Monday, September 16, 2013

For the "Urban Planning" Page of your Underbelly Notebook

I'm trying to find some way to tie these two stories together.  One,  the splash in the Sunday NYT (style section, yet) about how Malibu is being overrun by rehab centers.  And two, the genuinely fascinating Quartz piece on the Hong Kong subway, including the throwaway that the ticket price for the New York subway covers only 45 percent of operating costs (cool it with the italics, OK?--ed.).  Sic, that's operating costs alone--capital spending has to come from elsewhere.  The secret, per Quartz is a  nifty little piece of urbanology jargon called "value capture," which means only that "we own the shops at the end of the line."  I'm a  bit vague on the details here, but isn't that common in transport--squeezing a few nickels out of the ultimate beneficiaries of the service?  That surely is the point of, at least, Hooters Airline, serving your infantile-regression needs almost any place you would want to go provided you leave from Myrtle Beach SC.

Still not finding the link between Hong Kong and Malibu, but I do recall that the great and good in our Nation's Capital made sure that the DC subway would not stop in Georgetown, so as to keep the riffraff away.  But I suppose the riffraff in Malibu arrives by stretch limo.

1 comment:

Ebenezer Scrooge said...

Yass. They managed to keep the riffraff from debarking from the Metro into Georgetown. So said riffraff drove their cars in. Divine justice done!