Driverless Car Update

The National Transportation Safety Board has issued its report about the 2016 crash that killed a Tesla driver. This has been billed as the “first self-driving car fatality,” but the truth is that the Tesla wasn’t designed to be a self-driving car. Instead, it is what is technically known as an SAE level 2 autonomous car, which is defined as “driver assistance systems of both steering and acceleration/ deceleration using information about the driving environment and with the expectation that the human driver perform all remaining aspects of the dynamic driving task.”

Instead of treating it this way, the driver acted as if it were a level 3 car, meaning a car capable of performing “all aspects of the dynamic driving task with the expectation that the human driver will respond appropriately to a request to intervene.” The Tesla was not designed to deal with all aspects of driving nor was it capable of making a request for the driver to intervene.

In this case, the car was going the legal speed limit on a highway and failed to slow or stop when a truck illegally entered the right of way to cross the highway. The Tesla was designed to detect another car in its lane but not a vehicle crossing the lane. The truck driver–who, the NTSB notes, had been smoking marijuana–cross the highway in violation of the Tesla’s right of way. An alert driver would have slowed down, but the Tesla driver was relying on his car to do things it wasn’t designed to do. Continue reading

Bike Share Programs: Why?

After less than a year of operation, Baltimore is shutting down its bike share program for a month because so many of its bikes were stolen or are heavily damaged. The program began last November with a 175 bikes–40 percent of which had electric boosters–available for rent from 20 different locations, soon increased to 200 bikes and 20 stations.

One cyclist spent a day recently visiting all 25 stations and found only four bikes available to potential renters. The city says the private partner that is running the operation is upgrading the locks to reduce theft. In the meantime, the city has two full-time employees tracking down the GPS-equipped bikes so that other people can repair them and put them back into service.

Baltimore is far from the first city to have problems with its bike-share program. Seattle’s is attracting only half as many riders as expected. Bike share programs in New York, San Francisco and many other cities have also had problems. Continue reading

DC Metro More Reliable But Riders Are Not

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) has blamed much of the rail system’s ridership declines on the system’s reliability problems and all of the track work it did in 2016 and early 2017 to fix those problems. Now, the system has become more reliable, but riders don’t seem to be returning.

The Federal Transit Administration has published month-by-month ridership data for all transit systems through June, 2017. The numbers show that Metro rail ridership in February, March, and April of this year were all about 10 percent less than in the same months last year. In May, however, it was only 1.5 percent less, while June 2017 ridership was actually more than in June 2016–though only by 0.6 percent.
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While that’s grounds for a bit of optimism, Metro rail ridership still has a long way to go before it returns to its 2009 peak, which was 28 percent higher than the year ending June 2017. I don’t like making predictions because there are too many unknown variables, but I suspect ridership will never return to those levels partly because many former riders have lost faith in the system and partly because the band-aid work done on the system in the last year won’t solve its long-term reliability problems. Time will tell.

Not Subprimes, But Not Flippers Either

As most readers know, the Antiplanner never bought in to the story that subprime loans were responsible for the 2008 financial crisis. “Low interest rates, the Community Reinvestment Act, and subprime lending were equally available in all 50 states,” I wrote in American Nightmare, “but bubbles occurred in only some of those states,” namely those that were practicing growth management or had some other artificial land-use restrictions.

Several research papers have confirmed the Antiplanner’s view that subprime loans were not the problem. Unfortunately, some have interpreted these papers to place blame on another class of borrowers: flippers, that is, people who bought homes simply to resell them at higher prices. Yet they are no more responsible for triggering the financial crisis than subprime borrowers.

A paper from Wharton’s Business School argues for “a reinterpretation of the U.S. foreclosure crisis as more of a prime, rather than a subprime, borrower issue,” say Wharton economists Fernando Ferreira and Joseph Gyourko. “Housing traits, race, initial income, and speculators did not play a meaningful role.” This absolves subprime borrowers, but also flippers (“speculators”).

A Federal Reserve Bank of New York staff report may be the one that supposedly places the blame on flippers. “In states that experienced the largest housing booms and busts, at the peak of the market almost half of purchase mortgage originations were associated with investors,” the report concluded. That may be true, but that doesn’t mean that flippers triggered the financial crisis.

As a paper by MIT finance professor Antoinette Shoar and two of her former graduate students found, “homebuyers and lenders bought into increasing house values and borrowers defaulted after prices dropped.” In other words, prices began dropping before flippers defaulted. After all, as long as prices were rising, why would speculators default?

So what did trigger the crisis? As chapter 13 of American Nightmare shows, the trigger was pulled by the bond ratings agencies: Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch. Up until January, 2007, these companies had been giving AAA ratings to bonds made up of individual mortgage loans. This was because, as one writer observes, “never in history [had] prices for housing market gone down nationally.” Because of this, the ratings companies believed that, even if individuals defaulted on their loans, the banks could resell the homes to someone else without losing money.

What the ratings companies failed to realize, however, was that growth management had made housing prices far more volatile, and such growth management had extended from three or four states in the previous recession to nearly 20 in the mid-2000s–and those 20 states contained close to 45 percent of American housing.

It only took a very small decline in housing prices to wake the companies up to their mistake. Between the third quarter of 2006 and the second quarter of 2007, prices in key markets such as Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area fell by about 1 percent. One percent doesn’t sound like much, but prices had grown in those markets without interruption since 1994.
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Starting in June, 2007, the bond ratings companies responded by downgrading bonds issued in 2002 through 2004 from AAA to AA- or A; bonds issued in 2005 from AAA to BBB-; and bonds issued in 2006 from AAA to as low as CCC+. Anything below BBB- is considered junk. More important, reduced ratings increased the cash reserves banks were required to keep.

Buying a bond is the same as lending money, and banks are required to keep cash reserves when they lend money in case their depositors want some of their money back. A bank buying $1 billion of AAA bonds had to keep $16 million in cash. When the grade of those bonds was reduced, that reserve requirement might grow to $80 million. Since all of these bonds totaled to trillions of dollars in value, the banks that owned billions of dollars worth of bonds had to scramble to come up with billions of dollars in cash overnight. Some banks–Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual–went out of business; others, notably Citibank and AIG, were deemed “too big to fail,” so the federal government stepped in. With or without federal involvement, the credit market tightened, leading to financial problems nationwide.

If the banks had not gotten in trouble, credit wouldn’t have tightened and defaults would not have been a problem. If the ratings agencies had correctly rated the bonds in the first place, the banks would not have gotten trouble. If growth management had not made housing more volatile, the original ratings on the bonds would have been correct.

This sidesteps the question of what triggered that 1 percent decline in housing prices in 2006. One story is that builders responded to high prices by oversupplying the market, leading prices to fall. That might have happened in Arizona where it was easy to subdivide land and built new homes, but I doubt that it happened in California, where it can take many years to get permits to build new homes.

Instead, I think homebuyers, whether speculators or not, were spooked by rising prices and fears that a bubble would soon burst. In 2005, The Economist predicted that the bubble would inevitably collapse. “The whole world economy is at risk,” the magazine-that-calls-itself-a-newspaper accurately noted. “It is not going to be pretty.” By early 2006, there were whole websites devoted to monitoring the housing bubble and to debunking those who claimed there was no bubble.

Remember that in the early 2000s, California home buyers routinely bid 20 percent or more above the asking price for homes. It wouldn’t take much publicity about the bubble to lead some potential buyers to say, “Maybe we should wait until after prices fall before we buy.” That in turn would cool the market just enough to get the bond ratings agencies to take notice.

Today, home prices in the San Francisco Bay Area are a third higher than they were during the peak of the 2006 bubble. Even after adjusting for inflation, they are 12 percent higher. Clearly, we are in another bubble. The inevitable collapse of that bubble will cause many local hardships, but should not result in a major financial crisis because the ratings agencies and banks have presumably learned their lessons.

Bringing Soviet Planning to New York City

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to bring the same policies that worked so well in the Soviet Union, and more recently in Venezuela, to New York City. “If I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed,” he says. “And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents.”

As shown in the urban planning classic, The Ideal Communist City, soviet planners also believed they were smart enough to know how every single plot of land in their cities should be used. The cities built on their planning principles were appallingly ugly and unlivable. They were environmentally sustainable only so long as communism kept people too poor to afford cars and larger homes.

If de Blasio believes in this planning system so much, why doesn’t he implement it in New York City? The biggest obstacle, he says, is “the way our legal system is structured to favor private property.” He blames housing affordability problems on greedy developers who only build for millionaires. Continue reading

Is Gentrification Reducing Transit Ridership?

The Eastsider, a Los Angeles publication, has suggested a new explanation for that city’s spectacular decline in bus ridership: gentrification. Rising housing prices have forced many low-income transit riders to distant suburbs while the people moving into gentrified neighborhoods have higher incomes, more cars, and are less likely to ride transit.

The Eastsider bases this idea on a story in Curbed Los Angeles, which offers four explanations for declining ridership: traffic congestion slowing down buses; service cuts; low-cost fuel; and high-cost housing. “Many of the most transit accessible neighborhoods in Los Angeles are significantly more expensive, and home to more affluent demographics than they once were,” says the publication. “As the transit-riding demographics get priced out of relatively central and transit-friendly neighborhoods, and move to the cheaper but more far-flung and car dependent suburbs, ridership suffers.”

While I’m not discounting this as a partial explanation, Curbed LA never even mentioned Uber and Lyft, which the Antiplanner has estimated may be responsible for more of the decline in transit ridership than all of the other explanations put together. Aside from that, there are plenty of reasons to think that gentrification plays only a tiny role in transit ridership, even in Los Angeles. Continue reading

Transit Ridership is Declining–So Why
Pay Transit CEOs So Much Money?

Transit ridership is declining, and that decline appears to be accelerating. Nationally, ridership declined by 4.4 percent between 2014 and 2016 and by 4.5 percent in the first six months in 2017 compared with the same period in 2016.

Despite these losses, transit agency CEOs get paid staggering amounts of money. Here’s a few examples.

  • Los Angeles Metro lost 10.5 percent of its riders from 2014 to 2016, and another 5.8 percent in the first six months of 2017. Yet the agency’s CEO pulls down a salary of more than $430,000, plus nearly $48,000 in benefits.
  • San Francisco BART ridership has been flat for the last several years, and it lost 4.9 percent of its riders in the first half of 2017. Its CEO collected $498,000 in pay and benefits in 2016.
  • Even better paid was the CEO of San Mateo County Transit, who also runs the commuter trains between San Jose and San Francisco. From 2014 to 2016, SamTrans lost 4 percent of its riders and another 7.6 percent in 2017, while CalTrains ridership has been flat through 2016 and lost 7.9 percent in 2017. Its CEO received $492,500 plus $24,000 in benefits in 2016, for a total of more than $516,000.
  • Atlanta’s MARTA lost 4.8 percent from 2014 to 2016 and 2.1 percent in 2017; its CEO (who recently resigned) earned $369,000 in 2016.
  • Honolulu Area Rapid Transit (HART) has yet to carry a single rider, but its CEO will earn $379,000 this year.
  • Boston’s transit system, the MBTA, is falling apart and it lost 4.0 percent of its riders from 2014 to 2016 and another 3.2 percent in 2017. Its CEO collects about $384,000 plus benefits.

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LaHood to DC Metro Board: “You’re Fired!”

Washington DC’s Metro system has a multibillion-dollar maintenance backlog, declining ridership, and serious problems with labor unions. The systems problems are so bad that Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe asked former Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood, one of the least credible people ever to hold that office, to lead a search for new funds for the agency.

Now LaHood has come out with his proposal. Has he found a billion dollars stuck in the seat cushions of Metro trains? Nope. Has he discovered a treasure map at the White House that leads to a city of gold? Nope. Has he found any money at all? None.

Instead, he proposes to replace Metro’s current sixteen-member board of directors with a “reform board” consisting of “five members who are solely responsible to the transit system, not the parochial interests of the local officials who would appoint them.” Continue reading

What If All American Cars Were Electric?

An Antiplanner reader writes, what “if all vehicles in USA were powered by electricity?” The reader wasn’t sure, but suspected that it would be “impossible to do with electricity as now generated and distributed.” I was inclined to agree, but when I looked into it, the results surprised me.

First, as I’ve noted before, only about a third of the power used to generate electricity ends up being delivered to the end users; the rest is lost in generation and transmission. This would seem to reduce the apparent efficiency of electric cars.

Counter to that, however, internal combustion engines dissipate most of their energy in the form of heat. On average, only about 21 percent of the energy from burning gasoline or Diesel is used to move vehicles; the rest is lost. Electric motors, however, only lose about 20 percent of their energy as heat. This more than offsets the losses from electrical generation and transmission. Continue reading

Zoning Wouldn’t Have Saved Houston

The rain hadn’t stopped falling before numerous commentators blamed Houston’s flooding on a lack of zoning. This is simply untrue.

First, flood-plain zoning focuses on “high-risk” areas, which by definition means areas in the 100-year floodplain. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac require that homes they mortgage be covered by flood insurance if they are in zone A or V, which means the 100-year floodplain.

But the Houston flooding resulting from tropical storm Harvey was a 1,000-year flood. That means neither zoning nor insurance would have made a difference for the homes outside the 100-year floodplain. At least half of all the homes damaged by Harvey flooding were in the “moderate-risk” zone in the 500-year floodplain but outside the 100-year floodplain, and more were in the low-risk area outside the 500-year floodplain. Continue reading