Search Results for: driving in europe

Europe More “Auto-Dependent” Than U.S.

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Before the pandemic, Europeans relied on automobiles for 70 percent of their travel, compared with 77 percent for U.S. residents. But after the pandemic, in 2021, the European share of passenger travel that used automobiles climbed to 80 percent, while the U.S. share increased only to 78 percent (and dropped to 74 percent in 2022), according to a recently released report from the European Union. That means that Europe is more auto-dependent than the U.S.

Click image to download a 12.4-MB PDF of this report.

Although the report is labeled “2023,” it actually was released in late January 2024 and includes data through 2021. The title of the report is “key figures,” which is literally true: it consists almost solely of figures as in charts, with little or no actual data. However, the charts are clear and can be read to the nearest percent or so. Meanwhile, National Transportation Statistics table 1-40 shows the share of passenger travel in the United States that relies on autos, airplanes, rail, and other modes. Continue reading →

Cities More Accessible in U.S. Than Europe

By | | Transportation
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“Should the U.S. repair crumbling roads and highways to enhance car-based mobility or replace them with new public transit infrastructure that re-orients U.S. commuting systems away from their current car dependence?” asks a paper recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. To answer the question, the paper compared accessibility via transit and driving in about 50 U.S. and 50 European cities. If transit made European cities more accessible, the researchers reasoned, then it would make sense for the U.S. to emphasize transit as well.

Should the United States attempt to build as much transit infrastructure as is found in Europe even if doing so reduces people’s access to jobs and other economic opportunities?

Instead, the researchers — two economists from Yale and one from UC San Diego — found that U.S. urbanites had far more access to their cities than Europeans did in theirs. Moreover, Europeans using cars had far more access to their cities than those who relied on transit. This shouldn’t be a surprise to those familiar with the research published by the University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory, but it seems to have surprised the people doing this research. Continue reading →

November Driving 1.5% More Than in 11/2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 1.5 percent more miles in November 2022 than November 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. This is the third month in a row that driving exceeded 100 percent of pre-pandemic levels. For the year to date, Americans drove 99.99 percent as many miles as in 2019, so if December is even just 0.2 percent above 100 percent, the year as a whole will be as well.

States where driving was well ahead of 2019 include South Dakota (20%), Florida, Missouri, and Rhode Island (all 14%), and Hawaii (12%). Hawaii is surprising as much driving there is by tourists, and the tourist industry has been decimated by the pandemic. Apparently, it is recovering. States where driving remains short of 2019 include West Virginia (-22%), California (-13%), Minnesota (-9%), and New Jersey (-8%), as well as the District of Columbia (-14%). Continue reading →

Tesla’s Self-Driving Beta Test

By | | Transportation
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Tesla released what it calls “full self-drive beta” software to selected Tesla owners last week, and while it does not really make a Tesla into a true driverless car, it works pretty well under most conditions and provides a glimpse of what driverless cars will be like in the near future.

Tesla has taken a different approach to autonomy from other manufacturers. While Waymo, Ford, and GM driverless cars rely heavily on extremely precise maps, which means they can only be used within “geofenced” (i.e., mapped) areas, Elon Musk has criticized this approach. In technical terms, an autonomous car that relies on maps is called a level 4 vehicle while Tesla wants to go straight to level 5, meaning a vehicle that can go anywhere based on the geography that it detects with on-board sensors. Continue reading →

Driving Bounces Back

By | | Transportation
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The mayor of San Diego wants to spend $177 billion expanding the region’s transit system in order to make San Diego like “Barcelona, Madrid, Paris.” Meanwhile, Barcelona, Madrid, and Paris are becoming more like U.S. cities, at least in terms of the transportation habits of their residents. Driving is the dominant form of travel in all European cities and is rebounding fast after pandemic lock-downs.

Of course, driving is rebounding even faster in the United States, according to INRIX estimates. Total driving at the end of June, the entire month of July, and the first week of August was more than it had been in the weeks before the pandemic. Of course, it was the middle of winter before the virus, but that’s still an impressive comeback.

Interestingly, that driving hasn’t brought congestion back to its pre-COVID levels. Morning rush-hour driving in most urban areas was only only around 70 to 80 percent of pre-shutdown levels while afternoon rush-hour driving was 80 to 90 percent, with afternoon levels exceeding 100 percent in just a couple of urban areas. As a result, rush-hour speeds are significantly higher than they were before the pandemic. Continue reading →

Should the U.S. Be More Like Europe?

By | | Policy brief
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“What about Europe?” people often ask when I critique rail transit or high-speed rail. “Why can’t passenger trains work here as well as they work there?” We can answer this question with the help of the recently released EU Transport in Figures, published by the European Commission.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

As my friend Wendell Cox observed, this publication, which is based on 2016 data, shows that Europe and the United States are “more similar than different.” In both areas, he notes, the automobile is the dominant form of transport, accounting for 78.8 percent of passenger miles in the U.S. and 72.4 percent in Europe. Other modes also have similar shares of travel with the exception of rail, which is 6.7 percent in Europe but only 0.5 percent in the United States. In general, concludes Cox, Europe “is more like the United States than many retro-urbanists, not to mention casual tourists, assume.” Continue reading →

Will Apple Join the Self-Driving Car Race?

By | | Transportation
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Apple is planning to put an electric car on the market by 2020. No, Apple is planning to build a self-driving car. No, it’s not. It would be stupid to do so.

Rumors about Apple, which has the highest market capitalization of any company in the world, are an industry in itself, so the rumor world was thrilled to learn that Apple had leased a modest Dodge Caravan and was driving it around Silicon Valley festooned with cameras, Lidar, and other devices.

Meanwhile, Apple has hired hundreds of auto engineers away from Tesla, General Motors, Ford, and other companies with the goal of putting as many as 1,000 of them to work on the so-called Apple Car. (Ironically, less than a month after being fined more than $100 million for agreeing not to poach employees from Google, Adobe, and Intel, Apple is being sued by battery maker A123 for allegedly poaching its experts.)

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Buying a Self-Driving Car

By | | Transportation
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BMW has announced that it will demonstrate a valet-parking car at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month. This is more than a car that can parallel park by itself. Instead, it is a car that can cruise through a parking garage until it finds an empty space and park there until recalled on a smart phone (or smart watch), at which time it will drive itself to the car’s owner.


Official BMW photo of a car supposedly demonstrating self-parking capabilities. Click image for a larger view.

BMW hasn’t said yet when this feature might be available to actual car-buyers. Some suggest that it might be available on BMW 7-series cars in 2016, but that is only speculation.

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The European Transport Myth

By | | Transportation
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An article in Transport Reviews compares U.S. and European transit usage and argues that Europeans use transit more because they have better transit service, low fares, multi-modal integration, high taxes and restrictions on driving, and land-use policies that promote compact, mixed-use developments–all things that American planners want to do here. One obvious problem with the paper is that it doesn’t quantitatively assess how much each of those factors actually contributes to transit usage. If high fuel taxes are responsible for 95 percent of the difference, then efforts to promote transit-oriented development or multi-modal integration in American cities are likely to be a big waste.

A more subtle problem with the paper is that it measures transit usage in trips, not passenger miles. This leads to a bias in favor of shorter trips: Netherlanders, the Transport Reviews article says, take 26 percent of their trips by bicycle, but they certainly don’t cycle for 26 percent of their passenger miles. Yet longer trips are actually more valuable than shorter ones because they can reach more destinations: a two-mile trip can access four times as much land as a one-mile trip.

When measured in terms of passenger miles, instead of trips, European transit mobility looks a lot less impressive. Eurostat measures four kinds of personal mobility by country: autos, buses, intercity trains, and metros/trams. The agency’s latest report that shows passenger kilometers by country has data through 2006. The table below compares these numbers (converted to passenger miles and divided by 2006 populations) with similar data for the United States.

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Let’s Be Like Europe and Build More Trains!

By | | Transportation
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One recently revealed aspect of the European debt crisis is the role European passenger trains played in running up national debts. The Greek rail system, for example, has debts of $13 billion, or about 5 percent of Greece’s gross national product. Rail workers get paid so well that it would be cheaper to hire taxis to move passengers, at least if the taxis carried two or more passengers at a time.

Greece spends $1.20 per passenger mile on passenger trains. That’s twice what the U.K. spends, but even the U.K. trains are hardly a model of efficiency considering that driving in the U.S. costs only about 35 cents a vehicle mile, including subsidies to highway. Divide that by however many passengers you think are in the cars to get an average cost per passenger mile.

Spain, meanwhile, went so far overboard in building high-speed rail lines that it recently shut one down because it was attracting only nine passengers a day. That’s what happens when you let politicians decide where the trains should go.

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