhile, a drug-dealing hooker and convict who would have been deported is being given permanent residency (a green card) just for telling prosecutors what she knew about Eliot Spitzer after his role in a prostitution scandal broke. 

While the drug-dealing hooker is getting a special break from the requirements of immigration laws requiring deportation of alien felons, an immigrant who risked his life to help American troops in Iraq now risks being deported because he opposed Saddam Hussein!  Our immigration bureaucrats say that his membership in an armed Kurdish group that fought Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein after Saddam Hussein engaged in genocidal chemical weapons attacks against Iraq’s Kurdish population makes him a “terrorist“!  Rules are rules, they say, and there’s no exception for Saman Ahmad, who risks torture and death if he is deported back to Iraq because he served as a translator for American troops.  Under our immigration bureaucrats’ twisted definition of a “terrorist,” the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto who heroically fought Adolf Hitler’s Nazis would have been considered “terrorists.”

This is the same immigration bureaucracy that approved the student visa applications of the 9-11 hijackers six months after they committed mass murder by flying planes into the World Trade Center and killing 3,000 people.

While Congress refuses to increase the number of H-1B visas beyond their modest cap of 65,000 annually, many in Congress want to amnesty most of the 12 million illegal aliens in this country, and many left-wing politicians and activists want to give them welfare and affirmative action to boot.  In the eyes of the politicians, it’s better to be an illegal alien than a legal immigrant with valuable skills.

Yet in the end, I see nothing wrong with a privately-funded prize to develop technologies on one end of the trade-off curve. As long as the resulting technology isn’t mandated so that people have to buy it, they will continue to make their own trade-offs and the value placed on the technology by the market will be recognized in the price. So far, Americans have proved resistant to voluntarily trading off safety for fuel-economy. Perhaps a 100 mpg family sedan would change that.

Is there an opportunity cost, in that developers would possibly pursue other avenues were it not for the prize? Possibly, but there is a felt need for this technology. We are likely to see funds devoted to it whatever happens. Rather than government funding, a prize is likely to lead to the most efficient distribution of resources.

We should also remember that prizes spur different approaches. The Longitude Prize was won by the inventor of the portable clockwork watch, which has been used for 200 years for a quite different purpose than the calculation of longitude at sea. Meanwhile, the “runner-up” for the prize, a set of astronomical tables, was not nearly as accurate as the winner, but actually proved to have an acceptable margin of error and was much more user-friendly. Government funding would have concentrated on one or the other approach, depending on the lobbying capabilities of the developers.

I would argue that those mandated safety features act as “floors” and can restrict innovation by forcing design features into certain areas, which can lead to neglect of other areas that could provide greater safety or to unintended consequences. (Think of the air bag mandate’s effects on children riding in the front seats of vehicles.)

Market forces may have more quickly led to other safety features, such as accident avoidance technology – sensors for proximity to other vehicles, blind spot alarms, rear sensors and cameras, which, as you have noted, have been introduced on pricier vehicles.

The X Prize criteria includes other mandated safety features – windshield wipers and washers, seat belts and restraints, rear and side view mirrors, lamps, lighting, horn, indicators, brake lights and reflective devices consistent with safety regulations.

Wouldn’t it have been more interesting to let innovators come up with their own safety features – after all, windshield wipers were invented in 1903 and became standard on cars in 1913 – and let competition and consumer choice move technology forward?

I think the Progressive Automotive X Prize is a great idea. It may work where the government has failed.
Existing government programs to do similar things–particularly the calamitously impractical Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles–have failed to produce real breakthroughs. Toyota and Honda beat American-based companies to the market with practical, highly fuel efficient hybrids largely because they focused on what consumers wanted (practical, fuel efficient cars) rather than trying to adhere to goofy government mandates. By setting the bar very high, 100 miles per gallon, furthermore, the X Prize sponsors are pretty much forcing the use of some sort of breakthrough technology.
When and if a 100 MPG car comes to market, however, it’s likely to involve some sort of trade-off for consumers. The last car with a fundamentally new drive-train system–the first generation Toyota Prius–was a tiny, expensive, probably-not-too-safe car that, in its base configuration, lacked such expected features as automatic windows and a CD player. It sold well enough, however, to convince Toyota to build a truly viable, big-enough-for-a-family second generation version of the car with every expected amenity. Any first generation product is going to have to have lots of trade-offs. If we ever have a 100 MPG car, one can bet that it will, indeed, look at lot like the first generation Prius. In time, I think, people can figure out which trade-offs they want to make for fuel economy. And, of course, there’s almost no way getting around the fact that the first 100 MPG car is going to be smaller and less safe than a standard-issue SUV. There’s nothing wrong with this. In fact, it’s the way progress happens.

The newly renamed Progressive Automotive X PRIZE is an international competition designed to inspire a new generation of viable, super fuel-efficient vehicles. The independent and technology-neutral competition is open to teams from around the world that can design, build and bring to market 100 MPGe (miles per gallon energy equivalent) vehicles that people want to buy, and that meet market needs for price, size, capability, safety and performance.

When I first read an email about the announcement, I asked if “safety” would be one of the criteria, as often some of the tradeoffs involved in designing cars are not recognized, especially through government mandates, for example, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standard doesn’t recognize that smaller and lighter cars may get greater gas mileage but are often less safe than larger heavier cars when they are involved in accidents.

This led to a rapid exchange of views among CEI staff – see further postings. 

I then learned that the vehicles have “to meet safety regulations in the U.S. and other markets.”

On this point I have some strong views, but I’ll continue my posting after other staffers post their own comments on the X Prize.