Search Results for: car sharing marginal average

Dude, Where’s My Driverless Car?

By | | Policy brief
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A minor footnote in the history of the COVID-19 pandemic is that this may be the first major crisis in history that was assisted by driverless vehicles. A Chinese company named Neolix is using its driverless delivery vans to transport medical supplies and sterilize streets in Wuhan.

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

I’ve been promoting the idea that the advent of driverless cars means we shouldn’t be wasting money building archaic rail transit projects since 2010. Now, a decade later, seems an appropriate time to see how far the industry has come and how far it has to go to make widespread use of driverless cars a reality. Some say that the task of creating a fully driverless car is more difficult than anticipated and we won’t have them for many more years. Continue reading →

Prediction: 95% of 2030 Travel by Self-Driving Cars

By | | Transportation
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“By 2030,” says a new report from a group that calls itself RethinkX, “95% of U.S. passenger miles traveled will be served by on-demand autonomous electric vehicles owned by fleets, not individuals.” The Antiplanner is more optimistic about the rapid growth of self-driving cars than most, but RethinkX’s prediction is more dramatic than anything the Antiplanner has said.

As recognized in this more moderate report from UC Davis, RethinkX’s statement is really three predictions in one: first, about self-driving cars; second, about what powers those cars; and third, about who owns those cars. I think 95 percent by 2030 is optimistic for any one of these predictions, much less all of them.

First, the decision about what powers cars is completely, 100 percent independent of the decision about whether humans or computers drive cars. So long as the United States gets most of its electricity from fossil fuels, even natural gas, the environmental benefits from converting to electric cars is negligible, especially since we can make gasoline-powered cars more fuel-efficient. Continue reading →

Pittsburgh Bridge Collapse

By | | Transportation
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Just when the infrastructure issue seemed to be settled for awhile, the failure of the 52-year-old Fern Hollow bridge in Pittsburgh has reawakened it, especially as the collapse took place just a few hours before President Biden was scheduled to speak in Pittsburgh. “I hope it’s a wake-up call to the nation that we need to make these infrastructure investments,” Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman told local reporters.

Photo from the Pittsburgh Department of Public Safety. Click image for a larger view.

No one yet knows why the bridge collapsed, but numerous media reports say that it was rated to be in poor condition. Inspection reports reveal, however, that the part of the bridge in poor condition was its superstructure while its substructure was considered “satisfactory.” Bad substructure may cause a bridge to collapse, but not, generally, bad superstructure. A 2017 inspection concluded that the bridge “meets minimum tolerable limits to be left in place as is.” As a result, the bridge wasn’t scheduled to be repaired or replaced under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Continue reading →

More Fake News from New York Times

By | | Transportation
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Americans are expected to buy a record number of cars in 2016. The American Community Survey says that the share of American workers taking cars to work grew from 86.3 percent in 2010 to 89.7 percent in 2015. So naturally, the New York Times says that America is “over the whole car thing.” The story is illustrated by a photo of riders on a rather empty Los Angeles subway, one of the least-used subways in America.

Despite the misleading illustration, the gist of the article is not that Americans are abandoning cars for transit but that they might abandon car ownership for car sharing. What the Times misses is that a car that is shared might travel 75,000 miles per year, compared with around 15,000 for a privately owned car. That means that shared cars will need to be replaced every three or four years instead of every 20 years.

In other words, car sharing doesn’t mean lower sales for automakers. It might give automakers that can rapidly introduce new products with new technologies a new advantage over manufacturers with longer product cycles. It will also reduce the demand for parking lots.

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The Death of the Auto Industry as We Know It?

By | | Transportation
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Adam Jonas, head of auto research at Morgan Stanley, is predicting the end of the auto industry “as we know it.” Or, at least, that’s what Business Insider is reporting–Jonas’ actual article appears to be behind a paywall.

As near as the Antiplanner can tell, what Jonas is actually saying is that self-driving cars will completely change the auto industry, and industry analysts who fail to account for that change will lose out. The actual title of Jonas’ article is “Death of an Auto Analyst.”

According to the report, Jonas “sees a world in which everyone rents a car instead of owning one.” This means the industry will have to change from one that sells cars to consumers to one that sells cars to car-sharing firms that rent them to consumers. He may believe that this will change the dynamics of auto making such that, for example, style becomes less important than functionality.

Continue reading →