Not My Utopia

If Waymo and other manufacturers can get the bugs out, driverless cars promise many benefits including reduced congestion and pollution and increased speeds and safety. But anti-car people are upset because the utopia promised by self-driving cars is not the utopia they want, which is a city without, or at least fewer, cars.

A graphical op-ed published in the New York Times argues that cities should design streets for “people not cars,” as if cars don’t have people in them (or the people in them somehow don’t count). Only mass transit counts.

The op-ed distorts numerous facts and issues. For example, it starts out saying that streets in the early 1900s had pedestrians, bicycles, and wagons, and the result was “chaos. . . but it work[ed] because no single mode of transportation is privileged.” Whoever wrote this didn’t actually see those streets in the early 1900s, when New Yorkers complained at least as much about congestion as they do today, pedestrians stuck to the sidewalks (as they do today) because getting in the way of streetcars (which the op-ed doesn’t even mention) was dangerous and no one wanted to step in the pollution left by all the horses.

It then says that driverless car advocates claim that driverless cars will relieve congestion by reducing the number of cars on the road. That’s not what they say at all; instead, they point out that most congestion is caused by slow human reflexes, and driverless cars will have faster reflexes, thus increasing road capacities.

The op-ed also claims that transit can move 25,000 people per hour through a city while cars can move only 600 to 1,600 people an hour. These numbers are just plain imaginary. Light rail and streetcars can’t come close to moving 25,000 people per hour; subways can but only because they aren’t in the streets. Buses can on limited-access bus lanes, but not in city streets.

Meanwhile, a single-lane of a limited access highway can move 2,000 cars an hour, and if those cars have five people each that’s 10,000 people per hour. Of course, the cars aren’t going to have five people each, but neither will the buses or subways be loaded to their full capacities.

Three lanes of a six-lane freeway can therefore move 30,000 people per hour, more than transit. Since they are counting limited access busways or grade-separated subways to get their transit number, they should also count limited access highways for the auto numbers, especially since a six-lane freeway costs a lot less to build than a subway or even a light-rail line, and not much more than a two-lane busway.

Another article — not an op-ed though it is full of opinions — in the New York Times argues “the case for the subway,” claiming that the subway is egalitarian because “it connects rich and poor neighborhoods.” Beijing and London are building new subway lines, so the United States has to as well or it will lose the “subway race.”

The Antiplanner doesn’t find these arguments persuasive: automobiles are far more egalitarian than subways, as before the era of huge transit subways working-class people couldn’t afford to regularly ride transit but they could afford to buy Mr. Ford’s Model T.

The situation isn’t much different today considering that the article estimates that repairing the existing subway will cost well over $50 billion and adding 61 new miles to “neighborhoods without subway access” will cost another $62 billion, or a billion dollars a mile. New York City residents haven’t stepped up to repay the $37 billion in debt incurred from the last time the subways were falling apart, not to mention the even greater amount of unfuneded pension and health-care obligations. Who do they expect will pay for $111-plus billion needed to restore the subways now?
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When jobs decentralized in the 1920s and the working-class decentralized in the 1950s, most older American cities accepted a loss of population as high-density housing near the city centers was replaced by lower-density housing of the sort that most Americans prefer. Some cities lost more than half their population even as their urban areas as a whole continued to grow.

Even Manhattan’s population fell from nearly 2.3 million people in 1910 to 1.4 million in 1980, though New York City’s population grew from 4.8 million to 7.1 million. Since 1980, Manhattan’s population has recovered somewhat to more than 1.6 million people while the city as a whole has grown to 8.5 million.

Admittedly, this growth and the densities required for such growth are dependent on the subway. But are such densities — 72,000 people per square mile in Manhattan and 28,000 per square mile in the city as a whole compared with an average of about 2,500 people per square mile in urban areas in the rest of the country — really necessary?

Supposedly density boosts economic activity, and we in the hinterlands are supposed to be so grateful for all the economic benefits provided by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street bankers that we should be glad to subsidize their tunnels, subways, and other transit systems. But if density is so economically valuable, why was New York City’s mean per capita income in 2015 only about 14 percent more than the national average?

Many lower-density communities — including New York City’s own suburbs — have higher incomes. Seattle’s per capita income is 55 percent greater than New York City’s even though the former’s density is only about one-fourth as much. Bellevue’s income is even higher despite having half the density of Seattle. Manhattan’s income is higher than Seattle’s, but incomes in Palo Alto — density 2,700 people per square mile — are 22 percent greater than Manhattan’s.

Of course, Palo Alto doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but neither could Manhattan survive without being surrounded by lower-income areas. When measured for the nation’s 400 or so urban areas, the correlation between per capita incomes and density is less than 0.22. That’s a little better than random, but not much. (Playing in Excel reveals that any two series of 400 random numbers can have correlation coefficients as high as 0.12.)

Some people want to live in Manhattan densities, and they are welcome to do so. But they have to realize that density comes with a cost, and one of those costs is the cost of maintaining the subways. The best way to fund the subways would be to triple subway fares; if they aren’t willing to pay those fares, they probably really don’t want to live in Manhattan densities.

Outside of New York (and, to a much lesser extent, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington), transit is not the solution to any problem except how to waste money. All of the arguments for transit and against driverless cars are meaningless in other cities and even most of the suburbs of the above six cities.

Are driverless cars going to save cities? The question to ask instead is do we really want to save the Manhattan-like cities promoted by the transit lobby? The answer is that driverless cars are going to completely change the look and feel of cities. If you want your city to look like Manhattan, you will probably be disappointed with the post-driverless car city. But if you want your city to have safe, efficient transportation and you want affordable housing and consumer goods and services, driverless cars should help all of those things regardless of what the cities of the future look like.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

21 Responses to Not My Utopia

  1. Henry Porter says:

    The NYT graphical op-ed showcases the skills of a team with an 12th grade degree in graphic arts, a 5th grade education in economics and a 3rd grade understanding of human behavior.

  2. JimKarlock says:

    “Who do they expect will pay for $111-plus billion needed to restore the subways now?”
    This is yet another cost of high density that the planners don’t like to talk about!

  3. Sandy Teal says:

    I love how so many urban fans idealize streets on a warm sunny summer morning, when people are milling about and sitting on outdoor cafe tables, and no one is in a hurry to get anywhere. Yes, that is an enjoyable part of urban life. About ten days per year.

    The other 355 days of the year it is raining, cold, people have to get to work or the kids to school, and nobody is brunching in the cafes’ wet and cold tables. The people are in their cars getting places quickly while staying warm and dry.

  4. Sketter says:

    According to the Comptroller of NY “New York sent an estimated $40.9 billion more in tax payments to Washington in 2016 than it received back in federal spending,”. So any federal money that goes to any project in NY from my perspective is already theirs is just took a detour through DC before it goes back to the state. Now if you want to talk about a state like Mississippi or Alabama that gets ANY federal funding knowing that those states get more back from the federal government than they put in then I would take someones statement seriously.

    https://www.osc.state.ny.us/press/releases/oct17/100317.htm

  5. Sketter says:

    “Supposedly density boosts economic activity, and we in the hinterlands are supposed to be so grateful for all the economic benefits provided by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street bankers that we should be glad to subsidize their tunnels, subways, and other transit systems. But if density is so economically valuable, why was New York City’s mean per capita income in 2015 only about 14 percent more than the national average?”
    GDP per capita is a more accurate measure of economic activity and not mean per capita income.

  6. aloysius9999 says:

    According to the Comptroller of NY “New York sent an estimated $40.9 billion more in tax payments to Washington in 2016 than it received back in federal spending,” is yet another argument against the existence of a Federal government.

    Is the Comptroller including taxes generated by the stock and commodities markets which are national not local?

    I’m sure the US Coast Guard spends more money in New York harbor than it spends in Nebraska. Would the Comptroller like the USCG to limit spending in New York to its New York income?

  7. Jardinero1 says:

    @Sketter: Fully 85 percent of government spending is Social Security, Department of Defense and Interest on the debt. Where that money gets spent is largely of function or where the retirees live and where DOD chooses to place personnel and engage in procurement.

  8. CapitalistRoader says:

    Getting into the spirit of the times — repealing Constitutional amendments — the Comptroller of New York could put his money where his mouth is by leading an effort to repeal the the 16th. Going back to apportioning taxes by state population would eliminate his state’s balance of payments disparity.

  9. CapitalistRoader says:

    The best way to fund the subways would be to triple subway fares; if they aren’t willing to pay those fares, they probably really don’t want to live in Manhattan densities.

    They wouldn’t want to subsidize their deplorable toilet cleaners’/window washers’/doormans’ subway fares. Subways are welfare for rich people. They gut their skut work done but send those skut workers off to their deplorable suburbs at night via subways so as not to have to see or interact with the proletariat in the evening.

  10. btreynolds says:

    “Now if you want to talk about a state like Mississippi or Alabama that gets ANY federal funding knowing that those states get more back from the federal government than they put in”

    Mississippi and Alabama are occupied territories. Washington has to pay for those military bases somehow!

  11. JOHN1000 says:

    The New York complaint that they get less back in what they pay in taxes is just not true.

    They are only counting direct payments like government grants, welfare, money for highways and transit etc.. Meaning $ you can count as coming into New York’s governmental accounts.

    They do not count the enormous sums spent by the federal government in (1) keeping huge numbers of federal employees, regulators, judicial systems et al in a very expensive environment; (2) costs like Coast Guard and other federal expenditures to protect their waterways; (3) the cost of the government to maintain the economic system (stock markets, etc.) which give new York huge benefits and a lot of highly paid jobs; etc. etc..

    Some will claim that the feds spend $ on similar items in other states – but nowhere does it come close to what is spent in New York. If all of that was included, New York may very well be subsidized by the rest of the country.

  12. Sketter says:

    @JOHN1000
    That’s a nice assumption but do you have any facts or figures to back that up?

  13. rws says:

    I think many of the benefits of density are tied to manufacturing. One great thing about high density is that you’re likely to be near just about any type of economic activity that’s not by definition non-urban (e.g. ranching). That’s great for economic opportunity, and for running a small enterprise: employment opportunities and customers abound. Over time linkages grow, and enterprises pop up to create intermediate goods for other local businesses. But, in the U.S. we’ve become reviled by the process of creating physical things, and have mostly outsourced such activity.

    One microtrend working in the opposite direction is that of boutique producers perhaps best epitomized by craft breweries; they have a “cool factor” that enables them to disarm our collective hositility and charge a premium to meet the high costs of manufacturing in the U.S.

    Anyway, I’ve veered off topic. If U.S. manufacturing were strong, I think the benefits of dense city living would be much greater. But since it’s not, I agree that aside from the soft benefits of increased recreational and social opportunities, density doesn’t have much other inherent value. There’s no reason not to live in the ‘burbs if that’s your preference and you can afford the real estate and car commute, and many positive reasons besides (schools being the one that always first comes to mind for me).

  14. Not Sure says:

    Virginia City, Nevada in the 1800’s, Mark Twain:

    “The sidewalks swarmed with people — to such an extent, indeed, that it was generally no easy matter to stem the human tide. The streets themselves were just as crowded with quartz- wagons, freight-teams, and other vehicles. The procession was endless. So great was the pack, that buggies frequently had to wait half an hour for an opportunity to cross the principal street.

  15. Not Sure says:

    “But, in the U.S. we’ve become reviled by the process of creating physical things, and have mostly outsourced such activity.”

    ???

    US manufacturing is at a near all-time high.

    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS

  16. LazyReader says:

    People forget, before automobiles most cities were horse and carriage driven and they SHIT everywhere, combine with early industries like meat/fat rendering, metals, shipping, food processing, cities were foul smelling disgusting places, the City Beautiful movements in many American cities was to simply clean up their downtowns and civic areas. When electricity came to flourish, electric trains cleaned cities up by eliminating traction animals………..what they really did however was create a means for people to escape the city to new neighborhoods and the elite and wealthy individuals started……..NEW TOWNS in the outskirts or along the city edge. And when the automobile came a knocking less than 30 years later it transformed cities. This anti automobile stuff only started in the 60’s with Jane Jacobs and the highway revolts.
    Cities are the perfect environment for the electric automobiles, even the ones with the shortest ranges can traverse any US city before having to charge and even if charging stations are few and far between where you work…….don’t matter. I carry an extension cord.
    Chevrolet Volt (2nd Generation): 53 miles (not including range extension engine)
    Chevrolet Bolt: 238 miles
    Nissan Leaf (2nd gen): 150 miles
    Hyundai Ioniq: 124 miles
    BMW i3: 114 miles
    Smart FourTwo: 58 miles
    Honda Fit EV: 82 miles
    Tesla Model 3: I don’t care, Tesla’s are for Douche Bags.

  17. sprawl says:

    From Horse Power to Horsepower
    BY ERIC MORRIS
    —cut from article —
    Experts of the day estimated that each horse produced between fifteen and thirty pounds of manure per day. For New York and Brooklyn, which had a combined horse population of between 150,000 and 175,000 in 1880 (long before the horse population reached its peak), this meant that between three and four million pounds of manure were deposited on city streets and in city stables every day. Each horse also produced about a quart of urine daily, which added up to around 40,000 gallons per day for New York and Brooklyn.
    –cut from article —
    Vacant lots across America were piled high with manure;
    in New York these sometimes rose to forty and even sixty feet.
    –cut from article —
    Horse manure is the favored breeding ground for the house fly, and clouds of flies hatched in it (one estimate is that three billion flies hatched in horse manure per day in US cities in the year 1900).

    http://www.accessmagazine.org/articles/spring-2007/horse-power-horsepower/

  18. prk166 says:


    If Waymo and other manufacturers can get the bugs out,
    ” ~Anti-planner

    Bugs are something that you understand, you wrote code to address but some boo-boo in the code caused it to not work right .

    Their problems are not bugs, there are very important things that they do not yet fundamentally understand and hence haven’t even been able to implement. That’s not a bug, that’s a design flaw; that’s a knowledge gap.

    History is full of technologies that the experts claimed were just a few years away…… and they claimed that for decades or more.

    If you’re vehicle can’t “see” a person ___walking___ __SLOWLY___ across the road when the vehicle itself is travelling a very slow speed, well, let’s call a spade a spade. It means that when it comes to robocars they still essentially know f* all.

  19. CapitalistRoader says:

    History is full of technologies that the experts claimed were just a few years away…… and they claimed that for decades or more.

    And vice versa:

    The telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.
    —William Orton, president of Western Union (1876)

    Fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time. Nobody will ever use it, ever.
    Thomas Edison (1889)

    The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty–a fad.
    —Horace Rackham, president of Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer (1903)

  20. LazyReader says:

    History is full of technologies that the experts claimed were just a few years away…… and they claimed that for decades or more.

    I’m still waiting for fusion power and all food in pill form
    One critique of cars in cities is Air pollution. While air pollution control technology has undoubtedly improved, put all those cars in one location, then surround them with a canyon of 500 foot high concrete and brick that keeps the wind from pushing it away.
    The advantage Electric cars have in cities is there’s no localized pollution, regardless of power source, coal, natural gas, whatever those emissions are not IN the city they’re usually 100 miles out.
    The average car in the US accumulate 11,400 miles per year in driving and emits 4.7 tons of co2 per year (11,400 average annual miles at a mileage of 21.6 miles per gallon)
    The electric Chevrolet Bolt (238 mile range on a 60 kilowatt-hour battery equates 3.96 miles per kilowatt hour)
    So accumulating 11,400 miles of Bolt driving equates to 2,874 kilowatt-hours per year of electric consumption.
    Life cycle CO2 equivalent from selected electricity supply technologies. So charging your Bolt for a years worth of driving using the various power sources would emit depending on what you generate from.
    Coal = 2.59 tons per year
    Natural gas = 1.48 tons per year
    Hydroelectric = ~25-150 pounds (electric production incurs no emissions, anaerobic decomposition of vegetation at the bottom of a reservoir emits CO2 and methane when you inundate what used to be forest and vegetated habitat. Hoover dam however was built on a rocky canyon…..no vegetation so no decomposition.)
    Wind = 70-80 pounds (manufacture of materials and transportation to remote sites and maintenance overhaul of life cycle; doesn’t take into consideration natural gas backup for weather which harms capacity factor which may run up to 0.7 tons with gas backup running 50% of the time)
    Nuclear = 40-60 pounds per year. (takes into consideration fuel mining and former processing, other than that, no emissions directly from power production, nuclear CO2 emissions per kw-h set to decrease with factoring of electrically driven fuel processing in the near future)
    Solar PV = 285 pounds
    Geothermal = 285 pounds per year (Carbon dioxide, methane and Carbon monoxide exist in rock fragments dislodged during drilling)
    The price of running charging stations is what makes them costly. In fact you don’t even need as many charging stations. If it’s a station in your building it’s usually different price, Tesla charges 24 cents for Supercharging…….financial genius. If you plug it into your house, electricity is whatever your bill is. Typically the price varies but average is 12 cents per kilowatt hour, New York City is 19.8 cents per kw-h. Accumulating 11,400 miles per year on a 238 mile range means you’re charging your car from depletion to 100% 48 times (not really since mostly you charge to top off once every day or so), 2,874 kilowatt hours of power per year, at ~20 cents/kw-h, it should only cost 569 dollars a year to charge your car if you just plug it into your socket. And if you’re underhanded and secretly keep a 100 foot extension cord in your trunk like me…………NOW granted a 120 volt socket is the slowest means to charge with an average 4 miles of range per hour of charging, but if it’s done at night from 8pm-6am, that’s 10 hours or 40 miles added. Wall mounted home charging units operate at 240 volts; 25 miles per hour. Unless you’re commuting 150 miles to and from every day there’s no reason to even visit a charge station. Even if you commute from Staten Island to Manhattan daily that’s about 50 round trip miles.

  21. CapitalistRoader says:

    Anton Wahlman over at Seeking Alpha has an interesting article on Tesla M3 vs. hybrids:

    Tesla Model 3 Costs More To Charge Than A Gasoline Car

    Let’s summarize the situation, in six easy steps:

    ? The Tesla Model 3 costs twice as much to buy as the hybrid hatchbacks from Toyota, Hyundai and Honda.

    ? The Tesla Model 3 has at best half as much range as those cars, and is far more impacted by temperatures.

    ? The Tesla Model 3 takes at least 10x-20x as long to recharge/refuel – only to get half the range.

    ? You have to assign some number to annual battery depreciation, even if the battery will be fine for at least a decade. That amortization number could be in the ballpark of $1,000 per year.

    ? Considering that these hybrids will cost you only $636 per year in gasoline expense for the average 12,000 mile per year driver, the argument stops right there.

    ? Even if you somehow dream away the battery depreciation, the Tesla Model 3 costs $0.06 per mile from the Tesla Supercharger, whereas the gasoline hybrids cost $0.05 per mile at the current nationwide gasoline price average. In other words, gasoline is cheaper even if you assume away all the other EV costs.

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