Kill-Switch Rule Under Consideration

Section 24220 of the 2021 infrastructure law directs the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to require that automakers include a device in new cars that will passively detect whether the driver is drunk and keep them from operating the car. NHTSA has until November of this year to write the rule and then new cars made beginning two years after that must comply. The law specifically states that if NHTSA can’t find a device that will accomplish this, then it doesn’t have to require one.

U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Nathanael T. Miller.

This law has led to fears that the government will require automobiles to have “kill switches” that the government can remotely control, thus shutting down people’s freedom of mobility at any time. Defenders of the policy argue that these fears are overblown. Last month, NHTSA issued its advance notice of proposed rule making on the subject and it’s worth looking at it before comments are due next Tuesday, March 5. Continue reading

December Driving 96.9% of 2019

U.S. residents drove 96.88 percent as many miles in December of 2023 as in the same month in 2019, according to estimates released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Though this is down from 104.3 percent in November, driving has been hovering around 100 percent of 2019 levels all year.

In fact, the estimates indicate, Americans drove 100.1 percent as many miles in 2023 as they did in 2019 and 102.0 percent as many miles in 2023 as in 2022. I would judge that driving has completely recovered from the pandemic and is now growing at pre-pandemic levels. Decreases in rush-hour driving due to remote work are made up for by increases in non-rush-hour driving by remote workers running errands, going out for coffee, or attending meetings as well as by people moving from urban to rural areas or from some states to others. Continue reading

November Driving 1.2% More Than in 2019

Americans drove 1.2 percent more miles in November of 2023 than in the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. Rural driving was 6 percent greater than in 2019, while urban driving was 0.9 percent less. This may partially be due to a movement of people from urban to rural areas.

For a discussion of airline, Amtrak, and transit numbers, see the post from earlier this week.

A few states are still seeing major shortfalls in driving. West Virginia is 31 percent below 2019; California is down 21 percent; and the District of Columbia remains 29 percent less than in 2019. Missouri and Washington are also below 2019 levels, but only by 5 to 6 percent. Continue reading

October Driving 99.2% of Pre-Pandemic Levels

Americans drove more than 99 percent as many miles in October of 2023 as they did in the same month in 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Miles of driving have been hovering around 100 percent of pre-pandemic levels since March of 2021.

Transit and airline performances in October were reviewed on December 7 and Amtrak’s on December 11.

Although driving has recovered, the places and times people drive have changed. Rural driving is 2 percent ahead of 2019 numbers while urban driving is 2 percent behind. Within both rural and urban areas, driving is greater on interstate freeways than on other arterials and greater on other arterials than on other roads and streets. Continue reading

Why More Pedestrians Are Dying at Night

Just a few days after the excellent New York Times article about the Bogotá rapid buses, the Times published a data-heavy article about increasing pedestrian fatalities and that fact that most of them take place at night. While the article makes several important points, it also misses two key points that leads it to make some wrong conclusions.

Seeing through the data. Photo by emre0614.

A 2019 Antiplanner policy brief made many of the points found in the Times article: Pedestrian fatalities are up, most of the increase is at night and has taken place on arterial streets, and distractions from cell phone usage may be a part of the problem. All of this information can be dredged out of federal accident databases. Almost two years ago, I noted that Portland and San Jose had released data indicating that a high percentage of fatalities were homeless, which was also mentioned by the Times. Continue reading

Will Reducing Parking Save the Planet?

As stated previously, I can’t take climate change seriously as long as people keep putting forward their wacko ideas that they had long before climate was an issue as “the solution.” The latest example is a claim that ending minimum parking requirements is “one solution to fight climate change.” I think the proponents of this idea are just totally confused.

The article credits Donald Shoup with the idea that eliminating minimum parking requirements “could pave the way for cities to build denser housing, increase public transit options, and reduce their carbon emissions.” Shoup is a decent researcher, but he has made parking the focus of his work since 1975, long before almost anyone was talking about global warming. It is one thing to note that minimum parking requirements might not be necessary. It is another to claim that eliminating them will do all the things listed above. Continue reading

How Long Do Cars Last?

According to one web site, “you can expect a standard car to last around 12 years or about 200,000 miles.” Another site agrees, “The average car lasts around 12 years or around 200,000 miles.” Both of these web sites are wrong.

A 1957 Mercury Montclair, made during the gaudiest era of U.S. automotive design.

This caught my attention when I was reading the MBTA’s State-of-Good-Repair report, which tried to explain Boston transit’s state of poor repair simply as a function of age, and not the agency’s own incompetence. It did so by using cars as an example, claiming that the “useful life” of a car was eight years and anything older than that was in a “state of bad repair.” Continue reading

September VMT Continues to Exceed 2019

Americans drove 1.4 percent more miles in September 2023 than in the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. Vehicle miles of travel (VMT) have exceeded 2019 numbers in seven out of the last twelve months.

Most of the increase in driving was in rural areas. Although September’s rural driving was 4.6 percent greater in 2023 than 2019, urban driving was only 0.1 percent greater. The increase in urban driving was on collector and local streets; freeway and arterial driving were still a little short of 100 percent of 2019 miles. Continue reading

States Shouldn’t Try to Reduce Per-Capita Driving

The most idiotic ideas come from articles written by anti-car writers. This isn’t recent, but a colleague from Washington let me know of a 2022 article from a “public interest” organization called the Frontier Group that reports that “less driving is possible.” Thanks to “compact neighborhoods” and “investments in infrastructure that supports walking, biking or riding transit,” some states have managed to reduce per-capita driving, which the Frontier Group regards as a victory.

To encourage transit while discouraging driving, Washington converted lanes on a bridge that had previously been open to all vehicles into light-rail lines. Image by Sound Transit.

As evidence, the author of the Frontier Group article, Elizabeth Redlington, compared miles of per capita driving by state in 1996 and 2021. Between those two years, some states increased but some declined and the biggest decline was in Washington state, which saw a 15.8 percent drop in per capita driving during that period. Continue reading

Transport and Economic Opportunity: 2020

The nation’s fifty largest urban areas housed 82.5 million jobs in 2020, and auto drivers could reach 98 percent of them in an hour of travel. Transit riders, by comparison, could reach only 8 percent in an hour while bicycle riders could reach 7 percent, according to the University of Minnesota Accessibility Observatory.

The average resident of one of the nation’s fifty largest urban areas can reach 600,000 jobs in a 30-minute auto trip but only 85,000 jobs in a 50-minute transit trip and 92,000 jobs in a 50-minute bike ride.

I’ve previously cited the observatory’s 2019 data many times, but when writing yesterday’s post about travel speeds and productivity, I noticed that it has recently updated the data to 2020. The introduction says the data were collected before the pandemic so “the 2020 results may provide a useful baseline for evaluating the impact that COVID-19 had on access across America.” Continue reading