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CES & Self-Driving Cars

By | | Transportation
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The Consumer Electronics Show opens in Las Vegas today, so the next few days are likely to see new hype (some say overhype) about self-driving cars. Last month, Yahoo reported that Ford and Google would announce that they would build self-driving cars together, but Ford’s announcement yesterday about its electronics plans didn’t mention Google. Ford may still make an announcement with Google later in the show, but it is curious that Yahoo’s original story doesn’t seem to be live anymore.

A combination that has been confirmed is between General Motors and Lyft. While their goal is to create a system of shared, self-driving vehicles, the only substance in the announcement was that General Motors was “investing” $500 million in Lyft. So it isn’t clear which, if either, company will be developing the software and hardware needed to make GM cars self-driving.

A Ford-Google partnership probably makes more sense than a GM-Lyft combine. With the former, Ford offers car-making expertise while Google offers the software and the resulting products could be used for car sharing, individual ownership, trucking, and other services. The GM-Lyft partnership is limited to just sharing and neither of the partners has the software to do true autonomous cars.

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DC Streetcar Still Not Open for Business

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Speaking of poorly managed governments, Washington, DC’s streetcar, which has been planned for at least nine years, won’t be carrying any revenue passengers in 2015. That’s news because, just a couple of months ago, the city promised that it would be in business by the end of this year.


The string of embarrassing accidents, fires, and other problems have proven so embarrassing that someone has rewritten the Simpson’s monorail song for the DC streetcar.

Despite all those years of planning, the streetcar continues to be accident-prone, partly because the streetcar route is too close to a parking strip and partly because streetcars, unlike buses, can’t swerve around poorly parked cars. When the streetcar hit a city police car that was parked over the white line, the city suspended the streetcar driver for five days without pay, but otherwise DDOT blames the motorists for improper parking. Of course, it wasn’t the motorists who decided to run inflexible, 30-ton vehicles down a busy street just inches from a parking strip.

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Still Not Carrying Passengers

By | | Transportation
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Washington DC’s H Street streetcar ran down a police car last week. But, as the Washington Post headline notes, it’s “still not carrying passengers.”


Still in the testing stage a year after construction was supposedly complete. Wikimedia photo by Michael J.

The District Department of Transportation began testing the streetcar about a year ago, and the result was so many accidents that the DC council seriously considered scrapping the whole thing. Instead, it asked for an expert peer review by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). Since APTA has never met a rail transit project it didn’t like, the review’s conclusion was pretty much predetermined.

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Streetcar Entitlements

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The response of Sacramento streetcar advocates to voter rejection of their pet project reminds me of a little boy who has a temper tantrum when he doesn’t get the expensive Christmas present he wants. Like the little boy, it apparently never occurs to the streetcar crowd that the extraordinarily high cost of their scheme was too much for taxpayers to support. Instead, they act like they are entitled to the streetcar, and anyone who doesn’t want to help pay for something they will never use is just a grinch.

Building a streetcar requires tearing up perfectly good pavement that can be used by cars, trucks, and buses and inserting tracks. The cost of one mile of streetcar line can be more than the cost of a mile of a suburban four-lane freeway, yet the streetcar will never move more than 2 or 3 percent as many passenger miles per day as that freeway.

The streetcars themselves have fewer seats than a standard, 40-foot bus, yet cost nearly ten times as much and occupy more street space and so contribute more to congestion. Analysts predicted that a proposed streetcar in Anaheim would reduce the capacity of the streets to move cars by four times as much as the number of cars it would take off the road.

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Sacramento Voters Reject Streetcar

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Sacramento wants to build a streetcar, and since everyone knows that streetcars increase property values, the city asked property owners to agree to pay a tax to help pay for it. Under California law, two-thirds of voters must agree, but the city must have believed that everyone loves streetcars so much that they would overwhelmingly agree to pay the tax.

Not so much. In fact, they couldn’t even get half to support it. The final vote count was something like 48 percent in favor.

Not to worry. Even though a nineteenth-century technology makes no sense in a twenty-first-century city; even though the people don’t want to pay for it; even though it has so far taken ten years to plan something that was obsolete a hundred years ago and certainly can’t respond to the almost daily changes in tastes, technologies, and travel patterns we experience today; they’re going to try to find a way to build it anyway. “We’ll look for other sources of funds,” said one city councillor. “We’re really committed to keep the project on track.” In other words, committed to stupidity.
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Requiem for a Streetcar Company

By | | Transportation
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The United Streetcar Company was supposed to create 300 full-time jobs and bring millions of dollars into the Oregon economy. Based on these promises, the company’s parent, Oregon Iron Works, lobbied hard to get a $4 million federal grant to build its first streetcar, which was an almost exact copy of streetcars that Portland had purchased from the Czech Republic for $1.9 million apiece. The Oregon congressman who earmarked the grant for the company confidently predicted that it would sell a billion dollars worth of streetcars to American cities in the next twenty years.


United Streetcar received $4 million to build this prototype car. The car never worked very well and fixing it cost another $3 million. Wikipedia photo by Steve Morgan.

The state of Oregon then put up $20 million in lottery money, which Portland used to order six new streetcars. Various problems forced the company to more-or-less arbitrarily reduce the order to five streetcars for the same price. “You’re not getting less,” gushed the company president unapologetically, “I actually think you’re getting more.” She later took a job as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for manufacturing, proving once again that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

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Rail Transit Debates

By | | Transportation
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Debate over the Maryland Purple Line continues. The governor is expected to make a decision in a few months.

Debate over a proposed streetcar in Sacramento begins. The measure will be voted on by local residents in May.

Debate begins over funding for two new light-rail lines in Vancouver, BC. Proponents include a council of suburban mayors, all of whom no doubt hope that light-rail lines will eventually be built to their cities. (The Antiplanner will have more to say about this one in a few days.)
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Already Built, DC Streetcar May Be Shut Down Before It Opens

By | | Transportation
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Washington’s H Street streetcar line may be shut down before it even begins operation. In testing since last fall, the line has already experienced collisions with 11 automobiles and one railcar spontaneously combusted.

DC has already spent $200 million on the project and once had planned to spend a total of $2 billion on streetcar lines in the district. But, aside from accidents, testing revealed that the streetcars created major congestion problems and slowed down buses that carry people to work on H Street. The city predictably blames most of the accidents on the auto drivers, but if the city hadn’t put the streetcar there, most of the accidents never would have happened.

“I’m not going to ask for money from the citizens of this jurisdiction nor from this council for something I can’t manage,” says the director of the district’s Department of Transportation. The city has asked the American Public Transportation Association–hardly an unbiased source–to review the streetcar project.

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Outrageously Expensive Transit

By | | Transportation
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The average cost of light-rail construction has grown to nearly $200 million per mile, according to data in the Federal Transit Administration’s 2016 proposal for capital grants to transit agencies under the “New Starts/Small Starts” program. This is up from $176 million a mile in the 2015 plan.

San Diego, which started the light-rail craze when it built the nation’s first modern light-rail line in 1981 at an average cost of well under $10 million per mile–less than $18 million per mile in today’s dollars–wants to spend $194 million per mile on a new Mid-Coast line. Boston, which can’t afford to maintain its existing increasingly decrepit rail system, wants to spend $489 million per mile on a 4.7-mile extension of one of its light-rail lines. The least-expensive light-rail line in the budget is a 2.3-mile extension to an existing light-rail line in Denver costing a mere $98 million per mile, nearly twice as much as the least-expensive new light-rail line in the 2013 plan.

Streetcars, which were supposed to be cheap, are costing an average of $59 million a mile, up from $46 million a mile in last year’s plan. That’s less than a third the average cost of light rail today, but still more than three times as expensive as San Diego’s original light-rail line. (I’m counting the Tacoma rail line as a streetcar, as it uses equipment that is nearly identical to the Portland streetcar; Sound Transit and the FTA call it light rail mainly to justify taxing Tacoma residents to help pay for the outrageously expensive light-rail lines being built in Seattle.) The FTA proposes to fund another streetcar line in Charlotte, and streetcars in Sacramento and Fort Lauderdale are also in the plan though not recommended for immediate funding.

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Milwaukee Streetcar Debate Continues

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Supporters of a Milwaukee streetcar boondoggle are chiding a city alderman for expressing the fear that streetcar passengers could be vulnerable to crime. Apparently, opponents of progressive ideas like streetcars aren’t supposed to use real facts when making the case against those ideas.

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics reports crime by transit mode. When those numbers are compared with passenger miles by transit mode, it turns out that light-rail riders are far more likely to be victims of crime than bus riders. Light-rail riders are three times as likely to be raped or sexually assaulted, twice as likely to suffer aggravated assault, and five times as likely to be robbed as bus riders. Yet anyone who points this out is apparently “fear mongering.” Streetcars aren’t exactly the same as light rail, but they share one feature that buses don’t have: the driver is often in a separate compartment from the passengers, so can’t do as good a job monitoring passenger behavior.
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On the other hand, the Wisconsin Reporter reveals the “incestuous relationships” among streetcar supporters, all connected together by a PR firm called Meuller Communications. All this really points out is that streetcars involve lots of money and lots of people want to get in on the action. Contrary to some, the Koch Brothers don’t stand to make a dime if streetcar lines are not built, but many other people and companies stand to make millions if they are built. For this reason alone, Milwaukeeans should be wary of any claims made for streetcars.