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More Automakers Move Toward Self-Driving Cars

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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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.

Land-Use Manifesto 2013

By | | Housing, Mission, Regional planning
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Here is the second of my statements of principles for the New Year.

1. The Property-Rights Principle: Government should not regulate land uses except to prevent trespasses or nuisances.

People should be allowed to use their land in any way they see fit provided their use does not harm others (such as through air, water, or noise pollution) or violate contracts they have voluntarily agreed to. Any regulation beyond this “for the greater good” puts someone’s subjective notion of social values above individual rights.

Even if it could be proven that such regulations would benefit society more than they would harm individual property owners, government should not have this power because it invites abuse. If the social benefits are truly greater than the individual costs, then society should be willing to compensate the property owners.

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A Rental Crisis?

By | | Housing
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The Bipartisan Policy Center released an “infographic” arguing that there is an imminent shortage of rental housing. “Five to six million new renter households will form over the next ten years,” says the “graphic” (quotations used because it really isn’t that graphic), but a “slowdown in new construction . . . means rental market conditions are tight.”

Click to download the entire infographic.

The group buys into the notion that an increasing number of people want to rent rather than buy. Yet it is more likely that the sagging economy combined with housing prices that are still too high in many states are preventing people from buying even though they would prefer to do so.

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Not a Crisis After All

By | | News commentary
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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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Transportation Manifesto 2013

By | | Mission, Transportation
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The New Year seems an appropriate time to state, or restate, the main goals of this blog. Today the Antiplanner will focus on transportation. Future manifestos will focus on land-use regulation and public land management. Any suggestions for improving these principles and corollaries are welcome.

1. The Transportation Agency Principle: The sole goal of government transportation agencies should be to efficiently enhance mobility.

Mobility is so important socially and economically that it deserves the same protection under the Constitution as freedom of speech and freedom of religion. (In fact, freedom of movement is nominally protected under the privileges and immunities clause of the Constitution.) Enhancements in mobility over the past century have been a major factor in increasing wealth, reducing poverty, increasing lifespans, and increasing leisure time. No other goal should be allowed to divert attention from the efficient enhancement of mobility.

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San Jose Transit Is Still Near the Top

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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That is, near the top of the list of the nation’s worst transit systems, says the San Jose Mercury-New. “The near-empty trolleys that often shuttle by at barely faster than jogging speeds serve as a constant reminder that the car is still king in Silicon Valley,” says the paper, “and that the Valley Transportation Authority’s trains are among the least successful in the nation by any metric.”

Many if not most San Jose light-rail “trains” are just one car long, which means they aren’t really trains at all. Considering an average load of just 18 people, the first third of this articulated railcar would be more than enough to handle the demand most times of the day.
Flickr photo from Albert’s Images.

Five years ago the Antiplanner declared the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) to be worst-managed transit system. Is it still the worst? It has a lot of competition, including Baltimore, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh, yet VTA manages to remain competitive.

In terms of number of riders per light-rail car, VTA carried an average of just 18.3 in 2011, a number lower than all other light-rail systems except Buffalo (17.0) and Baltimore (18.2). Fares from San Jose’s light-rail riders cover just 15.7 percent of the trains’ operating costs; only Baltimore, at 12.0 percent, is lower. Counting just operating costs, taxpayers pay nearly $5 to subsidize each light-rail trip, an amount exceeded only by Dallas and Pittsburgh light-rail systems. Overall, I’d say Baltimore’s is the worst system, with San Jose’s a close number two.

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Merry Christmas

By | | Housekeeping
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Have a Happy Hanukkah, Wonderful Winter Solstice, thrilling Kwanzaa, Festive Festivus, glorious Gurnenthar’s Ascendance, or whatever holiday you celebrate.


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From the Antiplanner dogs, Smokey & Buffy.

Failing the Intelligence Test

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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Garl Boyd Latham, of the Texas Association of Railroad Passengers, predicts that San Antonians will be “pleased by streetcars once they are running.” His response to the Antiplanner’s op ed critiquing the city’s streetcar plan basically amounts to, “don’t confuse me with the facts; I know what I believe.”

To be precise, Latham says, “An astute man can prove anything he wanted with facts and figures,” then argues that the Antiplanner “manufactured an artificial reality through the manipulation of facts.”

One of those supposed manipulations is my claim that streetcars cost more than buses. Latham admits the capital costs are high but claims that, once built, streetcars have “a minimum life expectancy of a half-century or longer,” which will be surprise to the Federal Transit Administration (or just about anyone in the transit industry), which says streetcar vehicles last about 25 years, and other streetcar infrastructure lasts no more than 30 years. Not even counting maintenance, FTA data clearly show that streetcars cost far more to operate–either per vehicle mile or per passenger mile–than buses.

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Defining Success for Amtrak

By | | Transportation
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The Auto Train, which carries passengers and their autos between Virginia and Florida, was a “private failure” but a “public success,” says the January, 2013 issue of Trains magazine. For those who don’t know the story, the Auto-Train began as a private venture when a Department of Transportation employee named Eugene Garfield took a DOT feasibility study and $56,000 of his own money to begin the service from Lorton, Virginia (outside of DC) and Sanford, in central Florida. When it began service a few months after Amtrak took over most of the nation’s passenger trains, the Auto-Train was heralded as a great success, earning a profit as early as its second six-months of operation.

The original Auto-Train.

In 1974, however, Garfield bet the company starting a second route from Louisville to Florida, hoping to capture some of the Chicago market. Even without this failed investment, the profits Auto-Train reported only covered operating costs, not maintenance. As so many railroads have done in the past, it was deferring maintenance hoping for more profits to cover those costs in the future. That deferral contributed to at least two accidents that cost the company millions of dollars. The hoped-for long-term profits didn’t happen–Trains reports that it only netted a profit in 1973, ’74, and ’75–and the company went out of business in 1981.

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The Benefits and Costs of Tolling

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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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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