The Antiplanner » Transportation

Category Archives: Transportation

Should We Be Paranoid About Connected Vehicles?

By | | Transportation
1 Comment

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.

Continue reading →

DC Metro Rail Far from Fixed

By | | Transportation
13 Comments

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.

Continue reading →

Is Waymo Way More than Google Cars?

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

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.

Continue reading →

Is Congestion Deliberate?

By | | City planning, Transportation
12 Comments

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.

Continue reading →

Hyperloop None

By | | Transportation
12 Comments

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.

Continue reading →

Not All Infrastructure Is Created Equal

By | | News commentary, Transportation
6 Comments

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.

Meet the New Secretary of Transportation

By | | News commentary, Transportation
Leave a comment

In what may turn out to be his least controversial cabinet nomination, President-elect Trump has picked Elaine Chao as Secretary of Transportation. Chao was previously Secretary of Labor under George W. Bush and Deputy Secretary of Transportation under George H.W. Bush. She has also served as director of the Peace Corps and worked as a distinguished fellow for the Heritage Foundation.

Chao was born in Taiwan and when she was 8 years old her family emigrated to the United States, where her father ended up founding a major shipping company that owns a fleet of at least fifteen ships. She earned a degree in economics from Mount Holyoke College in 1975 and an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1979.

Continue reading →

America Has Enough Infrastructure

By | | Transportation
12 Comments

Many people in Washington are talking about infrastructure spending. Infrastructure is a bi-partisan issue, because every elected official is happy to spend other people’s money on projects that will get their names in the paper and contributions to their re-election campaigns.

George Will throws a dose of cold water on the party when he points out that it’s hard to spend money on infrastructure when we’ve thrown up so many roadblocks in the form of environmental reviews. But that’s not the real problem with infrastructure spending. The real problem is that we really don’t need any new infrastructure.

Most writers assume that government spending on infrastructure has a multiplier effect: that every dollar spent will generate more than a dollar of gross domestic product. That worked for early highway spending, which generated a huge amount of new travel and shipping that didn’t exist before. It won’t work for most infrastructure spending today.

Continue reading →

Amtrak’s World-Class Losses

By | | Transportation
1 Comment

Amtrak issued its F.Y. 2016 unaudited financial results last week with a glowing press release that claimed a “new ridership record and lowest operating loss ever.” Noting that “ticket sales and other revenues” covered 94 percent of Amtrak’s operating costs, Amtrak media relations called this “a world-class performance for a passenger carrying railroad.” The reality is quite a bit more dismal.

Many new high-tech firms attract investors despite losing money, but a 45-year-old company operating an 80-year-old technology shouldn’t really brag about having its “lowest loss ever.” The “world-class performance” claim is based on the assumption that trains elsewhere lose money, which is far from true: most passenger trains in Britain and Japan make money, partly because they are at least semi-privatized.

Moreover, a close look at the unaudited report reveals that Amtrak left a lot of things out of its press release: passenger miles carried by Amtrak declined; ticket revenues declined; and the average length of trip taken by an Amtrak passenger declined. The main reasons for Amtrak’s positive results were an increase in state subsidies (which Amtrak counts as passenger revenue) and a decrease in fuel and other costs.

Continue reading →

Still Unreliable After All These Months

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
Leave a comment

When Denver’s new airport rail line experienced severe glitches shortly after it opened, including malfunctioning crossing gates and a lightning strike that shut down the entire line for seven hours, among other problems, transit officials assured the public that they were just getting the bugs out of the system. But now, more than six months after it opened, the bugs are still thriving.

The crossing gate problem is so severe that the Federal Transit Administration has threatened to shut down the line until it is corrected. The contractor that built and operates the line tried to claim the lightning strike was an act of God, so the contractor shouldn’t be held responsible, but Regional Transit District officials responded that they had pointed out the company’s design was vulnerable to lightning as early as 2013, yet the company did nothing to fix the flaw. Meanwhile, the system continues to perform unreliably.

Now RTD has been forced to admit that two other lines being built by the same company won’t open on time. RTD claims that it saved money by entering into a public-private partnership for the line in what is known as a “design-build-operate” contract. In fact, it saved no money at all, but was merely getting around a bond limit the voters had imposed on the agency. If the private contractor borrows a billion dollars or so and RTD agrees to pay the contractor enough to repay the loan, the debt doesn’t appear on RTD’s books. Taxpayers will still end up paying interest in the loans, which actually makes it more expensive than if RTD had stayed within its debt limit.

Do run the course under the supervision of price of viagra pills the doctor; since, they are the one to decide best and better for you. purchase sildenafil If you want to read more and know more regarding erectile dysfunction. But this type of cost of viagra robertrobb.com has no such ads and medical representatives. The medicines can be a good solution if your levitra 5mg marriage is in trouble due to your poor performance in bedroom. Continue reading →