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Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle - Megan McArdle is a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and The Economist. More

Megan was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra-dry skim-milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster-recovery firms at Ground Zero … all before the age of 30.

While working at Ground Zero, Megan started Live From the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. She has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to The Atlantic, along with its owner, in August 2007.

Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington, D.C., where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.
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More on freight rail

By Megan McArdle

Mar 17 2008, 5:20 PM ET Comment

My father the transportation expert points out something else I should have said about freight rail: the railroads don't want to take freight that's going less than 1,000 miles because it isn't cost-effective for them. If the average truck trip is 700 miles, there's a huge gap that needs to be filled before freight rail becomes a meaningful replacement for a lot of truck trips.

He also notes that one of the giant problems with rail yards is that cities like to rezone around them. This severely restricts the usage of the yards, because the neighbors complain if you operate them 24/7. This is putting even more pressure on the rail yard system.

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