According to a study released by the Mercatus Center, the Missouri Division of Professional Registration subjects 240 occupations to varying forms of licensure. This means that in Missouri, 21.3 percent of the workforce is licensed (with an additional 5.4 percent requiring certification).  

An earlier study conducted by the Institute for Justice examined 102 low- to moderate-income occupations and noted that Missouri requires a license for 31 of these occupations. Licensing requirements can be costly, both financially and in terms of time, and serve as a barrier to entry for job seekers.

The licensing requirements in Missouri also are not especially well matched with actual safety risks (like consumer health risks). As the Mercatus Center explains, “Occupations that are less likely to involve risk to the public are often more highly controlled than riskier occupations.” For example, Missouri requires emergency medical technicians (EMTs) to undergo 23 days of training while athletic trainers are required to undergo 1,460 days of training.

What can be done about excessive licensing? Show-Me Institute researchers have previously written about license reciprocity, but Missouri could also take a cue from its neighbor, Nebraska.

Nebraska is beginning a legislative review of all the state’s occupational licensing laws. The review will be carried out over the next five years with the ultimate goal of identifying less restrictive options for professional regulation (and identifying which professions need these regulations at all).

Reviewing each license and the options for reducing or eliminating licenses seems like a great place to start in reforming occupational licensing.

Missourians should be able to practice the profession of their choice without excessive barriers to entry. Instead of making it harder for people to work, shouldn’t we be removing unneeded roadblocks?

The post Missouri Should Follow Our Neighbor’s Lead and Review Occupational Licensing appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

RideKC is the regional transit group responsible for the Kansas City streetcar. RideKC’s initiatives are largely funded by city taxpayers, and this latest venture is no exception. The cities of Kansas City, MO and North Kansas City, MO are both listed as public funders of the scooter project.

Eric Vaughan, bike share director for local advocacy group BikeWalkKC, commented on the scooter project:

RideKC is the only transit authority in the country that’s now integrating scooters as part of the regional transit network, which really goes to show how progressive our team here in Kansas City has been with their approach.

This raises an obvious question: If private companies are already putting electric scooters on the streets, why is taxpayer money being used so that the Kansas City transit authority can enter the market?

Bird is a company that consistently has scooters on the streets in Kansas City. Lime has had scooters in the area as well, and a company owned by Ford called SPIN will be placing scooters in Kansas City later this year. Scooters are widely available, and the companies’ use of private chargers and mechanics ensures that scooters are in good shape and located in well-trafficked areas. Lime’s 2018 year-end report claimed that 31,000 Kansas Citians used Lime scooters in a three month period.

The scooter market in Kansas City seems to be doing just fine without government help. If private companies are already providing services, why is our government spending taxpayer dollars on those services as well?

The post Why Is RideKC Entering The Electric Scooter Market? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Business Facilities’ 2019 Metro Rankings Report scored Kansas City in the top ten on its list of major American cities with the highest potential for economic growth.

Kansas City landed on the list based on a few different factors, including the city’s quality of life and cost of living. Researchers at the Show-Me Institute have often urged Kansas City to play to exactly these strengths. Back in 2016, urban policy expert Wendell Cox published a paper walking through the advantages the region offers:

The fundamental question is, “What competitive advantages does Kansas City have over other metropolitan areas, and how can it maintain or expand those advantages?” The answers are clear. Kansas City’s strongest advantages are its low cost of living (the result of superior housing affordability), superior mobility, and a complete array of lifestyle choices. However, each of these advantages could be threatened by policies that currently enjoy favor within urban planning circles.

These factors might not be the most impressive on paper, but they are very important to those choosing to move into or stay in the region. Instead of playing to these simple strengths, Kansas City officials seem to be determined to become the next Denver, Dallas, or Seattle, using economic incentives to build trendier entertainment districts and businesses.

But Kansas City is unique, and has a lot to offer without trying to chase the trends of other areas. People live here for simple reasons like affordability and ease of transportation. A city government that chooses to spend taxpayer dollars on subsidizing things like sports stadiums or streetcars instead of bolstering basic city services is doing the region a disservice.

Kansas City risks squandering its potential for growth if policymakers fail to understand what the city does best. As my colleague Patrick Tuohey has previously stated, “If we want Kansas City to succeed, we need to understand exactly what we have to offer.”

The post Kansas City Should Rely On Its Strengths appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The proposal, which is being considered by the Kansas City Council, seeks funding to help build an office tower and parking garage combination (requiring $27 million and $36 million in subsidies respectively). The building site is at the corner of 13^th and Main, right in the heart of downtown. Supporters of the project argue that the subsidies would help provide needed office space.

As ludicrous as the idea of government subsidizing private development in a popular area already is, it gets better—there are no tenants lined up to occupy the space. In other words, economic development officials want the government to spend $63 million on office space . . . just in case.

Jon Stephens, CEO of Port KC (which is currently an active participant in this proposal), attempted to explain this reasoning: “The demand for ready-to-occupy space has been proven in other markets. The demand appears to be present here.”

The editorial board is asking the correct questions in response to Stephens’ comment. If the demand is there, why are taxpayer dollars needed? If the demand isn’t, why would you ask taxpayers and government to take on that risk?

If downtown Kansas City is attractive to a company, then the company should pay for building its own office space. Private developers should be building based on market forces, without being cushioned from risk by taxpayer subsidies.

The Star’s editorial board is right: “It’s time for downtown projects in Kansas City to stand on their own merits, not on public dollars subsidizing private development.”

The post Kansas City Star Editorial Gets It Right on Tax Subsidies appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The increase from 7 to 44 people on bikes might not seem like much, but it’s still early days and Armour is a short corridor that does not yet connect to any other bike lanes or trails. Upcoming projects like Charlotte/Holmes and The Paseo will start to create a network out of isolated pieces of infrastructure.

BikeWalkKC boasts that this is a 600% increase in daily cyclists on Armour. That is true but underwhelming. We’re talking about 44 cyclists in a metropolitan area with more than two million people.

How do we know 44 people a day are now using the Armour bike lanes? The post didn’t say. I followed up with an employee from Kansas City Public Works, who confirmed that BikeWalkKC was using data from its one-time departmental bike counts. No one knows if 44 riders is a one-time phenomenon or a daily occurrence.  

Bike advocates claim that building infrastructure will create demand. Patrick Tuohey talked about this assertion in an earlier blog post, citing the demand analysis BikeWalkKC published to support this project. The analysis was performed without any current cyclist counts. A demand analysis that doesn’t bother trying to measure current demand to help gauge future demand seems more like guesswork than rigorous assessment.

Building bike lanes and hoping that demand will follow is not sound public policy. Data actually shows a downward trend of bike commuters in the United States. Only about 0.1 percent of Kansas City’s metro population commuted by cycling in 2014, and recent data from Public Works suggests that number has dropped even lower.

“If you build it, he will come” was an effective line for a movie, but that idea doesn’t translate to municipal policy. Kansas City has more pressing needs, and better ways to spend taxpayer dollars.

The post Building Bike Lanes to Encourage Cycling Is Not Sound Policy appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The expenditure is questionable when you consider that less than half of one percent of the city’s population currently uses the bike lanes. Even worse, the bike lanes might be introducing a new set of safety risks.  

Drivers have had concerns about the safety of Kansas City’s new parking-protected bike lanes since the pricy installation began, including complaints about limited visibility and dangerous intersections. If 311 complaints about near-misses and crashes weren’t enough, a near-fatal accident seems to have highlighted the problems.

A crash occurred on May 11 along Armour Boulevard after a driver whose view of oncoming traffic was obstructed by the bike lane was struck by another vehicle. Her Chevy Suburban was flipped on its side, and a responding police officer told her family members that they likely would have been planning their daughter’s funeral if not for the size of the vehicle she was driving.

This driver was lucky that she was in such a large vehicle, but what if that had been a smaller car? Or, even worse, what if that had been a cyclist crossing through one of the intersections or into turn lanes? Limited visibility is not just a problem for cars; it poses a major risk to cyclists in certain sections of the lane.

In response to the accident, a spokesperson from Kansas City Public Works stated:

[W]e plan to make sight line adjustments and add vertical delineators as part of the [safety] pilot here in a few weeks. We are still working on timing and date details. Depending on neighborhood feedback and the impacts of the pilot location, we will coordinate with the Parks Department to make those modifications along the corridor.

Really? It is going to take a “few weeks” to install a No Parking sign (“vertical delineator”) at a dangerous intersection in the wake of a serious accident. I probably shouldn’t be surprised, considering that the promised pilot program to investigate and address safety programs along the route has been delayed for months.

Safety improvement plans are all well and good, but shouldn’t a problem as obvious as lack of visibility have been addressed before the city started funneling money into this project? If taxpayer money is going to be put toward infrastructure like this, all elements need to be thoroughly considered in advance, including the safety risks. Will the city address these concerns before they spend money on lane expansion? I hope so.

The post When Will Kansas City Officials Address Bike Lane Safety Concerns? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Why is there such a difference between the two? Charles Silver and David Hyman, authors of Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care, argue that it is because of the free market.

Traditional providers, like hospitals and clinics, are expensive and inconvenient for the consumer because their pricing is primarily based on what insurers will pay. In comparison, retail providers, like the clinic found in your grocery store, have to price their services in order to attract customers and strive for convenience. The two offer many of the same services but have completely different ways of doing business.

Retail providers are becoming an increasingly disruptive challenger of traditional providers. This should not be surprising—when providers are able to compete the results typically are lower-priced and more attractive options for the consumer. Just as internet shopping is disrupting brick-and-mortar businesses, retail medicine is disrupting traditional medicine, an industry that is used to being insulated from competition.

A great example of this is the way retail medicine is transforming audiology. While traditional audiologists charge steep prices for hearing aids and hearing checks (with additional charges for things like testing, warranties, and damage coverage, which can often make up 70 percent of the total price of a hearing aid), retailers are improving services while lowering costs. Costco Hearing Aid Centers offer similar services to that of audiologists without the additional charges.

Silver and Hyman write:

As more retailers enter the field, prices will become easier to compare and competition will intensify. Bargain-hungry consumers will look for better deals, but they will be interested in quality too . . . With pressure on both quality and price, retail offerings are bound to improve. (pg. 325)

Competitive pricing offered by the retail sector also allows people to avoid markups that come with using third-party payers. While most retail providers take insurance, patients pay out-of-pocket one-third of the time. In contrast, patients who visit primary care doctors pay out-of-pocket only ten percent of the time. Silver and Hyman view this as an important factor in the success of retail providers:

When we pay for health care the same way we pay for other services—by spending our own money instead of an insurer’s—good things happen: prices fall and quality improves as providers compete for business. (pg. 320)

Competition provides good things indeed. Want to learn more about market solutions for health care problems? Join us in St. Louis or Kansas City to learn more from Cato Institute scholars Charles Silver and David Hyman as they discuss why the American health care system is so dysfunctional and costly.

The post Health Care Desperately Needs Competition-Retail Medicine Provides It appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

It is important to realize that this marketing campaign, even though it uses biker-oriented talking points, is not talking about 36 cyclist lives—the latest annual data from 2017 showed zero cyclist fatalities. Instead, it estimates:

• 15 lives saved by increased physical activity
• 6 lives saved by improved air quality
• 15 lives saved by a reduction in fatal car crashes (not crashes that occur because a cyclist was involved—any fatal car accident counts)

Only the physical activity category is directly connected to bikers who would use the lanes.

There are problems with these estimates. Physical activity benefits, while hard to measure, are dependent upon more Kansas Citians choosing to bike instead of drive. Only 0.3 percent of commuters used bikes in 2018, and a survey noted that fewer than 50 percent of respondents were interested in biking more. More bike lanes could mean an increased number of bikers—but it’s just a projection, and there’s no way to know how many more bikers we’ll see with expanded bike lanes, let alone what the actual health benefits will be.

Six lives saved by improved air quality also seems a stretch. The number was achieved by expanding data from research in New Zealand. Even if this study was properly applied to Kansas City, the boasted number is the highest estimate possible. An economic summary of the Bike KC Master Plan read:

Assuming 1 death due to air quality for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled and 1 per 40 million vehicle starts (trips), the bike plan could reduce Kansas City air pollution fatalities anywhere from 1-6 deaths per year . . . [emphasis added]

The most puzzling estimate is that of fatal crash reduction. The economic summary of the bike plan noted that 228 fatal car crashes occurred within the city limits of Kansas City from 2015-2017, and that 94 of these occurred along the route of the proposed bike lanes. While the summary boasts a 47 percent reduction in these crashes due to the way bike lanes will change the flow of traffic, no crash data was included.

Upon reaching out to the authors of the economic summary for more information, I was told that they did not have any data on the cause of these car accidents: 

The dataset provided by the Mid-America Regional Council did not provide any context on the causes of the crash. There has been some analysis of the contributing factors in fatal crashes . . . but our FHWA source on road diets does not differentiate by crash cause or even crash severity. It is simply an empirical measure on the impact of road-dieted streets on total crash volume. These benefits accrue to all users, regardless of mode or how many people take up bicycling.

How can a 47 percent reduction in fatal crashes be a realistic estimate when there is no available data on what caused the crashes? If the reduction is due to fewer cars traveling the roads with the bike lanes, does that simply mean the crashes occur on the alternative routes these cars travel? Stating the number of crashes occurring within city limits and presenting some traffic flow statistics from other areas does not seem compelling. If BikeWalkKC wants to claim 15 fewer lives taken annually by fatal car accidents as a result of expanded bike lanes, shouldn’t there be more data to back that claim up?

By portraying the Bike KC Master Plan as a strategy that will save 36 lives per year, BikeWalkKC is not avoiding the real problem at hand: this project will cost hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars, money that could be better spent elsewhere. As my colleague Patrick Tuohey noted,

Kansas City has significant needs, significant transit needs. They are not biking. It is infrastructure. It is infrastructure repairs. It’s getting those steel plates off our streets.

The use of questionable statistics will not help develop solid city policy. If the city has millions of dollars to toss around and is concerned about saving lives, a better idea would be hiring more police officers, not building more bike lanes.

The post Would Kansas City Bike Lanes Actually Save 36 Lives per Year? Probably Not appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

These additional streetcars will be added to the current fleet of four that travels the two-mile loop from Union Station to the River Market. While the fleet currently has four streetcars, only three are usually in use; the remaining streetcar is brought out only during busy occasions. The two streetcars that were just ordered would increase the normal number in use from three to four.

Mike Hurd, the marketing director for the Downtown Council of Kansas City, explained the purchase:

We have so many times of the year that we have big events going and the current rotation of streetcars really is not enough to handle the demand. So being able to add streetcars and still being able to keep the service free is just fantastic.

Hurd’s comments need a correction. While the streetcar may not charge a fee to riders, it is not a free service—it is paid for by taxpayers. Instead of receiving funds from a small user fee, the Kansas City streetcar is funded by special taxing in an area called a transportation development district (TDD). Researchers at the Show-Me Institute have written frequently about these districts, and previously explained how a TDD is created.

The taxing rates within this TDD are not going up to pay for these new streetcars. Instead, the official position is that the KC Streetcar Authority will be using existing funds saved  from previously received TDD income. This raises a question: If the Authority is able to save more than $10 million dollars from this TDD, doesn’t that indicate that the district tax rate is higher than needed to fund normal operations?

Additionally, no data has been released to confirm wait times will be significantly reduced by adding two new streetcars to the fleet. If the goal is to add an extra streetcar to the daily rotation and hold two back for special events, why not test the idea by running the current fleet of four streetcars on a daily basis and measuring the results? It appears Kansas City officials are touting an untested solution to a potentially nonexistent problem, and using taxpayer dollars to bring it to life.

If there really are $10 million dollars in excess funds, maybe the Streetcar Authority should lower the tax rates in the TDD. Instead, residents are being asked to pay for expensive additions to an already expensive scheme. Is that really a good idea?

The post Should Taxpayers Pay $10 Million To Reduce Streetcar Waiting Times? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The three-mile route opened in August, running along Armour Boulevard in Midtown. Advocated for by groups such as BikeWalkKC, the $700,000 project was highly praised by both city officials and the media. However, the lack of foresight in planning these lanes quickly became evident.

Protected bike lanes, where bikers ride in between the curb and a row of parked cars, have the potential to help keep riders safer than they would be if they were in the main traffic lane, side-by-side with moving cars. According to a story from KSHB news, some residents have complained of extremely limited visibility when turning out of cross streets onto Armour Boulevard. But the same story noted that the Kansas City Police Department had not seen an increase in accidents along the road where the bike lanes were added, so cyclists and drivers seem to have been fortunate so far.

The onset of winter, however, has revealed another problem, as the lanes have been obstructed—first by large piles of leaves, and later by snow and ice, rendering them unsafe and almost unusable. Many bikers are using the popular neighborhood site Nextdoor to vent their frustration:

“I had to be in the middle of the street on Armour on my daily morning bike commute, which completely defeats the purpose of the bike lanes…Everyone seems to have a problem with these new bike lanes, myself included, and I’m a cyclist!”

The need to keep the new bike lanes cleared should hardly be a surprise. People continue to bike, whether to work or for fun, year-round – not just during the warm months. It takes only common sense to recognize that bike lanes, just like streets for motor vehicles, need maintenance and upkeep if they are to remain usable in bad weather. But as the picture above shows, there’s little evidence that bike lane got any attention after the snowfall earlier this month. (And yes, that snow-covered area just to the right of the row of cars really is the bike lane.)

No one wants to see cyclists put at risk, whether by motor-vehicle traffic or by treacherous bike paths. But spending over half a million dollars on a bike path—especially one that is rendered useless by bad weather—is hard to justify. According to a 2016 report from the League of American Bicyclists, only 0.4 percent of Kansas City commuters ride their bikes to work. I don’t know what fraction of those riders take this specific stretch of Armour Boulevard, but we aren’t talking about a large number of riders.

I hope that in the future, city leaders will think carefully about the benefits and costs, and the future obligations, that come with projects like the Armour Boulevard bike lanes.

The post There’s a Bike Lane Around Here Somewhere appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The State of the Heartland Factbook 2018, a joint effort by the Walton Family Foundation and the Brookings Institution, uses 26 different socioeconomic measures to detail the performance of the 19 states that compose America’s Heartland. This data is compiled into the full report, and is accompanied by an interesting interactive database.

This new information makes it easy to compare Missouri to the other states in our region. However, the comparison is hardly flattering. The two best examples of Missouri’s stagnation are the change over time in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is the total value of everything produced by the people and companies of the state, and standard of living. Measuring the change in GDP from 2010 to 2016, Missouri only grew faster than two nearby states (Mississippi and Louisiana), averaging a 0.8 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Most of the other states had a CAGR of over 1.0 percent.

Standard of living (which the authors measure as GDP per capita) showed practically identical results, with Missouri once again coming in third from the bottom (again ahead of only Mississippi and Louisiana). While Missouri showed a positive CAGR of 0.5 percent in standard of living, the majority of the states where data was reported averaged at least a 1.0 percent CAGR from 2010 to 2016.

The story was the same with regard to wage growth. Missouri held its popular position of third from the bottom, a CAGR of 0.4 percent from 2010 to 2016.

Clearly, there is work to be done in Missouri if we want to climb to a position where we are competitive with the states surrounding us. Policy initiatives that spur economic growth will be key in helping turn the Show-Me state into a better place to work and live.

The post Are Missouri’s Neighbors Passing It By? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.