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Monthly Archives: July 2015

Portland Cuts Police to Fund TODs

By | | City planning
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The Portland Tribune reports that the number of police officers in Portland has declined by 9 percent since 2001, even as the city’s population grew by 13 percent, resulting in a 20 percent decline in officers per capita. This decline is typical for a city that is neglecting its streets, its schools, and other essential services all so that it can fund streetcars and transit-oriented developments.

The Portland Development Commission (the city’s urban-renewal agency) is using tax-increment financing (which is a polite term for stealing) to gobble up as much tax revenue as it can. According to the State Department of Revenue, that’s nearly $100 million per year (see page 45). Since nearly all of that development would have taken place without the subsidies (though perhaps not as dense as planners would like), that’s $100 million that’s not available for police, streets, schools, and other services that depend on property taxes.

All of that urban renewal isn’t doing much to create jobs. Oregon was just ranked the second-worst state to make a living in due to its high cost of living (meaning housing costs), low average incomes, and the highest income taxes in the country.

America’s First High-Speed Rail Project

By | | Transportation
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Despite continued evidence that high-speed rail is a waste of money, reporters still write articles lamenting that high-speed trains in America are “elusive.” It’s elusive for a simple reason: it makes no sense, being slower than flying, less convenient than driving, and far more expensive than both.

Due to the high costs, high-speed rail projects proposed more than 100 years ago were similarly flawed. In 1893, someone proposed to build a 100-mph line straight from Chicago to St. Louis for $5.5 million–around $135 million today when using GNP deflators but more than $6.5 billion when measured as a share of the economy at the time. The proposal went nowhere.

Then, in 1906, someone proposed a similar, 100-mph line from Chicago to New York called the Chicago-New York Electric Air Line (several railroads at that time were named “air line” probably because they wanted to indicate they offered the shortest route between two points). The line would have either no curves or none that trains couldn’t negotiate at 90 mph. It would have no grade crossings so wouldn’t have to stop for other trains or risk hitting cars crossing its tracks.

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Say Yes to Self-Driving Cars

By | | Transportation
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A writer for Electronic Design magazine named Lou Frenzel opines “that the driverless car is not a good idea.” His argument comes down to, “I don’t know anything about it, but I can think of lots of problems that I don’t imagine anyone at Google has ever thought of.”

For example, he asks, can self-driving cars operate at night? Can they handle rain, fog, and snow? Can they find a parking space in a garage? Can they make left turns?

The fact that all of these questions have been asked and answered by Google, Volkswagen, and other companies developing self-driving cars makes Frenzel’s article pretty insipid. For example, most of these cars rely on radar, infrared, and/or laser beams, none of which care whether it is day or night. Infrared can also “penetrate smoke,rain, snow, blowing sand, and most foggy conditions,” though in heavy fog, a self-driving car would slow down, just as a human-driven car should do.

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Oregon Starts Mileage-Based User Fees

By | | Transportation
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Yesterday, the Oregon Department of Transportation began accepting applications from volunteers willing to switch from paying gas taxes to mileage-based user fees. The experimental program is limited to 5,000 volunteers and apparently the applications are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

Oregon’s gasoline tax is 30 cents a gallon, so if your car gets 30 miles per gallon, you currently pay about a penny per mile. The initial mileage-based fee is 1.5 cents per mile, the same as if your car gets 20 miles per gallon. It will be interesting to see if most of the people who sign up drive gas guzzlers that get less than 20 miles per gallon.

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WiFi Yes, V2V No

By | | Transportation
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A little-known conflict over the electromagnetic spectrum could shape self-driving cars for years to come. On one side is “an ecosystem of companies” that have developed vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications systems and the National Highway Traffic Safety Commission (NHTSC), which wants to mandate such systems in all cars and trucks, which together want the Federal Communications Commission to dedicate the 5.9 gigahertz spectrum to such systems. On the other side are WiFi developers and advocates who would like to open parts of that spectrum to WiFi use.

The V2V people say that such systems are essential for improved auto safety and self-driving cars and don’t want to share the spectrum with millions of WiFi users. However, General Motors and Cisco have thrown a monkey wrench into their case with an announcement that they plan to test WiFi for V2V communications.

Volvo and other companies have already shown that WiFi alone can provide adequate V2V communications for platooning cars down a highway. In such platooning, a lead vehicle does the driving and numerous following vehicles, spaced as little as five meters apart, merely mimic the lead vehicle’s speed and direction. Such platooning would obviously greatly increase highway capacities.

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