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More Automakers Move Toward Self-Driving Cars

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Lexus cautiously presented its work towards a self-driving car at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show yesterday. Audi has taken the bolder step of obtaining a Nevada license for its self-driving car. Tire maker Continental has also entered the field.

Lexus (which of course is owned by Toyota) is advertising its technology as more of a “co-pilot” that will take over driving in case of what it judges to be an emergency. “Our vision isn’t necessarily a car that drives itself,” said executive Mark Templin, “but rather a car equipped with an intelligent, always-attentive co-pilot whose skills contribute to safer driving.” That’s an important intermediate step that will make driving safer, but it won’t have the revolutionary effects that truly autonomous cars will bring.

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So who will dominate the self-driving auto field? Google hopes that automakers will provide the hardware and let it provide the software. But
the fact that both an automaker and an auto parts company are actively working on self-driving technology shows that the future of self-driving cars is still anyone’s game.

Not a Crisis After All

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The “obesity crisis” became a hot topic just over a decade ago when the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) published data showing that American weights were increasing. All sort of interest groups jumped on this crisis, including urban planners who blamed obesity on urban sprawl and driving.

If obesity has a cause, it is more likely due to the increased availability of low-cost sweeteners such as high-fructose corn syrup than to sprawl. For one thing, obesity appears to be increasing throughout the developed world, including in European nations that supposedly have controlled sprawl.

In commenting on this supposed problem more than a decade ago, the Antiplanner was skeptical that obesity was even a crisis. “More than one recent study has found that weight is less important to health as you get older,” I noted. “People over 50 can have BMIs [body mass indices] as high as 32 and not suffer any greater mortality than people with BMIs under 25. Researchers add that, unless such people have heart disease, diabetes, or some other obesity-related disease, asking them to diet “might unjustifiably decrease their perceived quality of life.”

It turns out this isn’t just true for people over 50. As yesterday’s Wall Street Journal noted (see also an article in the Independent), a new CDC study indicates that people who are somewhat overweight (BMIs of 25 to 30) can actually expect to live longer than people of “normal” weight (BMIs of 18 to 25).

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The Benefits and Costs of Tolling

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The costs of collecting electronic tolls are rapidly declining, particularly for roads that only accept electronic tolls. In 2009, when I was writing Gridlock, the best available estimates indicated that 12 to 23 percent of toll revenues went to collection costs, compared with just 3 percent for state gas taxes.

However, a recent paper from the Reason Foundation claims that the costs of collecting electronic tolls has now fallen to be almost as low as the costs of state gas tax collections. Moreover, once the benefits of using tolls to relieve traffic congestion are considered, tolls become a far less costly way to pay for roads.

Those traffic congestion benefits are the reason why the Antiplanner recently proposed that highways be refinanced out of tolls in the form of vehicle-mile fees rather than gas taxes. Congestion imposes a $100 billion-plus annual cost on Americans; we know how to fix it, and the only thing preventing that solution is inertia.

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Who Needs Freedom When You Have Obamacare?

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“When does regulating a person’s habits in the name of good health become our moral and social duty?” Dr. David Agus asks in a New York Times op ed. The answer, says Agus, is “when all of us are stuck paying for one another’s medical bills (which is what we do now, by way of Medicare, Medicaid and other taxpayer-financed health care programs).”

In other words, one of the costs of Obamacare and other government health assistance is that we lose our freedom to eat what we want and behave how we like. Agus uses this reasoning to argue that, just as we require people to use seat belts when they drive on public roads, we should require that most men over 45 and women over 55 take a daily dose of aspirin.

The gentle readers of the New York Times respond mainly by arguing that not everyone would benefit from taking aspirin or that some other treatment should be mandated as well. Out of 107 comments, fewer than a half dozen mention that Agus’ reasoning takes away people’s freedom.

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The Stupidity Cliff

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A common saying (sometimes attributed to Samuel Francis, but I first heard it before he is supposed to have said it) inside the DC Beltway, at least among fiscal conservatives, is that America has two political parties: the Evil Party and the Stupid Party. It appears to the Antiplanner that the Stupid Party has once again found itself in a no-win situation over the co-called fiscal cliff.

Republicans have promised no increase in taxes, while Democrats want to increase taxes only on the rich–those who earn more than $250,000 a year. The latest Obama plan projects that such a tax increase will yield about $140 billion a year over the next ten years. Since fewer than 3 million tax filers earn more than $250,000 a year, that works out to an average $50,000 or so increase in annual taxes per person.

The idea of creating a fiscal cliff–a deadline by which Congress must reduce deficits or face automatic tax increases and spending cuts–may have sounded great to fiscal conservatives when it was first proposed. It doesn’t look so good now. If Republicans agree to Obama’s tax increase, they will be accused of breaking their promises. If they allow the country to go over the cliff, Democrats will respond next year with a middle-class tax cut that Republicans will find difficult to reject, else they’ll be blamed by all taxpayers, not just the wealthy ones, for raising rates. Either way, Dems win, Reps lose.

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State & Local Corporate Welfare

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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State and local governments spend $80 billion a year trying to attract businesses away from each other, reports the New York Times. This is a giant zero-sum game, the paper suggests, and in fact may even slow growth in some areas by increasing the tax burden. The Times even admits that it has received $24 million in subsidies from the city and state of New York over the past 12 years.

Coincidentally, the Antiplanner is back in the air today to Boise, where I’ll be speaking to legislators about the follies of tax-increment financing (TIF), which is one of the main ways local governments subsidize corporations. Idaho cities and counties spend more than $50 million a year on TIF, which is a lot for a small state: nearly 20 percent of the property taxes collected in at least one county goes to TIF subsidies.
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When Jerry Brown was mayor of Oakland, 10 percent of his salary came from TIF. Rather than be seduced by the money, he realized the folly of giving cities the power to effectively steal money from other tax entities. In 2011, he persuaded the California legislature to abolish TIF in California, the state that had invented it in 1952 and which up to that time was doing more TIF than all other states combined. Other states should follow suit.

Relieving Congestion with Adaptive Cruise Control

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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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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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Is Collapse Inevitable?

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“What do you think is going to happen?” my friend asked, adding that most people he talked with believed the nation if not the world would suffer a major economic collapse in the next four years. Given the nation’s $16 trillion debt, plus another (according to one calculation) $84 trillion in unfunded liabilities, simple arithmetic suggests that a U.S. government default is inevitable, and that default would have world-wide repercussions.

For this very reason, many conservatives and Republicans argued that the recent election was the most important one in our lifetime, or at least in many years. Apparently, they believed (or wanted voters to believe) that they could somehow prevent this collapse–though if collapse is truly inevitable, by definition a single election couldn’t prevent it.

Now that Obama has won re-election, some people actually seem eager for the collapse in the hope that it will teach some kind of lesson to those foolish enough to vote for the wrong candidates in the recent election. Meanwhile, the web is filled with sites telling people what they need to hoard before the collapse comes (warning: annoying video starts as soon as page opens), or arguing that people should buy gold or providing some other useful (and often profitable, at least to the advisor) advice.

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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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