The infrastructure plan recently released by the Biden campaign is a collection of tired ideas that have consistently failed in the past. Too much of the plan is based on last year’s groupthink and not enough of the plan recognizes the new realities that have emerged from the pandemic.
A large part of the plan is based on getting people out of their cars and onto transit and bicycles. American cities have been trying to do this for the last fifty years, spending $1.5 trillion subsidizing transit, and it hasn’t worked anywhere. The plan calls for connecting low-income workers to jobs by building more transit, yet people can reach far more jobs by automobile than by transit while auto ownership, not transit subsidies, are the key to getting people out of poverty.
The plan is based on assumptions about transportation dollar and environmental costs that are fundamentally wrong. Transit, the plan says, saves money while cars impose a burden on low-income people and produce too many greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, when subsidies are included, American transit systems spend five times as much moving a passenger one mile than the average automobile. Ignoring subsidies, average transit fares are still more than the average cost of driving per passenger mile. Transit also uses more energy and emits more greenhouse gases per passenger mile.
The only token acknowledgement of the changes brought about by the pandemic is the use of the word “resilient” in the plan. But the planners seem to think that transit is resilient as it proposes “expanded public transit systems, giving more Americans an affordable, efficient way to get around without their cars.” In fact, as Hurricane Katrina, the Camp Fire, and other natural disasters have shown, highways and private motor vehicles are far more resilient than mass transit.
Just look at the current pandemic: transit agencies are in financial crises, but the highways are there when we need them, 24/7. As of August, transit ridership was still down by 65 percent, while driving was down only 12 percent. None of this is taken into account by the anti-auto parts of the plan.
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Of course, planners want to shift to renewable energy, which will cost trillions of dollars. Adding the transportation system to the electrical grid will massively increase the burden and cost of doing so. California is already suffering rolling blackouts due to its emphasis on renewable but unreliable energy; just think how bad it would be if the demand for electricity were doubled.
The plan mentions self-driving cars, but suggests that the government needs to spend billions on “smart cities” to make those cars work. Yet the government can’t even coordinate traffic signals in most cities; how is it going to operate and maintain so-called smart infrastructure? Biden apparently never got the memo that virtually all of the companies developing autonomous vehicles are designing those vehicles to rely on existing infrastructure and not to need any smart improvements in that infrastructure.
Finally, it is worth noting that the very first item in the plan is to “create good, union jobs.” Unions are among the biggest backers of the Biden campaign and this emphasis shows that Biden is just catering to his constituency. While that’s not a surprise, many of the problems with crumbling infrastructure emphasized in the plan can be traced to the high cost of union labor and union rules that makes it difficult to keep infrastructure in a state of good repair.
In the end, the Biden plan shows that government can be counted on to pick losers, not winners, and to prefer obsolete technologies and solutions that fail to recognize the changes society has made in recent months and years. Implementing this plan will waste trillions of dollars on infrastructure we don’t need and that we won’t be able to afford to maintain. This will cripple our cities and reduce the productivity of our economy.
Yet the government can’t even coordinate traffic signals in most cities; how is it going to operate and maintain so-called smart infrastructure?
Mr. O’Toole, this is simply untrue. In any major Washington or Oregon city, the signals are coordinated. They are simply coordinated in the opposite manner you would expect. That is, to ensure you catch as many red lights as possible while driving around the speed limit.
Further weaponizing the tools of signal coordination are video detection devices, which are replacing embedded loop detectors at many new intersections. The ability of the cameras to see further back on its roadway allows the system to preemptively turn the light yellow-red by the mere fact that you’re approaching that signal, rather than a car on a cross street triggering a light change.
So you can enjoy empty intersections that still turn red for YOU (right before you reach them) because the cameras saw you approaching and planners had the intersection controllers programmed to screw with you and punish you for driving a car.
Evil, institutional government planners say cars pollute the most in stop & go traffic, then turn around and create exactly those kinds of situations to push us to support their stack & pack policies and toy trains.
Most people like to think that the “other side” has sincerely held, if mistaken, beliefs. This is simply not the case with government planners. You’ve seen with your own eyes the vicious vitriol planners have used to describe the way most people want to live (the suburbs).
CATO needs to do a study to prove what I’ve been saying. If even ONE major newspaper picks it up, the shockwaves could be huge. People would greatly resent the idea that thuggish planners are secretly colluding to deliberately make it more inconvenient to drive.
Most planning concepts are too dense for a newspaper article or the average person, but this could provide a lot of momentum for change. Lead the way, Mr. O’Toole!
Trying to cut carbon emission by specific actions such as increasing mass transit has always failed. A system that applies incentives needs to be implemented. By far the best method of cutting carbon emissions is a carbon fee and dividend as endorsed by Economists:
https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/
and has bipartisan support:
https://energyinnovationact.org/.
If transit is a cost effective way of reducing carbon emissions then it will be implemented by the market using a carbon dividend model.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in August; the state had to “sober up” about the fact that renewable energy sources had failed to provide enough power for the state at peak demand, and needed “backup” and “insurance” from other sources.
Electrifying cars is a notorious long term nightmare that has no grounds it’ll ever succeed in such a time frame.
Cobalt mining, required to make batteries for e-vehicles, has severe impacts on the health of women and children in mining communities, where the mining is often done in unregulated, small-scale, “artisanal” mines. Lithium extraction, also required for manufacturing batteries for e-vehicles, requires large quantities of water, and can cause pollution and shortages of fresh water for local communities.
Green technologies are incredibly resource-greedy. Part of the problem is their feeble ‘power density’ – which is the measurement of the amount of land required to produce a fixed amount of energy. By far the most power-dense form of energy is natural gas, followed by nuclear, oil and coal. Fossil fuels can produce large amounts of energy requiring little land. Renewables, by contrast, need huge amounts of land to produce relatively tiny quantities of energy. Fossil fuels produce on average about 1000 times more power for any given land surface area.
Professor Richard Herrington, Head of Earth Sciences at the Natural History Museum in London stated. To produce enough ev’s to sustain UK driving replacement of the fleet…..
“…just under two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production during 2018″ Just to replace Britains car fleet. If we are to extrapolate this analysis to the currently projected estimate of 2 billion cars worldwide, based on 2018 figures, annual production would have to increase for neodymium and dysprosium by 70%, copper output would need to more than double and cobalt output would need to increase at least three and a half times for the entire period from now until 2050 to satisfy the demand”
An EV future is an environmental nightmare, basically it means a 2000 percent increase in overall mining for all the critical resources needed to make them. People just dont understand Energy physics, a gallon of gasoline weighs 6.3 pounds and can propel your car 30-40 miles, a Tesla battery store 100 kw-h on a 1200 lb battery that’ 12 pounds per kw-h and can only propel it 3 miles
Ivan Illich, 1978 book “Energy and Equity” he painstakingly researches energy physics, while that was 40 years ago, it’s still relevant, the laws of physics haven’t changed.
Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only a mere fraction of a calorie. The bicycle takes 1000x less energy to manufacture than a car, uses NONE of the super toxic heavy metals for batteries and electrical components, it’s powered by your own carbohydrates and requires vastly less infrastructure. Health/weather/fitness permitting, biking can save a person literally 2-5 gallons of gas a day, with an average price of 3 dollars per gallon, that’s 12-15 dollars a day or 4000 dollars a year in fuel costs.
A bicycle may take 1000x less energy to manufacture but an automobile can haul 1,000,000,000,000,000,000X more than a bicycle.
Where is this 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 passenger car you’ve seen?
From Lazy reader above: “Health/weather/fitness permitting, biking can save a person literally 2-5 gallons of gas a day, with an average price of 3 dollars per gallon, that’s 12-15 dollars a day or 4000 dollars a year in fuel costs.”
As a former cyclist who incorporated part of my commute on bicycle you are forgetting “time.” Regrettably it takes a great deal longer to get most places by bicycle. It is useful for short local trips. In the SF Bay area we are now seeing miles and miles of empty bike lanes on major roads. I don’t even cycle on these as I regard them as not as safe as side streets. I was appalled a few years ago to find the SF Bay area MTC proudly explaining just how many more of these empty bike lanes they are going to add between major cities. When I pointed out to the proponents that the bike lanes between cities had no significant use, they had no answer. Probably better to just put in more bike facilities round stations, business districts and downtowns.
A quintillion times as much is a slight exaggeration, Mr. PRK166, but I get your point. I love cycling but its usefulness is limited. For example, the city of Portland made Ikea install bike racks at its PDX store, which is nearly 2 miles from the nearest residential area. I suspect not many people use those racks.
metrosucks,
Do you remember seeing signs saying, “Signals set for 30 mph” or some other speed? Somewhere I have a photo of a sign in the Boston that read, “Signals set to require frequent stops.” That sort of proves your hypothesis, at least for Boston.
From LazyReader above: “Electrifying cars is a notorious long term nightmare that has no grounds it’ll ever succeed in such a time frame.”
This depends on the incentives. I agree with you pointing out the costs of Cobalt, Lithium, and these costs need to be properly added to any cost of an electric car. According to an article in Chemical and Engineering News, (require membership in American Chemical Society) there is a great deal of work going on especially in Europe to overcome all these problems. As to infrastructure, if electric cars can charge at times of low demand and cost, then feed back in the the grid at times of high cost electricity, then they may actually stabilize the electrical grid. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid.
Power will still have to come from a non-CO2 producing source. While I support cost effective renewables, carbon sequestration may well be necessary, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage
If biomass is burned for energy and the carbon captured this will actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere while supply power for electric cars. We just need to see where the technology goes if the incentives are priced appropriately. Pricing carbon is best done with carbon fee and dividend I describe earlier.
And don’t forget the invisible handicapped pedestrian that activates the countdown timer to add another half-minute to every light. That one, I love.
metrosucks,
Do you remember seeing signs saying, “Signals set for 30 mph” or some other speed? Somewhere I have a photo of a sign in the Boston that read, “Signals set to require frequent stops.” That sort of proves your hypothesis, at least for Boston.
Mr. O’Toole, those sort of signs are legacies from fixed timing signals. When you cruised through those lights at the set speed, you were supposed to catch all green lights while in that set network of traffic lights. Traffic light timing has an interesting history. I think in the 70s or so, all traffic lights were on a completely fixed schedule, with no sensors. So lights would turn whichever way they were set to turn regardless of congestion levels. Later on, these fixed timing networks were upgraded with hardware that allowed for different timings at different times of the day.
After that, embedded loop sensors were invented. You can spot these as tar looking circles in the traffic lane, usually 2-3 car lengths from the crosswalk. These sensors allowed the first dynamic timing systems to be run. The whole point of these systems was, initially, to allow steady flows of traffic on major streets while allowing occasional, dynamic green lights for cross streets, without waiting the whole one or two minutes it would normally take under a fixed timing schedule.
Somewhat recently, the next upgrade was video detection systems. These look like a security camera pointed at the roadway at a angle, depending on how far back the engineers wanted the camera to see. These cameras have a simplified vision of the roadway in order to detect if anything is in the lane. They were supposed to be a major upgrade because most bikes and aluminum motorcycles (or motorcycles with very little steel) wouldn’t trip the embedded loop sensors, which work via induction.
The sign you talked about in Boston is the first time I’ve actually heard about anything like that. I’m assuming the reason there was as a traffic calming measure, to prevent people from building up speed in some sort of busy area. I’ve never seen these signs anywhere, much less the west coast cities I’ve been to. This sort of signal timing is a secret, because there would probably be a lot of blowback if people knew planners were using that video detection device on a signal to turn the light red before you got to it.
For example, the original way embedded loop sensors worked was as an alert to the intersection controller that a car had shown up on a lightly used side street. That would trigger a delayed signal change, in which traffic on the mainline would be allowed to clear the light before it was changed for the cross street. Now, here in Seattle, and Portland, the embedded loop detector is used to instantly trip a yellow-red light for the main line, causing stop & go driving and congestion.
At one local intersection, planners placed the embedded loop sensor so far back on the side street that the light on the mainline turns yellow before you can even see the car that triggered the light change. People have taken to speeding like crazy up the hill this intersection is on because they’re tired of stopping at this light 100% of the time otherwise.
According to the Dept. of Energy, “In 2017 Nearly 60% of All Vehicle Trips Were Less than Six Miles.” Not only is that easily doable by bike by most healthy adults, upcoming generations are showing increasing willingness and desire to use bikes for transportation purposes. Electric assisted bikes make bike commuting feasible for even more people.
I think an important part of any complete multimodal transportation system (a term the planners love) should take advantage of these facts/trends.
For little additional cost (at least, compared to transit), bicycle friendly policy has the potential to yield relatively large benefits.
For Paul, I would add that it doesn’t always take longer by bike. I too am a former bike commuter. On my 10.5-mile each way commute in Sacramento in the early 70s, I use to play a game called “race the bus” with my neighbor who worked in the same downtown building as me. On average, I would win 80 percent of the time.
Most trips are done because people are trying to accomplish something. No one wants to go out for a romantic dinner in spandex. You can’t pick up your clothes at the cleaners on a bike. Nor go grocery shopping for a family.
No argument there, prk166. No one’s advocating confiscating your limousine or your minivan. But many people (not all) CAN go to work on a bike and data show that some are already doing so, accepting less that desirable roadway conditions.
Rather than buck the trend of fewer and fewer people wanting to ride buses and trains that are very expensive, why not go with the trend of more and more people wanting to ride bikes (which they pay for themselves) by improving roads, which is cheaper than transit and benefits more people.