San Antonio, notes Texas Public Radio, is “the largest city in the country without a rail system to move” its residents. As a result, the article implies, people are “stuck behind the wheel,” and the article’s headline asks, “Should San Antonio Reconsider Rail?”
Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, of course, suggests that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” But more important, the article is guilty of the Politician’s Fallacy, which is: “1. We have to do something [in this case, about congestion]. 2. This [rail] is something. 3. We have to do this [build rail].”
Before jumping to any conclusions, San Antonians should ask how well rail is moving people in other cities. The first point to note is that, when TPR says that San Antonio is the largest city not to have rail, there are only six larger cities to consider. We don’t think of San Antonio is being the nation’s seventh-largest city, but it is true because Texas cities have strong annexations powers, so tend to be much larger than cities elsewhere. Houston, Dallas, and Austin are also among the nation’s eleven largest cities.
Of the six that are larger than San Antonio, Houston has a rail line that carries only 0.1 percent of the city’s commuters to work. Phoenix and San Diego rail carry less than half a percent of commuters to work. Los Angeles is all the way up to 1.1 percent. Only in New York City and Chicago does rail carry significant numbers of commuters: 48 percent in New York and 15 percent in Chicago.
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Of the urban areas with rail, many carry insignificant numbers. Rail in the Houston urban area, like the city, carries about 0.1 percent of commuters. Despite spending billions of dollars on light rail and commuter rail, Denver is at just 1.0 percent, Seattle is 0.8 percent, and Dallas-Ft. Worth is a pathetic 0.6 percent. Rail systems in Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix, San Diego, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and St. Louis are all also below 1.0 percent, while Portland is under 2.0, Baltimore under 2.5, and Philadelphia under 5 percent. The only urban areas where rail is truly important are New York (26 percent), Washington (11 percent), Boston (10 percent), and San Francisco (10 percent).
Does anyone think that rail transit has actually relieved congestion in cities or urban areas that built it in the last 30 years? The 44-year-old BART line under San Francisco Bay probably relieved congestion on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (though some say all it did was induce more traffic over the bridge), but you would be hard pressed to find any other examples of real congestion relief due to rail construction.
San Antonio became the nation’s first large city to replace streetcars with buses in 1933. General Motors had nothing to do with it. Instead, the San Antonio Public Service Company, which owned 90 miles of streetcar lines and also provided electricity to the city, had begun running buses to the suburbs in 1923. By 1928, the company realized that buses were faster, more comfortable to riders, and less costly to operate than the streetcars. In fact, streetcar costs were so much higher that the company offered to pay the city of San Antonio $250,000–nearly $4 million in today’s dollars–to let it out of its streetcar franchise seven years early and to replace all of its streetcars with buses.
Today, people who were born long after San Antonio stopped running streetcars mourn that “sad end” and long for their return. Yet it makes no sense to think that a technology that was obsolete in 1933 can suddenly because viable in 2017. San Antonio should resist rails a few more years, after which self-driving cars will be on the road and we can better judge whether they will replace transit everywhere but in New York and possibly Chicago.
Here in Milwaukie OR the new $1.5 billion dollar Orange light rail line has been a flop when considering it’s below expected ridership and it’s being undependable when you need it to be on time the most, in lousy cold weather. Knowing that light rail actually does none of the things well that it is sold to the public as doing and that Tigard OR just passed a pro light rail measure. Is government pushing for it’s new $2 billion dollar Bridgeport light rail with lies and misinformation as I suspect? I believe this line to be simply another light rail boondoggle and that it will wipe out Barber Blvd. and make traffic congestion much worse, not better.
Three questions about self driving cars.
One- I can see how they will work outside on the open road, but how will they find a parking spot in a underground garage and avoid a sign denoted reserved parking spot?
Two- What if I want to drive in my yard around the house or off road?
Three- How are they programmed to handle this? As the huge truck approaches suddenly it swerves into my lane and will surely kill me if I don’t swerve to the right to avoid it. Two people are walking on the right that will be hit if my car swerves to the right in avoidance. How are the self driving car’s computers programed? Save me or save the pedestrians?
1) Wouldn’t the AV’s vision system be able to see and interpret the reserved sign like any other sign?
2) There will probably still be a market for old fashioned cars that require a meat servo. The used car market especially but perhaps the market will be large enough for some manufacturers to continue to supply human driven cars.
3)The Big Question. Seeing the forest for the trees, though, is the fact that AVs will likely reduce traffic fatalities ten-fold. The occasional “what if” ethical conundrums will likely be settled in the courts.
PONative,
Self-driving cars will have a database of all legal parking spaces. If you tell your car to park, it will drive around until it finds one that is vacant. If you want it to drive off the pavement around your house, you’ll probably have to give it special programming. I agree with CapRoader that the ethical dilemmas of self-driving cars are more imaginary than real. Self-driving cars will be programmed more to avoid accidents than to limit the damage from accidents.
There’s a huge amount of data that is getting crunched right now for driving. By data I’m talking about pictures, aka photo mapping. Computers parse those for useful information and file it away. That’s why if you use something like Google Maps on your phone for directions, it knows to tell you in 1/2 mile exit on the right two lanes for Big Blvd. Even if they don’t have it in a database, a one-off scan of the reserved parking sign isn’t an issue in itself.