For every Yin there is a Yan, for every supply there is a demand

Over the last six months a resounding call by presidential aspirants have demanded a reduction in gas prices by drilling for more domestic oil. Much of this call mimics candidate Newt Gingrich's 2008 (pre-BP) book titled Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less.

His book, a brief 142 pages in large print, only shows that Mr. Gingrich should stick to history and stay away from economics. If Mr. Gingrich ever took Econ 101, he must have skipped out just before the lecture on the demand portion of the supply and demand curve.

All but two of the 142 pages speak about supply (two pages highlight what Ford, Exxon/Mobil, and GE are doing to conserve energy), the theory being that all you have to do is take care of supply and that alone will take care of the rest. No taking into account that it is a non-renewable resource that gets more costly to produce each year.

However I don't completely fault Mr. Gingrich and friends. We see this all the time in transportation, land use, and even parking policy. Several examples can easily be demonstrated here in the Silicon Valley.

Introduced in October of 2010 after repeated customer complaints about long travel times, the local transit agency created a non-stop express service from South San Jose to downtown during the commute hours. Three months later Santa Clara County announced an increase of 33% in auto capacity on the southern portion of the Almaden Expressway which parallels the light rail line, significantly negating any relative advantage that transit may have had.

Likewise just several miles north, Caltrans announced that they would increase capacity and update highway design to increase capacity on freeways 280 and 880 after two very large shopping centers were allowed to build and expand. Now with upcoming construction there is talk of further expanding one of the shopping centers with at least two anchor tenants.

In this part of the San Francisco Bay it seems that just about every year a major big box mall (also known in the biz as auto oriented retail) is built, further decimating downtown retail. The City of San Jose mandates mixed use retail and housing but wonders why street level retail remains vacant while it approves even more big box retail. Is your college economics coming back to you now?

For every ying there is a yang

Large transportation and land use policies here will almost always have unintended consequences nearby.

And so, the can just keeps getting kicked down the road.