• About
    • What Should I Read to Understand Zoning?
  • Market Urbanism Podcast
  • Adam Hengels
  • Stephen Smith
  • Emily Hamilton
  • Jeff Fong
  • Nolan Gray
  • Contact

Market Urbanism

Liberalizing cities | From the bottom up

“Market Urbanism” refers to the synthesis of classical liberal economics and ethics (market), with an appreciation of the urban way of life and its benefits to society (urbanism). We advocate for the emergence of bottom up solutions to urban issues, as opposed to ones imposed from the top down.

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Linkedin
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Podcast
  • Economics
  • housing
  • planning
  • Transportation
  • zoning
  • Urban[ism] Legends
  • How to Fight Gentrification
  • Culture of Congestion by Sandy Ikeda
  • What Should I Read to Understand Zoning?

More on Subways and COVID-19

June 8, 2020 By Michael Lewyn

After reading an article suggesting that New York’s subways seeded COVID-19, Salim Furth’s response to that article on this blog, and one or two other pieces, I decided to write a more scholarly piece summarizing the various arguments. The piece is at https://works.bepress.com/lewyn/196/

For those of who you don’t feel like downloading the full paper, here’s a summary:

  1. Jeffrey Harris of MIT (whose article seeded this controversy) wrote that COVID-19 infections rose most rapidly before subway ridership began to decline; this alone, of course, is not a strong argument because as subway ridership declined, many other crowded places (such as restaurants) were also shutting down. Harris also notes that infections rose more slowly in Manhattan, where ridership declined most rapidly. However, a majority of the city’s jobs are in Manhattan. Thus, Manhattan’s lower subway ridership may have been a reflection not of changed behavior by Manhattan residents, but of the citywide loss of jobs as non-Manhattanites stopped riding the subway to Manhattan jobs. Furthermore, Alon Levy writes that ridership did not decline as rapidly in residential parts of Manhattan (which nevertheless have low infection rates).

Levy also asserts that Harris’s reliance on data from subway entrances is misleading in one technical but important respect.  If a Manhattan stops riding the subway to a Manhattan job, this means there are two fewer subway entries for that person.  On the other hand, if a Queens resident stops riding the subway to a Manhattan job, this means there is one fewer Queens entry and one fewer Manhattan entry.[ Why does this matter?  Suppose that on March 1, there were 100 Manhattan-to-Manhattan commuters and 100 Queens-to-Manhattan commuters, and a week later 30 of each group stop riding the subway.  Because there were 90 fewer entries at Manhattan stations (60 from the first group and 30 from the second group), one might think Manhattan subway ridership declined by 90 percent, when in fact it declined by only 30 percent.


2. Harris also relies on the pattern of infections by zip code- and in particular, infections in zip codes along subway lines, because any given rider of a subway line can be infected not only by residents of their own neighborhood, but also by riders who enter at other subway stations on the rider’s route (which perhaps explains why neighborhoods at the end of subway lines tend to have high infection levels). He finds that some subway lines had more drastic declines in ridership than other subway lines- and that the subway lines with more dramatic declines in March ridership also had lower infection rates as of early April. I’m not sure whether the other commentators fully address this point, but maybe I’m missing something.

3. Harris relies on unusually high infection rates among subway workers. Levy responds that subway workers and subway riders do not experience the same risks- subway workers had risks that subway riders did not experience (such as picking up possibly-contaminated rubbish without masks) while conversely, not all subway workers ride packed rush-hour trains.

Any comments?

Tweet

Share this:

  • Email
  • Print
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • LinkedIn

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: covid, New York City, subway

Market Urbanism Podcast

Connect With Us

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Linkedin
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Recent Posts

  • Tell It to the Judge: New Lawsuits Take Exclusionary Zoning to Court
  • What’s Scott Alexander asking, anyway?
  • Cataloguing California’s Cornucopia of Land Use Legislation
  • Another of these studies that don’t mean what some people thinks it means
  • Rent regulation in MoCo
  • Book Review: HIAHP
  • Resources for Reformers: Houston’s minimum lot sizes
  • Xiaodi Li, Misunderstood
  • The Homeownership Society Can Be Fixed
  • Do The Cities Need The Suburbs?
  • Welcome Michael Nahas
  • The fallacy of total rent regulation
My Tweets

Market Sites Urbanists should check out

  • Cafe Hayek
  • Culture of Congestion
  • Environmental and Urban Economics
  • Foundation for Economic Education
  • Let A Thousand Nations Bloom
  • Marginal Revolution
  • Mike Munger | Kids Prefer Cheese
  • Neighborhood Effects
  • New Urbs
  • NYU Stern Urbanization Project
  • Parafin
  • Peter Gordon's Blog
  • Propmodo
  • The Beacon
  • ThinkMarkets

Urbanism Sites capitalists should check out

  • Austin Contrarian
  • City Comforts
  • City Notes | Daniel Kay Hertz
  • Discovering Urbanism
  • Emergent Urbanism
  • Granola Shotgun
  • Old Urbanist
  • Pedestrian Observations
  • Planetizen Radar
  • Reinventing Parking
  • streetsblog
  • Strong Towns
  • Systemic Failure
  • The Micro Maker
  • The Urbanophile

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.org

Copyright © 2023 Market Urbanism

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.