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Category Archives: Transportation

Self-Driving Car Update

By | | Transportation
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Google reports it has run its self-driving cars nearly 700,000 miles, and the cars are mastering all kinds of situations in city traffic, including dealing with bicycles and detours. For example, as detailed in this article in Atlantic Cities, Google originally programmed its cars to know where every permanent stop sign was located, but not how to deal with temporary stop signs (such as signs held by flaggers of road maintenance crews). Now, the cars know how to spot and react to such signs.


With a Google engineer watching in the background, some guy wearing a funny tie examines a Google self-driving car in Washington, DC.

These improvements have encouraged Google to set a target of having driverless cars on the market by 2017. That’s a pretty ambitious goal considering that six years ago the auto industry’s best engineers were predicting the first self-driving cars wouldn’t reach consumers until 2018.
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Streetcars Pro and Con

By | | Mission, Transportation, Urban areas
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Last week, the San Antonio Express News published a pair of op eds for and against construction of a downtown streetcar. In opposition was Representative Lamar Smith, whose congressional district includes parts of both San Antonio and Austin.

A streetcar, he wrote, would be expensive, impractical, and would “likely make congestion worse.” “There are better uses for the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars now slated for streetcars,” Smith observed, adding that most residents of San Antonio seem to oppose it and should at least have the chance to vote on it.

Writing in support of the streetcar was planner Bill Barker of Imagine San Antonio, a smart-growth group. Barker was previously the Senior Management Analyst in the City of San Antonio’s Office of Sustainability. Barker’s argument in favor of the streetcar was simple: the people who oppose the streetcar are evil, so should be ignored.

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Ethiopians Need Traffic Lights

By | | Transportation
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“Who needs traffic lights?” is the name of the YouTube video shown below. It shows an intersection in Ethiopia in which some fourteen lanes of traffic cross six more, with pedestrians wandering amidst vehicles turning right, left, and going straight unhampered by signals, signs, or seemingly any conventions other than to drive on the right.

This video seems to support proposals by many urban planners that streets would be safer if there were fewer, not more, signals and signs. At the extreme is the late Hans Monderman, a Dutch traffic planner who advocated getting rid of street signs, signals, and crosswalks.

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Seattle Votes Down Transit Tax

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Voters in King County, Washington, soundly rejected a proposed tax increase that King County Metro said was needed to maintain bus service. With the failure of the ballot measure, the transit agency says it will have to make cut bus service by about a sixth.

King County was unable to persuade the Seattle Times to endorse the measure. Instead, the Times suggested that the agency was mismanaged, citing cushy union contracts and other excessive costs.

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Is Transit Only Transit If It’s Expensive?

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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Wired magazine freaks out because the Tennessee senate supposedly passed a “mind-boggling ban on bus-rapid transit.” AutoblogGreen blames the legislation on the left’s favorite whipping boys, the Koch brothers because it was supported by Americans for Prosperity, a tax-watchdog group that has received funding from the Kochs.


Not only would Nashville’s bus-rapid transit consume up to three lanes of traffic and be given priority at traffic signals, the design of stations in the middle of a major arterial will create hazards for pedestrians.

In fact, the senate did not pass a bill to ban bus-rapid transit; it passed a bill to limit the dedication of existing lanes to buses. There is no reason why buses need their own dedicated lanes, at least in a mid-sized city such as Nashville. Kansas City has shown that bus-rapid transit in shared lanes can work perfectly well and attract as much as a 50 percent increase in riders.

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Your Freedom Is Someone Else’s Hell

By | | Transportation
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Yonah Freemark, a writer over at Atlantic Cities–which normally loves any transit boondoggle–somewhat sheepishly admits that light rail hasn’t lived up to all of its expectations. Despite its popularity among transit agencies seeking federal grants, light rail “neither rescued the center cities of their respective regions nor resulted in higher transit use.”

Not to worry, however; Atlantic Cities still hates automobiles, or at least individually owned automobiles. Another article by writer Robin Chase suggests that driverless cars will create a “world of hell” if people are allowed to own their own cars. Instead, driverless cars should be welcomed only if they are collectively owned and shared.

The hell that would result from individually owned driverless cars would happen because people would soon discover they could send their cars places without anyone in them. As Chase says, “If single-occupancy vehicles are the bane of our congested highways and cities right now, imagine the congestion when we pour in unfettered zero-occupancy vehicles.” Never mind the fact that driverless cars will greatly reduce congestion by tripling roadway capacities and avoid congestion by consulting on-line congestion reports.

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Arlington Votes Against a Streetcar

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Streetcar skeptic John Vihstadt won a seat on the Arlington County (Virginia) board this week, the first Republican to do so in 15 years. One of the main issues in his campaign was the board’s plan to spend $250 million on a streetcar in this suburb of Washington, DC.

The election took place less than two weeks after the release of a consultant’s report that concluded a streetcar would dramatically boost economic development in the county (a claim disputed by the Antiplanner. Some people believe the report was timed to influence the election. If so, it didn’t work.

The election also took place after the unveiling of Arlington’s $1 million dollar bus stop that doesn’t even provide decent shelter from the elements. This served to raise voter awareness of the county’s free-spending ways when it comes to transit.
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So Much for TOD

By | | Transportation
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Transit agencies are quick to claim that new rail transit lines generate all sorts of new developments, particularly so-called transit-oriented developments, meaning high-density, mixed-use housing. But an objective study of Minneapolis’ Hiawatha light-rail line from economists Sarah West and Needham Hurst found that “neither construction nor operation of the line appears to affect land use change relative to the time before construction.”

Unfortunately, the paper itself is behind a paywall, but it is summarized in this article from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. An earlier version of the study is also available.

Hurst’s and West’s findings are obliquely affirmed by a recent article in the Journal of the American Planning Association that finds that people living in transit-oriented developments may drive a little less than other people, but it’s not because of the presence of rail transit. Instead, “Housing type and tenure, local and subregional density, bus service, and particularly off- and on-street parking availability, play a much more important role.” Another way of putting it is that people who choose to live in places with limited parking probably didn’t want to drive much anyway.

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Mono–Doh!

By | | Transportation
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Loyal Antiplanner reader MSetty let me know about a Tennessee proposal to spend $200,000 studying the idea of building a monorail from Nashville to Murfreesboro. The irony is that the proposal comes from a tea party member of the state senate. Senator Bill Ketron is a social conservative, not a libertarian, but he should know better than to think that giving a government agency a bunch of money to do a study recommending whether to give that agency even more more money will lead to a reasonable outcome.

Take, for example, Florida’s Pinellas County transit authority, which has spent $800,000 on “public education” regarding a proposed $1.7 billion (but likely much more) light-rail line that will be on this November’s ballot. Critics question whether it is legal for the transit agency to use “taxpayer money to engage in political advocacy leading up to a referendum vote.” The agency, of course, says it isn’t advocating anything, just educating people.

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The Inevitable Decline of Government

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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LaVonda Atkinson, the cost engineer for San Francisco Muni‘s $1.6 billion Central Subway project, has found so many problems with the project–and so little interest within Muni or the Federal Transit Administration in fixing those problems–that she has given hundreds of pages of budgetary and internal documents to the San Francisco Weekly. “Your article” about these documents “is going to get me fired,” she told the Weekly‘s reporter.


Politicians such as then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (center) love to have their photos taken breaking ground or cutting ribbons, in this case for the Central Subway project.

As just one example, Muni told the San Francisco city controller that it spent $110 million on preliminary engineering, when it told the Federal Transit Administration that it spent only $70 million. The extra $40 million went into a slush fund for other stuff.

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