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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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Suffer the Auto Drivers

By | | Housekeeping, Transportation
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Jesus said, “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.” Today, people use the word suffer in a very different way, as in, “Make automobile users suffer, and forbid them if you can, for of such is the work of the devil.” Some mental conditions like sans prescription viagra find out here stress, anxiety and depression could also lead to erection issues in males. This is an incredible drug that most of the men are the culprits and they face this issue. http://www.midwayfire.com/?product=6345 generic cialis usa Here are buy generic levitra some reasons why you should have sex with your partner every day. Many online pharmacies are viagra no prescription http://www.midwayfire.com/apparatus.asp claiming to provide version of the same drug at a lesser price. At least, that is the declared attitude of the Broward County Planning Council, as reported by the (Ft. Lauderdale) Sun-Sentinel.

The Antiplanner wishes everyone a happy holiday and hopes no one has to suffer this weekend no matter how they decide to travel. News will be slow next week so postings may be light.

To Depreciate or Not to Depreciate

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner has previously argued that Amtrak uses “accounting tricks” to make the Northeast Corridor appear profitable and the system as a whole appear to cover most of its operating expenses out of revenues. The most important of these tricks is that it appears to count maintenance as a capital cost. As a 2001 Congressional Research Service report noted, “Under generally accepted accounting principles, maintenance is considered an operating expense,” but Amtrak excludes it when it compares operating revenues and expenses.

Recently, I met with an Amtrak official who explained that the situation is a little more complicated than I described. Historically, he said, railroads had counted maintenance against revenues when calculating their bottom lines, but this led some railroads to defer maintenance in order to improve their apparent profitability. As I understood his explanation, the Interstate Commerce Commission corrected this several decades ago by changing the accounting rules so that maintenance would be included in capital costs. This eliminated any incentive to defer maintenance.

I sort of understood that, but I’m not an accountant, so I looked up the history of ICC accounting rules. The best explanation was in a 2007 paper in the Accounting Historians Journal called “The End of Betterment Accounting.”

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Light Rail Reduces Property Values

By | | Transportation
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Rail advocates love to claim that light rail and streetcars increase nearby property values even if hardly anyone rides them. According to their theory, the permanence of the rail line gives developers and potential buyers or tenants a sense of security that transit will be there when they need it.

This isn’t true in the case of the Norfolk light rail, a.k.a., the Tide. According to a study by economists at the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank, Norfolk’s light rail actually reduced property values.

Rail transit, notes the study, could increase values because “homeowners could benefit from increased accessibility and transit related economic development.” On the other hand, “homes in a close proximity to rail transit could experience disamenity effects from crime, noise and parking issues.” Whatever the cause, the study found that “properties within 1,500 meters experienced a decline in sales price of nearly 8 percent.” At least in this case, the study concluded, “accessibility benefits do not outweigh apparent local costs.”

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Should We Be Paranoid About Connected Vehicles?

By | | Transportation
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Last week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Commission (NHTSC) formally proposed to mandate that all new cars be equipped with “vehicle-to-vehicle” (V2V) communications, also known as connected-vehicle technology. This would allow vehicles stuck in traffic to let other vehicles know to take alternate routes. It would also allow the governments–or hackers–to take control of your car anytime they want.

The good news is that the Trump Administration will take office before NHTSC has a chance to put this rule into effect, and there is a good chance that Trump will kill it. The bad news is that this rule will feed the paranoia some people have over self-driving cars.

This article, for example, considers self-driving cars to be a part of the “war on the automobile” because they offer an “easy way to track the movements of individuals in society.” In fact, the writer of the article is confusing self-driving cars with connected vehicles. As the Antiplanner noted as recently as last week, none of the at least 20 companies working on self-driving cars or software, as far as I can tell, are making V2V an integral part of their systems. This is mainly because they don’t trust the government to install or maintain the infrastructure needed to make it work but also because self-driving cars don’t need that technology.

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DC Metro Rail Far from Fixed

By | | Transportation
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Washington Metro has been interrupting service for various “safety surges” (they call them “surges” because it sounds better than “slowdowns”), but according to the Federal Transit Administration it has a lot more work to do. The FTA says that the rail system’s power supply is “in a deteriorated condition” and the tunnels and tracks have numerous defects that haven’t even all been identified, much less put on the schedule to be fixed.

Not surprisingly, the American Public Transportation Association’s latest ridership report reveals that Metro ridership in the second quarter of 2016 was 11.5 percent less than the same quarter the year before. As the Antiplanner has previously noted, this decline took place before the delays caused by the maintenance work, so most of it is because people have found other means of transportation due to Metro Rail’s low reliability.

Washington is not alone. Rail rapid transit systems in Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia are just as bad off, and New York’s and San Francisco’s aren’t far behind. APTA’s president even issued a rather desperate-sounding op-ed begging for money to repair obsolete and dying forms of transportation.

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Is Waymo Way More than Google Cars?

By | | Transportation
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Google has spun off its self-driving car programs into a subsidiary called Waymo (which is apparently short for “a new WAY forward for MObility”), and Forbes celebrates by claiming that this is “waymo” than just a car. In fact, the real significance is that, by moving self-driving cars out of the company’s X Lab research division, Google is signaling that its technology is sophisticated enough that it is ready to start working on sales and not just research.

Uber has gotten headlines by starting a self-driving car-sharing service in San Francisco without getting permission from the state. This was supposed to be similar to the service it has going in Pittsburgh, where it is legal. The state of California immediately ordered Uber to shut down its service. (When someone documented Uber vehicles running red lights, the company blamed it on the drivers, not the self-driving technology.)

This is ironic because California’s self-driving car law was passed at Google’s instigation to allow for experiments like this. But the state passed regulations that were stricter than Google expected, so now even Google is doing most of its experimentation in places like Texas, which hasn’t passed a self-driving car law. Legal scholars say that operating a self-driving car is legal in most states so long as a licensed driver is behind the wheel ready to take over if necessary (which is how Uber is running its trial in Pittsburgh and planned to do it in San Francisco). But the California law is much more stringent.

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Is Congestion Deliberate?

By | | City planning, Transportation
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According to the Texas Transportation Institute, the costs of congestion have quadrupled since 1982. The Antiplanner has often argued that cities have deliberately allowed congestion to increase in the erroneous belief that more congestion would lead people to stop driving and start riding transit or use other modes of travel. However, the evidence for this is merely anecdotal; it’s hard to imagine city officials admitting even in private memos that congestion was their goal.

An article in last Friday’s New York Post, however, makes the case that congestion is deliberate. “City officials have intentionally ground Midtown to a halt with the hidden purpose of making drivers so miserable that they leave their cars at home and turn to mass transit or bicycles,” reports the newspaper that was founded by Alexander Hamilton. The article specifically blames “today’s gridlock” on the “Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations.”

Sensational news, perhaps, but not necessarily persuasive. The article attributes this information to “high-level sources,” later saying it comes from “a former top NYPD official.” While the article offered specific examples of ways the city has increased congestion, including the conversion of auto lanes to bicycle lanes and restrictions on the ability of drivers to make turns at many intersections, it offers no documentation that these things were done specifically to make auto drivers miserable.

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Hyperloop None

By | | Transportation
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When Elon Musk first proposed the hyperloop–a transportation tube between Los Angeles and San Francisco–the Antiplanner panned the idea saying that it would cost a lot more than Musk claimed, that passengers would be reluctant to be accelerated to high speeds in a windowless capsule, and that a point-to-point technology wouldn’t be able to compete with the door-to-door convenience of the automobile. Recently, New York magazine has published an article confirming the first point and possibly the second.

In “A Kink in the Hyperloop,” writer Benjamin Wallace recounts efforts by venture capitalists to put together a company called Hyperloop One that would build and operate the hyperloop. Most of the article deals with personal frictions between the various players, but a telling statement near the end of the article blows up the entire idea: “The projected cost-per-mile has gone from 6 percent to 60 percent of that of California High Speed Rail.”

Musk’s original cost projection for a San Francisco-to-Los Angeles line was $7.5 billion. If costs have increased ten times, the current projection must be $75 billion.

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Not All Infrastructure Is Created Equal

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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An op-ed in the New York Daily News argues that Trump’s infrastructure plan “will result in wasteful spending and do little to fix crumbling facilities or promote economic growth” unless it is properly targeted, and the best way to target is to spend only on infrastructure that can be built and maintained with user fees.

The country should also avoid building new infrastructure that will soon be obsolete. For example, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) spent nearly half a billion dollars building the Airport Connector, a 3.2-mile elevated cable-car line to the Oakland Airport. BART expected to cover operating costs by charging people $6 to travel between the airport and the nearest BART station. Instead, it is losing money, and they are blaming Uber and Lyft. It was a dumb idea even if they did recover operating costs, but new technologies have made it even dumber still.

The Trump Administration needs to learn the Antiplanner’s Law of Transportation Infrastructure: Any transportation technology that requires new infrastructure is doomed to failure because it will be unable to compete against technologies using existing infrastructure such as the nation’s hundreds of commercial airports and millions of miles of highways.