High Speed Rail Affirmative
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- MegaRegions K2 Economy
- Megaregions allow businesses to increase locations-thus increasing revenue
HSR K2 MegaRegionsHSR is key to maintain the health of megaregions-This is critical to economy─Tierney ‘12. Sean Tierney, Prof. of Geography @ University of North Texas. Ph.D in Geography from University of Denver. “High-speed rail, the knowledge economy and the next growth wave.” Journal of Transport Geography Volume 22, May 2012, Pages 285–287. On April 14, 2011, Cambridge, MA based Zipcar, soared on its first day as a publically traded company. Zipcar owns a fleet of cars in nearly 100 cities and charges a monthly fee to its members who reserve and use it only when needed. A critical underlying aspect of Zipcar’s vision is reliant on population density, as people must walk to and from cars that are strategically parked around town. What does Zipcar have to do with high-speed rail? High-speed rail (HSR) will form the corridors of housing, employment and recreation that will transform our regional geographies; a landscape where suburbs and detached single family housing are still the norm, but people and businesses are more densely aligned around stations making car-ownership less necessary. More than simply links and nodes, transportation is deeply embedded in the texture of the American experience, and HSR is the next logical iteration in the nexus between infrastructure and an expanding economic geography. History has shown that new transportation technologies improve exchange while accommodating growing urban populations. Street and trolley cars enabled the first bedroom communities along rail lines after which the early automobile expanded the perimeter a bit further. The Eisenhower highway system created the suburbs, while beltways brought us edge cities and exurbs. Urban boundaries have now pushed out so far that they often overlap with neighboring cities. People living in the boomburb of Castle Rock, CO are within an hour of both Denver and Colorado Springs, while Princeton, NJ splits the difference between New York and Philadelphia. It is axiomatic that agglomerations spur innovation and growth (Audretsch, 1998), but creativity has been pushing outward for decades as evidenced by Redmond, WA (Microsoft), Stamford, CT (UBS Bank) or Round Rock, TX (Dell). The landscape is extending yet again and where we used to associate economic vibrancy with cities, and then metropolitan areas, we now think of mega-regions. Charlotte is not part of the research triangle (Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill) but is home to the country’s largest bank (Bank of America) and is only 250 miles from Atlanta. Los Angeles and San Diego are part of a web extending across southern California. Southwest Airlines got its start serving traveler demand in the triangle between Dallas, Houston and San Antonio; with triple digit oil prices, rail could serve these three fast-growing cities (a triangle that also contains Austin and Ft. Worth), none of which are more than 275 miles apart. Florida (2009) identifies 40 global mega-regions, of which nine are located in the US (seven are purely US and two included parts of Canada). These places are not just driving global economic growth, they are doing it with a fraction of the people; home to less than 20% of the world’s population, these mega-regions produce 2/3 of the economic output. It is naïve to believe the populations of these regions will remain static, which is why it would be irresponsible not to start constructing HSR. Intelligent transportation systems or alternate fuel vehicles may obviate an oil crisis, but we would still have a highway and congestion crisis. There is a reason that highway construction has its own ‘black hole theory’ (Plane, 1995). And it is not just congestion that is costing us money, but also lost economic output. By equipping trains with Wi-Fi, as competitor countries have already done, HSR enhances productivity. In addition to being congested, cities like Boston, Seattle and Chicago are also expensive. HSR enables these cities to extend the benefits of urbanization economies, by making them available further into the hinterland where housing and commercial space is more affordable. Regional agglomeration benefits will be necessary as rising rents and labor costs choke off access, collaboration and opportunities for would-be entrepreneurs. MegaRegions K2 EconomyMegaregions allow businesses to connect with each other and increase spendingSassen 07[Saskia, Professor of Sociology at UChicago; “MEGAREGIONS: BENEFITS BEYOND SHARING TRAINS AND PARKING LOTS?”, pg. 5] Now the question becomes: Can a megaregion seek to accommodate a larger range of the operations constituting a firm’s value chain –from those subject to agglomeration economies to those that do not evince such economies. Practically speaking this points to the possibility of bringing into (in some cases, back to) a megaregion some of the services and goods now produced offshore to get at lower wages and less regulations. Can these be reinserted in the low-growth, low-cost areas of a megaregion. What type of planning would it take, and can it be done so as to optimize the benefits for all involved, firms, workers, localities. This would expand the project of optimizing growth beyond the usual suspects –office and science parks being one notable example—and move accross far more and more diverse economic sectors. It would use the lever of the megaregional scale to provide diverse spaces catering to different types of activities, ranging from those subject to high to those subject to low agglomeration economies. And, finally, the megaregional scale would help in optimizing the growth effect arising from the interactions of some of these diverse agglomeration economies. This growth effect would be optimized by re-regionalizing some of the low-cost operations of firms today spread across the country and/or the world. If this type of thesis does indeed capture a potential of megaregions, it would be the making of new economic history. The possibility of this type of potential is easily obscured by the prevalence of national level economic indicators, data sets, and policies. Identifying the megaregion produces an intermediate level, one that even though partly dependent on national macro-policies also inserts a far more specific set of issues into the economic picture.7 A megaregion can combine a very large share of the diverse economies that are very much part of our current era. And it can incorporate growth effects arising from the interactions of some of these diverse economies. Megaregions allow businesses to increase locations-thus increasing revenueSassen 07[Saskia, Professor of Sociology at UChicago; “MEGAREGIONS: BENEFITS BEYOND SHARING TRAINS AND PARKING LOTS?”, pg. 8] On the other hand, in the case of sectors subject to agglomeration economies, it may well be the case that the megaregion does not contain distinctive advantages over other scales, notably cities and metro areas. What these sectors seem to need is a bundle of resources that correlate with high-density, and, at its extreme, very dense central places –such as global cities and silicon valleys. The question then becomes whether there is one or several specific types of agglomeration economies, that can develop, and be enhanced, at the scale of the megaregion. The megaregions identified by RPA all contain high-density locations; a firm subject to agglomeration economies my well find the mix of highly specialized diverse resources it needs in one of those locations. But does it need a whole megaregion attached to that location? Here we enter new theoretical and empirical territory. One critical hypothesis I developed for my global city model is that insofar as the geographic dispersal of the operations of global firms (whether factories, offices, or service outlets) feeds the complexity of central headquarter locations, the more globalized a firm the higher the advantages its headquarters derive from central locations (see footnote 6).9 If I were to adapt this to the megaregion, one inference is that the advantage of a megaregional scale is that it could, in principle, contain both the central headquarters and at least some of those dispersed operations of global firms. In other words, is a megaregion a scale at which such firms can actually also “outsource jobs” and suburbanize headquarter functions—both in search of cheaper costs—and benefit from the region’s major city(s), including in some cases, global cities (New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco), or cities with significant global-city functions (Minneapolis, Miami, Atlanta, among others). Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 0.58 Mb. 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