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Monthly Archives: August 2023

The Next Step in Driverless Cars

By | | Transportation
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Elon Musk took a drive in one of his cars using the latest version of its full driverless software. The current software uses 300,000 lines of code to tell the cars how to turn left, how to respond to pedestrians and other vehicles, and so forth. Instead of code, the latest beta software is based on neural networks, meaning the computer has learned and will learn how to deal with various situations based on past experiences.

“It’s all nets, baby,” he said during the drive, “nothing but nets.” As I understand it, this is the approach George Hotz was taking when he was working on an his autonomous car software. Hotz tried to train his software without going through all of California’s state licensing requirements, and when the state and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration tried to force him to comply with their regulations, he left the business. Continue reading →

Driver Shortage; Money Shortage; What to Do?

By | | Transportation
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Transit agencies are “scrambling” to find funding to keep operating in the face of permanently lower ridership. At the same time, driver shortages are hampering agencies’ ability to keep running buses and trains.

This driver was so overworked that she fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into a utility pole. Yet the bus she was driving was empty, so why were she and the bus there in the first place?

There’s an easy solution to both problems: reduce service. Why run buses and trains that are nearly empty? Ridership isn’t going to come back just because the transit vehicles are there. Cutting service to the levels agencies can afford to operate without further subsidies will also help alleviate driver shortages. Reducing service will in turn reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve social equity because most of the taxes that would be needed to maintain service are regressive.

How to Pay for Amtrak’s Deficits

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak operations lost $1.2 billion last year without even counting depreciation and the other costs that Amtrak pretends aren’t real. (The $1.2 billion is calculated by adding $885 million “adjusted operating earnings” to the $329 million “state supported train revenue” that Amtrak pretends isn’t a subsidy.) A railroad in Japan provides an example of one way Amtrak could cover this deficit.

The Choshi Electric Railway hit some hard times in the 1990s, as did most Japanese businesses, due to the nation’s economic slump. The railway almost went out of business, but then it hit upon the idea of asking its customers and patrons to buy rice crackers. Today, it makes twice as much money on its rice crackers than on the rail line itself. Continue reading →

Time to Sell the Postal Service

By | | News commentary
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Why do we still have a postal service? In 2021, the agency cost federal taxpayers around $18 billion in operating and capital subsidies. Plus, in 2022, Congress bailed it out from having to pay $56 billion of employee health care obligations, meaning federal taxpayers are now obligated to cover those costs.

Around 250 years ago, mail was the closest thing the prospective nation had to the internet. When the Continental Congress was forming the fledging U.S. government, it decided in 1775 that America’s mail should be carried by a federal agency, not the states or private enterprise. One reason for creating a federal post office was to bring the country closer together, as distances would be less important if it cost the same to mail a letter across the country as across the street. This was critical as the land area of the original 13 states was far bigger than any European country other than Russia. Continue reading →

Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire

By | | Wildfire
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The Antiplanner’s exurban area has been filled with smoke the last few days as winds have blown soot from wildfires in western Oregon towards central Oregon. As bad as the air has been here, it usually wasn’t as bad as it was in New York City a couple of months ago due to fires in Canada.

Smoke obscures the sun from New York’s Long Island in June 2023. Photo by Don Sutherland.

Canada has seen more land burn so far this year — more than 34 million acres as of August 18 — than any full year in its history: the previous record was 17.5 million acres for all of 1995. The Maui fires, of course, have had unprecedented impacts, with at least 115 known dead to date and more than 1,000 missing. Many are blaming these fires on or saying they are evidence of human-caused climate change. Continue reading →

Affordable Housing Not Affordable

By | | Housing
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The news media is discovering something that the Antiplanner has been saying for years: so-called affordable housing isn’t affordable. The federal, state, and local governments spend tens of billions of dollars a year subsidizing supposedly affordable housing, yet few people who need such housing get into the projects and many of those who do can’t afford the rents that are charged.

104 of the 116 units of the Alameda View Apartments in Aurora, Colorado are dedicated to people earning up to 60 percent of median income, which in the Denver metro area is $75,300 a year. That means average monthly will be as high as $1,883 a month.

As a recent article in the LAist points out, more than 450,000 households in Los Angeles have incomes low enough to qualify for affordable housing, yet fewer than 50,000 such units have been built. One project that opened in 2022 received 7,500 applications for just 65 apartments. Continue reading →

“Priming the Pump” = Subsidizing the Myth

By | | Transportation
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Maryland has decided it needs to “take a more active role in promoting development around transit stations,” according to an article in the Baltimore Banner. “It’s priming the pump to get these things moving,” says Secretary of Transportation Paul Wiedefeld, who used to be general manager of Washington Metro.

Maryland’s stack-’em-and-pack-’em vision for transit recovery. But what if nobody wants to live there?

As of May, Baltimore transit ridership was about 67 percent of pre-pandemic levels, slightly less than the national average. But most of that was due to buses, which were at 73 percent. Baltimore light rail was only 59 percent and Baltimore’s subway was just 58 percent. Wiedefeld hopes that promoting transit-oriented developments will boost ridership. Continue reading →

Getting the Most from Driverless Cars

By | | Transportation
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Back in 2009, when I first suggested that urban transportation would soon be taken over by driverless cars, a friend of mine told me that he would never use a driverless car because “I get a testosterone thrill from having my hands on the wheel of a car.” I point out to him that, if cars drove themselves, we wouldn’t need open container laws and he and his girlfriend could make out in the back seat while the vehicle was in motion. His eyes bugged out and I knew I had won a convert.

What’s happening in the back of this van? Only the occupants and Waymo know for sure. Photo by Rob Pegaroro.

So I wasn’t surprised to read a report that “San Franciscans are having sex in robotaxis,” with some people doing it so often it is almost routine. Many of the vehicles have darkened windows that make it difficult to see inside, especially at night, creating a comfortable feeling of privacy. The travelers may not realize that Waymo and Cruise have cameras recording both outside and inside the vehicles, but the companies say no one looks at the videos unless there is some kind of an incident such as an accident. Continue reading →

Working from Home Expected to Rise

By | | News commentary
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Mike Myers, the director of Portland’s community safety program, is in charge of reducing gun violence and increasing street safety. This job paid him $208,263 last year, and he manages to do it while working at home. Home, for Myers, happens to be a gated community in Las Vegas, 750 miles from Portland.

Click image to review a copy of this report.

Perhaps it is only a coincidence that Portland has seen the fastest-growing homicide rates in the highest in the nation and the city suffered a record number of homicides in 2022. Or perhaps there are some jobs that just can’t be performed as well at home, at least if that home is hundreds of miles away. Continue reading →

Spending Other People’s Money

By | | Transportation
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Washington state Democrats believe that a Portland-Seattle-Vancouver high-speed rail line is vital to the future of the Northwest. It is so vital, in fact, that they want someone else to pay for it, namely the federal government. The federal government, after all, seems to be unique in the world in that it can spend unlimited amounts of money without raising taxes to cover those costs.

You’ll never guess why they think high-speed rail is needed so badly. According to a letter from Washington members of Congress to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, the high-speed train will “allow people to live in less densely populated areas and work anywhere in the megaregion.” So much for the supposed benefits of high-density living! Continue reading →