On our idiotic water policies. And I didn't even get into the sugar problem and our lack of cisterns or reuse of gray water for irrigation.

Hi Rand,

I read your article on water restrictions and I agree that the market should be allowed to work it out. I've lived in Colorado for a large portion of my life and water restrictions are just the way things are done. Despite many people saying different, Colorado (and much of the midwest) is an arid state. We measure things such as acres per cow not cows per acre as they do in the watery areas of the country. Government needed and excuse to 'do something' and they used a tired old answer.

For what it is worth, Colorado Springs tried the rate system you mentioned, cheap for basic water, high priced for extras like lawns. As I recall, it didn't work.

I live in the Mojave desert, where scattered creosote bushes and the occasional Joshua tree are the main vegetation. My monthly water bill is $17. flat fee for connection to the system, and $.10 per thousand gallons. In an average month I pay $.20 for water for two people. There is no incentive for conservation and I have plenty of neighbors who maintain grass lawns by daily sprinkler irrigation. In the desert. Of course, some of my tax money pays for advertisements and exhortations to conserve water.

It seems like the perfect socialist system to me. Charge according to cost and ignore the financial and environmental consequences.

My monthly water bill is $17. flat fee for connection to the system, and $.10 per thousand gallons.

You should hook up a water wheel in the backyard, Dan. That way you could also get your electricity almost free.

Why didn't it work, Joe?

In New Mexico you can get a tax break for converting your lawn to xeriscape,the initial cost can be high,but then your water bill goes way down.
Albuquerque & Santa Fe have sinilar schemes for water conservation,odd-even days,no watering after 10 am & before 6 pm & Albuquerque has "Water Police" that (supposedly) ensure that businesses don't leave broken sprinklers running all night.
Us westerners do have to laugh when we hear about water shortages in a place like So. Florida,you're surrounded by water,it rains there & your water table is like what,3" down? ;)

You get three days to water your lawn. In Jacksonville we only get two. Now, we aren't on an odd/even plan. And I've seen odd/even plans in Columbus, OH, so it's evidently not that uncommon.

What gets me, if you have your own well for watering your lawn (something that is popular here, because the water table is so low) or a recovery pond for irrigation, you're still limited in the number of days that you can water.

Not that it stops my neighbor, who's watering his lawn (from his own well) every day. It's also the heat exchanger for his A/C. At least, it used to be. If I were to put in an sprinkler system, I would go with my own well.

Then again, I would want real grass, not the crab grass that they call St. Augustine grass. I'm from Ohio, give me that rye and blue grass, something that feels good walking on, even in shoes.

It was a pretty good rant, Rand. Enjoyable.

It is weird how flaky we get about allowing people to make their own individual decisions, via a price mechanism, rather than have decisions be imposed through some "fair" process of adjudication by lords in black robes, or behind commission desks.

What's also weird is how inconsistent we are. In some areas we're OK with an open market, in others we aren't and play the game of having a master set the rules for everybody, and invent shenanigans to convince ourselves we're not paying the full cost.

We're willing to let the market set the price for education but play games with medicine. You want a Harvard education, you have to pay up front for it. But better doctors and hospitals are not allowed to openly charge more for higher-quality care. (Indeed, many of us wish for some national-scale charade that would let us pretend that we don't have to pay for medical care at all.)

We're willing to let air travel be priced according to demand, but not car travel. If you have an urgent business situation and want to get to Boston right now on the fastest and earliest flight, you can pay through the nose for the privilege. But if you want to get to San Diego on the I-5 for the same reason, you can't pay big bucks to travel in a special lane to avoid the traffic caused by half a million casual visitors to SeaWorld.

More recently, it seems we're willing to allow free-market pricing in long distance telephone communication, but not Internet communication. If you want a dedicated line installed to Poughkeepsie, you can pay a fortune for it. The phone company is allowed to charge you more for calling at peak call times. But the "net neutrality" folks argue passionately against the idea that your ISP might be allowed to charge you more for sending and receiving packets over the Internet that cost them more to deliver, or which they offer to deliver faster.

It's weird. I can't find any consistent pattern in when we're willing to see reality plainly and when we're not.

Rand,I forgot to mention earlier that the EPA prohibits the use of gray water for irrigation,I found out when I listed a house that ran the clothes washer water to their trees & was contacted by the local EPA rep,who kindly sent me the 90+ page regs on it.
Their reasoning is that e. coli could get into the tree & contaminate the fruit.
Yeah,it's damn stupid.

Lack of cisterns? By cisterns do you mean water holding tanks or septics (I've heard septics called cisterns)?

By cisterns do you mean water holding tanks

Yes, rain barrels (or their functional equivalents).

Rand, what's the big deal about growing rice in South Florida. Isn't that what all those backyard pools are for?

But if you want to get to San Diego on the I-5 for the same reason, you can't pay big bucks to travel in a special lane to avoid the traffic caused by half a million casual visitors to SeaWorld.

Actually, there ARE areas in SoCal where you can do this. HOT lanes are express/carpool lanes that use demand-based toll pricing. As sensors and toll booths register more and more users in the lanes, the price goes up, and price goes down as the demand decreases, in real time. The fluctuation is somewhere on the order of a low price of $0.50 (50 cents) up to around $9 or $10. But you'd have to be on I-15 instead of I-5.

I'm not sure if the lanes have been around long enough to prove that they work, but they make sense in the scheme of things, and they reduce travel times for both the express lane users and the non-express users (by allowing 1-person cars to use the carpool lanes, and getting them out of the rest of the flow of traffic).

I think that most of the HOT lanes are privatized, too. But even if they're not, there's a lot of evidence that public toll roads that are sold to private companies tend to be better taken care of and more profitable and less congested in the long run.

I'm sure I'll learn more once I start taking more classes on the subject, but there are a few good books on the issue, one of which I found linked off of one of Rand's posts a few months ago. I think it was titled "The Road More Travelled".

Raise the price somewhat, yes, but if it seems that it doesn't help and the price is raised higher and higher, rich people will just use water like before and poor people can have none of it, which isn't nice... Market methods can not always be used as a sole means for controlling use.
But I don't know the point at which the price of water currently is.
Judging by Dan DeLong's post, there sure would be some room for price increase where he lives!

"Their reasoning is that e. coli could get into the tree & contaminate the fruit."

E coli grows in the guts of warm blooded critters, not trees. To contaminate fruit, it would have to be from sewage contaminated water.

Grey water should not come from the septic system.

The reason grey water is frowned on is nutrient enrichment from the phosphates in the effluent (laundry detergent is the primary source). This can be a problem, particularly in low gradient, low dissolved oxygen watersheds. This can cause algal blooms that suck out the remaining oxygen and make life impossible for most aquatic organisms.

This is the real reason it is frowned on.

To add to the first paragraph: from sewage contaminated water, directly applied and consumed without cleaning the fruit/veggie.

John, I think you're thinking of the 91 between the coastal cities in OC and the I-15. It has exactly what you describe, Fastrak lanes where you can travel for a price that varies with the level of congestion. They keep the price high enough that it's always much faster to travel in those lanes than in the regular lanes.

It's a great idea, I think, except that they have this annoying policy where to get one of the transponders you have to either (1) use $x in tolls per month or (2) pay a monthly fee. This sucks for me, because I don't use the road often enough. Maybe a dozen times a year. But if I did that road regularly, I would do it in a heartbeat.

Strangely, the 91 was regarded as a failure. One of the problems was the owner cut a non-compete clause with the OCTA when they bought the roads, and the County was forbidden to improve the free lanes without paying exorbitant fees (like $10 million for adding 100 feet of extra lane in a nasty exit). I think the County was going to buy the lanes back, maybe. In any event, the general feeling seems to be that the experiment was a failure.

This may be one case where private greed sank a promising venture in its infancy, in which case they should be smacked upside the head.

There are a number of other roads around here that seem private ("The Toll Roads"), but they don't do congestion pricing. They're not really busy enough yet. Also, they have some weird connections, like the 241 out of Irvine fails to connect to I-5 even though it crosses it. WTF?? I can only assume some breakdown in public/private negotation. It's clearly a rocky road. So to speak.

Gray water can also have elevated levels of boron, from the perborate component of chlorine-free bleach.