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Innovation Does Not Mean Expensive

By | | Transportation
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“Innovation” means introducing new things. But to be successful, innovators don’t just introduce new things, they introduce things that are cheaper and better than what preceded them. Steam trains were a successful innovation because they were faster and less expensive than horses and wagons. Automobiles were successful because they were faster and less expensive than trains. But if automobiles had come first, no one would have successfully introduced the “innovation” of steam trains.

A New York transit advocacy group called the Transit Center has a very different view of innovation. As expressed in the above graphic from its recent report, A People’s History of Urban Transit Innovation, innovation doesn’t mean finding new things or finding ways of doing things better for less money. Instead, it means selling the public on old things that are more expensive and less effective than what we already have.

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Three Months of Work for a Three-Week Bill

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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After three months of debate, Congress has agreed to extend federal highway and transit spending for three weeks. Authority to spend federal dollars (mostly from gas taxes) on highways and transit was set to expire tomorrow. The three-week extension means that authority will expire on November 20.

Many members in Congress hope that the three-week delay will allow them to reconcile the House and Senate versions of a six-year bill. Among other things, the Senate version spends about $16.5 billion more than the House bill, $12.0 billion on highways and $4.5 billion on transit. The two bills also use different sources of revenue to cover the difference between gas tax revenues and the amounts many members of Congress want to spend.

To cover this difference, the Senate bill, known as the “Developing a Reliable and Innovative Vision for the Economy Act” or DRIVE Act, provides three years of funding by supplementing gas taxes with new customs, air travel, and mortgage-backed securities guarantee fees. The House bill, called the Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act, doesn’t offer any source of funds; instead, House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee Chair Bill Shuster merely expressed hope that the House Ways & Means Committee would find a source of funds.

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California High-Speed Rail Will Be Late,
Over Budget, and Obsolete

By | | Transportation
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The Los Angeles Times has a special report finding that the California high-speed rail project will cost far more and take far longer than the rail authority is promising. The official cost estimate remains $68 billion for an abbreviated system despite the fact that a 2013 Parsons Brinckerhoff report to the authority said there was no way the project could be done for that price.

P-B’s report was “never made public” and the rail authority refused to release it under the state public records act. However, “an engineer close to the project” slipped a copy of the report to the Times.

The rail authority has established a record for ignoring such reports. In 2012, another consultant told the authority that costs should be revised upwards by 15 percent. The authority simply fired the consultant.

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The Clock Is Ticking

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Because authority to spend federal dollars on highways and transit expires at the end of this month, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee (or, to be precise, the chair of that committee, Bill Shuster) has proposed a new bill titled the Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act. Like the Senate bill proposed last July, the House bill authorizes spending for six years but only provides funding for the first three.

Although the bill promises to “streamline environmental review,” it also adds several new–and probably unnecessary–programs to the existing bureaucracy. These include:

  1. A “Nationally Significant Freight and Highway Projects Program.” Since we already have an Interstate Highway System, a U.S. Highway System, and a National Highway System, a National Freight Highway System seems redundant.
  2. A “National Surface Transportation Innovative Finance Bureau.” Unfortunately, all too often, “innovative finance” means finding a creative way to stick it to the taxpayers.
  3. Funding for vehicle-to-infrastructure communications equipment. However, in the opinion of many experts, such equipment will soon be rendered obsolete by self-driving cars.

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Although the House and Senate now each have six-year bills, the two do not agree on many details. Most importantly, the two differ on where they will get the $10 billion to $15 billion a year needed to continue deficit spending. Thus, many observers believe that Congress will do little more than pass another short-term extension at the end of this month. The big question is whether it will be a two-month extension or a six- (or more) month extension. If the latter, little more (other than additional extensions) is likely to happen in 2016 as it is an election year. If they pass a two-month extension, however, it may signal that they are serious about resolving their differences so they can pass a true six-year bill before the end of this year.

Semi-Self-Driving Tesla

By | | Transportation
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Tesla says that next year its cars will not only steer themselves within a lane, they will change lanes to pass slower vehicles when it is safe to do so. While other high-end cars, such as the Mercedes S-class, can steer themselves (“lane centering”), Tesla is the first to promise automatic lane changing.

San Ramon, California may see the nation’s first self-driving buses next year. The buses will operate in an office park called Bishop’s Ranch. While their range will initially be limited, they will use existing infrastructure, which means all of the people who have been dreaming of pod cars should pack up their bags and go home. Pod cars and similar personal-rapid transit devices would, like Contra Cost County’s self-driving buses, have a limited range, but would require expensive new infrastructure to work at all.

Volvo’s CEO, Håkan Samuelsson, has so much confidence in his company’s progress towards completely automated vehicles that he says the company would accept full liability for any accidents that were the fault of its cars. (Google and Mercedes have made similar promises.) At the same time, Sanuelsson has urged the United States government to impose national guidelines on the states for self-driving cars. The Antiplanner isn’t so sure; I’d rather have 50 different state laws, some good and some bad with the bad ones learning from the good, than one national rule that is almost certain to be bad with little opportunity to learn because there are no other sets of rules in other states.

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Top Down vs. Bottom Up

By | | Transportation
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The Brookings Institution’s Robert Puentes takes a look at infrastructure procurement and reaches exactly the opposite conclusions as the Antiplanner. Puentes says that successful infrastructure needs 1. visionary leadership; 2. public sector expertise; 3. standardization; and 4. public-private collaborations.

To the Antiplanner, all of these goals and recommendations are exactly wrong. My recommendations would be: 1. get the incentives right; 2. rely on user-fee driven processes; 3. let hundreds of flowers (or at last 50) bloom; and 4. gradually turn infrastructure planning and management to the private sector.

Leaders follow incentives. No matter how visionary the leaders are, bad incentives will lead to bad outcomes. Get the incentives right and the visionary leaders will follow.

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Platitudes Won’t Solve Metro’s Problems

By | | Transportation
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The Washington City Paper asked “thirteen riders, advocates, and experts” how to fix the Washington Metro Rail system. Former Metro general manager Dan Tangherlini and former DC DOT director Gabe Klein offered banalities about “putting the customer first.”

Smart-growth advocate Harriet Trepaning thinks Metro “needs a different kind of leader,” as if changing the person at the top is going to keep smoke out of the tunnels and rails from cracking. She admits that “I don’t think we’ve been straight with anybody, including ourselves or our riders, about what it really takes to [keep the rails in a] state of good repair.” But her only solution is to have “a dedicated source of revenue,” i.e., increase local taxes for a system that already costs state and local taxpayers close to a billion dollars per year.

Coalition for Smarter Growth director Stewart Schwartz and former APTA chair Rod Diridon also want to throw money at it. Others dodge the money question and suggest that Metro do all sorts of things that it can’t afford and doesn’t have any incentive to do anyway.

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Self-Driving Cars in the News

By | | Transportation
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60 Minutes covered self-driving cars last Sunday and CBS News took a look at Mercedes’ vision of the car of the future. General Motors, which cut its R&D when it went bankrupt in 2008, now plans to get into self-driving cars in a big way.

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Tight-lipped Apple is rumored to be developing a self-driving car; at least, it is meeting the California DMV about getting a license for one. Toyota, which has been less enthusiastic about self-driving cars than many other companies, now promises to have them in the showrooms by 2020.

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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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The Nation’s Worst-Managed Transit Agency

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Eight years ago, the Antiplanner argued that San Jose’s Valley Transportation Authority was the nation’s worst managed transit agency, a title endorsed by San Jose Mercury writer Mike Rosenberg and transit expert Tom Rubin.

However, since then it appears that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA or just Metro) has managed to capture this coveted title away from San Jose’s VTA. Here are just a few of Metro’s recent problems:

  1. Metro’s numerous service problems include a derailment in August that resulted from a flaw in the rails that Metro had detected weeks previously but failed to fix;
  2. Metro spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a new fare system but now expects to scrap it for lack of interest on the part of transit riders;
  3. One of Metro’s power transformers near the Stadium/Armory station recently caught fire and was damaged so badly that Metro expects to have most trains simply skip that station stop for the next several weeks to months;
  4. Metro’s fleet of serviceable cars has run so low that it rarely operates the eight-car trains for which the system was designed even during rush hours when all the cars are packed full;
  5. WMATA’s most recent general manager, Richard Sarles, retired last January and the agency still hasn’t found a replacement, largely due to its own ineptitude;
  6. Riders are so disgusted with the system that both bus and rail ridership declined in 2014 according to the American Public Transportation Association’s ridership report;
  7. Metro was so unsafe in 2012 that Congress gave the Federal Transit Administration extra authority to oversee its operations;
  8. That hasn’t fixed the problems, so now the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) wants Congress to transfer oversight to the Federal Railroad Administration, which supposedly has stricter rules.

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