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Relieving Congestion with Adaptive Cruise Control

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Last month, the National Transportation Safety Board listed mandatory adaptive cruise control and other collision-avoidance technologies as one of its ten most wanted safety improvements in 2013. Such a mandate, the NTSB estimates, could reduce highway fatalities by 50 percent.

Honda’s illustration of how adaptive cruise control can reduce congestion. In normal traffic, when a lead vehicle slows down, everyone else must slow and usually slows a little more for safety reasons, thus leading to stop-and-go traffic. If one vehicle in the middle of a platoon has adaptive cruise control, it won’t slow as much, interrupting the pulse of congestion.

Research has shown that adaptive cruise control can also significantly reduce congestion by interrupting the “pulses” of slow traffic that takes place when someone hits the brakes, even if only briefly, on a crowded highway. The research suggests congestion will significantly decline if only 20 to 25 percent of vehicles on the road are using adaptive cruise control. tHowever, researchers fret that too few vehicles are being made with adaptive cruise control to have an impact on congestion in the near future.

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Streetcars as an Intelligence Test

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Antiplanner spent much of last week in San Antonio releasing a review of the city’s plans for a downtown streetcar. The trip turned out to be a lot more hectic (and with a lot less Internet access) than I expected, which is why I made so few posts last week.

Sometimes I wonder if streetcars are tests of intelligence or gullibility, as they are such bad ideas it is hard to believe that cities are falling all over themselves to fund them. As I point out in my report, 100 years ago, both streetcars and automobiles went at average speeds of about 8 miles per hour. Today, autos routinely cruise at 80 mph (at least in Texas), but San Antonio’s proposed streetcar will still go at just 8 mph.

The Antiplanner’s report for San Antonio is called “The Streetcar Fantasy,” partly because the feasibility study for the San Antonio streetcar is filled with fabrications and imaginary data. For example, page 68 the study discusses how the Boise streetcar was financed and page 69 discusses how the Arlington, Virginia streetcar contributed to economic development–yet neither Boise or Arlington have streetcars.

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Can We Drop the Fantasy That Transit Is Green?

By | | Transportation
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Atlantic blogger Eric Jaffe asks, “Can we stop pretending cars are greener than transit?” It’s a pointless question because no one really says that cars are greener than transit. On the other hand, claims that transit is greener than cars are vastly overblown.

Jeffe makes a few duffer mistakes that show he hasn’t thought this through. For example, he admits that it is a mistake (which many transit advocates make) to compare full buses with cars of average occupancy. He then proceeds to compare buses of average occupancy with cars with single occupants. But cars don’t average one occupant; the urban average is about 1.6 and the intercity average is about 2.4. While it is true, as many transit advocates point out, that putting one more person on a bus doesn’t significantly increase energy consumption, it is also true (and perhaps even more doable) that putting one more person in a car doesn’t significantly increase energy consumption.

Jaffe suggests that the reason why transit vehicle occupancy rates are low is because transit agencies “choose to design systems that favor coverage over capacity, knowing full well that will mean running some empty buses, because suburban or low-income residents need them.” In fact, “coverage over capacity” is a revenue strategy: agencies want to justify taxing wealthy suburbs, so they send buses and build trains to those suburbs even though most houses have three or more cars in their driveways. If we want to help low-income residents, it would be cheaper, greener, and greater help to them to simply give them used, but energy-efficient, cars.

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The Columbia River Crossing Is (or at Least Should Be) Dead

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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Taxpayers for Common Sense recently released a report (see page 27) that finds $2 trillion in budget cuts that will allow Congress to avoid the “fiscal cliff”–and one of those cuts is the Columbia River Crossing. The agency planning this bridge has managed to spend well over $130 million without accomplishing anything except to design a bridge that the Coast Guard says doesn’t have enough clearance to allow Columbia River ship traffic.

The latest death knell for this porky project was the rejection by Vancouver, Washington voters of a sales tax designed to pay the operating costs of the light-rail line that was supposed to cross the bridge. This has led fiscal conservatives to argue that the current bridge proposal is dead and planners must start over.

The Oregonian editorial board sycophantically responds that the bridge is vital for economic growth and jobs, and the voters didn’t reject the bridge but merely that method of funding it. What a load of crap. Everyone in the Portland area knows that the bridge is totally bloated with pork and light rail.

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Density’s Parking Impact

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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The City of Portland has approved numerous massive four- and five-story apartment buildings in neighborhoods of single-family homes separated by streets of single-story shops. These buildings stress the infrastructure built to handle a smaller population, which is most obvious in the increased traffic and parking problems–especially since many of the buildings are designed without parking.

Despite Portland’s reputation as a car-free city, I can attest that neighborhoods that once had few cars parked on the streets are now jammed with cars, indicating far more cars per housing unit than there were a few decades ago. The introduction of apartments lining the business corridors of these neighborhoods has led to huge increases in congestion, which isn’t helped by the fact that the city carefully keeps most signals uncoordinated so that people now frequently drive on neighborhood streets to avoid stopping at frequent red lights.

To allay concerns that the apartments were taking parking away from existing homes and businesses, the city just published a report reviewing the parking situation around eight recent buildings. Four of these had about two-thirds of parking space per dwelling unit on site, while the other four had no on-site parking (page 3). The city’s report found that, even during peak periods, at least 25 percent of on-street parking within two blocks of these buildings was vacant (p. 2).

That was enough to lead the Oregonian to headline its story about the report, “City study finds increase in no-parking apartments but little neighborhood parking impact.” There’s more to the story, however.

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The Case for Privatizing Amtrak

By | | Transportation
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On Monday, the Cato Institute will release the Antiplanner’s latest paper, Stopping the Runaway Train: The Case for Privatizing Amtrak. Antiplanner readers can preview the paper today.

Amtrak’s Empire Builder outside of Glacier National Park, September 13, 2010. (Click image for a larger view.)

The case against Amtrak is simple. Before Amtrak took over the nation’s passenger trains, average rail fares were a third less than average air fares. Today, thanks to four decades of government management, average rail fares are more than twice average air fares. Moreover, subsidies to passenger trains are nearly ten times as great, per passenger mile, as subsidies to airlines (and more than twenty times subsidies to highway travel). When fares and subsidies are combined, Amtrak spends nearly four times as much moving one passenger one mile as the airlines.

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TriMet Makes More Friends

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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One peculiar thing about almost every light-rail line in the country is that fares are on the honors system. There are no turnstiles, no drivers who demand fares upon boarding (the drivers are in a separate compartment from the passengers), and no fare collectors.

Instead, there are ticket boxes at stations and an occasional fare inspector who issues expensive tickets ($175 in Portland) to people who aren’t carrying proof of payment. If the potential for abuse by freeloading passengers is great, the potential for alienating fare-paying customers is almost as serious, particularly since the fare rules aren’t always clear and the ticket boxes at the stations don’t always work.

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Naturally, the attorney who was banned from riding the trains is suing. We can only hope that the court will determine that, not only do people have free-speech rights, they have the right to claim they have free-speech rights without fear of being kicked off the trains. In the meantime, I advise the attorney to telecommute or start riding a bicycle to work.

Big Loss for Honolulu Rail

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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Opponents of the $5 billion Honolulu rail project prevailed in their lawsuit charging that the city failed to consider a full range of alternatives before deciding to build rail. A federal judge ruled last week that the city was “arbitrary and capricious” in selecting rail and violated the National Environmental Policy Act in failing to present more alternatives in the environmental impact statement.

Construction on the rail line had already been stalled by a previous lawsuit that found that the rail project failed to comply with state historic preservation and burial protection laws when it failed to complete an archeological inventory survey for the 20-mile route before starting construction. Instead, it had planned to do the inventory just ahead of each step of construction.

Basically, the city let construction contracts and began construction prematurely because it wanted to commit funds before voters had an opportunity to stop the project. Voters will get their chance tomorrow, when former Hawaii Governor Ben Cayetano, who opposes the rail project and was one of the plaintiffs in the recent lawsuit, is on the ballot for mayor of the city.

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2011 National Transit Database

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The Federal Transit Administration has published the 2011 National Transit Database, which has cost, fare, ridership, and other data for every transit agency, broken down by mode, that receives federal support. You can download the raw data in two formats: the database, which is easier to manipulate, or data tables, which are easier to read (links download self-extracting .exe files; if you have a Mac, you can expand these files using Stuffit Expander).

Either of these self-extracting files includes about 20 to 30 spreadsheets with data ranging from operators wages to energy consumption. It has become an annual ritual for the Antiplanner to extract the most interesting data and compile it in a single summary spreadsheet. The 2011 summary presents the following data by agency and mode:

  1. Transit agency identification number
  2. Mode
  3. Who runs the service (DO=the transit agency, PT=a contractor)
  4. Full agency name
  5. Agency nickname
  6. City (usually the headquarters city of the agency)
  7. Urban area
  8. Passenger trips
  9. Passenger miles
  10. Vehicle revenue miles
  11. Fares
  12. Operating costs
  13. Maintenance costs (what the database calls “existing service” capital improvements)
  14. Capital costs (what the database calls “expanded service” capital improvements)
  15. Number of vehicles
  16. Total number of seats on those vehicles
  17. Standing room on those vehicles
  18. Directional route miles (rail only–note that 50 route miles of rail equals 100 directional route miles)
  19. BTUs of energy consumed
  20. Pounds of carbon dioxide emitted

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If We Only Had a Few Billion Dollars . . .

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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If only New York officials had heeded the warnings by building levees and other storm barriers, they could have avoided much of the damage caused by Sandy–at least, according to the New York Times. Hindsight is 20-20 vision, but those warnings were about the sea-level rise that is supposed to accompany global warming, not the recent storm that, in fact, probably had nothing to do with climate change.

All over the country, self-appointed experts argue that the government should retrofit infrastructure and/or require private owners to retrofit structures to guard against earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tornados, volcanos, and other natural disasters. No doubt many of them expect to cash in on their expertise in consulting contracts advising officials on what needs to be done.

The problem with this is that such retrofits tend to be very costly and may only be needed for a tiny fraction of the structures that could be worked upon. California earthquakes, for example, may seem to have done a lot of damage, but in fact they only harmed a small percentage of developments in the Golden State. While it might make sense to insure that new publicly built structures can withstand natural disasters, what happens to new or existing private structures should be between the owners and their insurance companies.

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