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Big Brother Wants to Run Your Self-Driving Car

By | | Transportation
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As a part of his 2017 budget proposal, Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx proposes to spend $4 billion on self-driving vehicle technology. This proposal comes late to the game, as private companies and university researchers have already developed that technology without government help. Moreover, the technology Foxx proposes is both unnecessary and intrusive of people’s privacy.

In 2009, President Obama said he wanted to be remembered for promoting a new transportation network the way President Eisenhower was remembered for the Interstate Highway System. Unfortunately, Obama chose high-speed rail, a 50-year-old technology that has only been successful in places where most travel was by low-speed trains. In contrast with interstate highways, which cost taxpayers nothing (because they were paid for out of gas taxes and other user fees) and carry 20 percent of all passenger and freight travel in the country, high-speed rail would have cost taxpayers close to a trillion dollars and carry no more than 1 percent of passengers and virtually no freight.

The Obama administration has also promoted a 120-year-old technology, streetcars, as some sort of panacea for urban transportation. When first developed in the 1880s, streetcars averaged 8 miles per hour. Between 1910 and 1966, all but six American cities replaced streetcars with buses that were faster, cost half as much to operate, and cost almost nothing to start up on new routes. Streetcars funded by the Obama administration average 7.3 miles an hour (see p. 40), cost twice as much to operate as buses, and typically cost $50 million per mile to start up.

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Time to Reconsider

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland’s first light-rail line turns 30 years old this year, which is about the expected lifespan of a rail line. Not by coincidence, the system was highly unreliable last year, being “plagued with delays and disruptions” and having terrible on-time performance.

The line between Portland and Gresham originally cost more than $200 million to build, which in today’s dollars is around twice that. It is likely it will cost roughly that amount of money to restore it to like-new condition.

But Portland has a choice. Instead of sinking a bunch of money into an already-obsolete transit system, it could scrap it and replace it with buses. Before building the rail line, the parallel freeway had HOV lanes; restoring those lanes (or turning them to HOT lanes) would give the buses an uncontested route to fallow. We know that the buses would be faster than the rail, because the rail line was slower than the buses it replaced.
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A Quarter Trillion for the Northeast Corridor

By | | Transportation
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A recent draft environmental impact statement published by the Federal Railroad Administration estimates that it would well over a quarter trillion dollars in capital improvements to make Amtrak “a dominant mode for Intercity travelers and commuters” in the Boston-Washington corridor. Even that is optimistic as the data in the report suggest that Amtrak would be far from dominant even after spending that much money.

Click image to go to the download page for the draft environmental impact statement, which is downloadable in more than 30 parts totaling well over 30 megabytes.

The statement considers four alternatives:

  • No action would keep train service at current levels. This would nevertheless cost $19.9 billion in maintenance and improvements over the next 25 years.
  • Alternative 1 would increase service at a rate equal to the region’s population growth. This would cost around $65 billion (the average of a range given in the DEIS), or $45 billion more than No Action.
  • Alternative 2 would increase service faster than population growth at a cost of around $133.5 billion, or more than double Alternative 1.
  • Alternative 3 would supposedly make rail “a dominant mode” in the region at a cost of around $287.3 billion, more than double Alternative 2.

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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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What Is Your Sin?

By | | Transportation
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Over at Green Car Reports, the “guide to cleaner, greener driving,” electric car advocate David Noland asks, “Which sins worse: cars or planes?” The “sin,” of course, is carbon emissions, and his answer, while interesting, is flawed in many respects.

“The passenger jet blows away the automobile in terms of efficiency and CO2 emissions per mile,” he says, a result he apparently considers surprising. But it’s not surprising at all to anyone familiar with the Department of Energy’s Transportation Energy Data Book. According to tables in the book, airlines emitted about 2,568 grams of carbon per passenger mile in 2013, while the average car emitted 3,144 grams (or 3,564 if SUVs and other light trucks are included).

But it’s not enough to show that both cars and airlines have been rapidly improving their energy efficiency. Noland wants to really blow cars out of contention, so he biases his analysis in several ways.

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Civil Rights and Fiscal Wrongs

By | | Transportation
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Are the NAACP and ACLU serious when they argue, in a lawsuit filed last week, that cancellation of the Baltimore Red Line light-rail project is a civil rights issue? Or are they just acting as a front for, or the unwitting stooges of, rail contractors and other rail proponents?

In Los Angeles, the NAACP filed a successful lawsuit against the county Metropolitan Transportation Authority for building light rail. The group argued that light rail was so expensive that the agency was forced to cut bus service to minority neighborhoods, resulting in a huge decline in transit ridership. The court ordered the agency to restore bus service, allowing ridership to recover. But in Baltimore, the NAACP seems to be arguing that cuts in bus service are worth building a billion-dollar tunnel under an African-American neighborhood.

Maybe this is a case of the NAACP’s Right Coast not knowing what its Left Coast was doing. But the heart of the complaint in Baltimore seems to be that blacks are somehow harmed because the state of Maryland chose to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on bus improvements instead of billions of dollars on one light-rail line. This suggests that the Maryland NAACP thinks dollars spent are more important than results. After all, Baltimore’s other light-rail lines are all embarrassing failures, with costs greater than projections but ridership well below projections.

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The Vision Zero Cult

By | | Transportation
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The Vision Zero Initiative seeks to reduce traffic deaths to zero–certainly a worthy goal. However, I looked throughout its web site and couldn’t find anything about how they propose to achieve that goal. Instead, there is a lot of mumbo jumbo along with a few poorly chosen statistics about how safe roads are in Sweden. The lack of specific recommendations combined with the misuse of data leads me to believe that this initiative is no better than a cult trying to get money out of gullible government officials with the promise that, if they pay enough, they’ll get a magic formula to safer streets.

The statistic they most commonly use is number of traffic deaths per 100,000 residents. The problem with this is that this number is bound to be higher in countries where people drive the most. Considering that commercial fishing is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, you could just as well argue that countries that have totally destroyed their fisheries due to overfishing have superior policies to ones that still have healthy fisheries. However, there are better ways of improving safety than destroying the utility of whatever it is that might be dangerous.

Only by searching other web sites, including Wikipedia, do we learn Vision Zero’s secret: they make streets safer by slowing traffic down to a crawl. In other words, they greatly reduce the utility of the automobile. We know from various research that slower speeds means lower economic productivity.

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Nice Work If You Can Get It (and Keep It)

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Stephen Banta, the CEO of Phoenix’s Valley Metro transit agency, resigned in disgrace after revelations that taxpayers paid for him to fly first class around the world, stay in $600-per-night hotel rooms, and take elected officials out to expensive dinners trying to woo them into supporting light rail. After resigning, he then tried to rescind his resignation, apparently wanting to negotiate a better golden parachute.

This tactic apparently worked, as the Valley Metro board has agreed to pay him $265,000 if he leaves on January 4. That’s approximately his average annual pay.

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2014 Transit Database Posted, Then Withdrawn

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The nation’s transit industry carried about 1 percent more trips and passenger miles in 2014 than in 2013. But to carry that many, industry operating costs grew by 7 percent and maintenance costs grew by 2 percent. For that increase in operating costs, vehicle revenue miles grew by less than 3 percent.

Transit is thus becoming increasingly expensive to operate and maintain per rider: the operating cost of single trip grew from $3.81 to $4.04, a 6 percent increase. Fares, meanwhile, grew by just 2 percent, and the industry as a whole collected just $15.1 billion in fares while spending $42.4 billion on operations, $11.0 billion on maintenance, and $6.0 billion on capital improvements.

These numbers are from the 2014 National Transit Database that the Federal Transit Administration posted last week. The numbers are only tentative, however, as the FTA took the numbers down this week (though some of the data are still available if you know where to look for them–see below). Moreover, a few key spreadsheets were missing from the data that were posted.

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Cars Saving Energy Faster Than Transit

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The average automobile on the road in 2013 used 1.2 percent less energy per mile than in 2012, according to table 2-15 of the latest edition of the Department of Energy’s Transportation Energy Data Book. Both cars and light trucks achieved about the same gain.

Click image to download a 12.9-MB PDF of the data book. Click here to access individual spreadsheets of all the tables and charts in the data book.

In contrast, says the datebook, the average transit bus used 0.9 percent more energy per mile in 2013 than in 2012. Worse, the average number of people on board transit buses declined slightly, so buses used 1.0 percent more energy per passenger mile.

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