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The State of Driverless Cars

By | | Transportation
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Cruise founder Kyle Vogt takes OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on a virtual 75-minute drive in a driverless car through the streets of San Francisco in the video below. Cruise vehicles use LIDAR, radar, and optical sensors and are connected to to Cruise offices through the 4G cell network. The video demonstrates that autonomous vehicles are ready to enter ride hailing service, but not quite ready to go on sale to consumers.

To save time, the video has been speeded up five times so that 75 minutes are compressed into 15. During this time, the car handily deals with pedestrians, cyclists riding the wrong way, unprotected left turns, double-parked cars, and other road hazards. Vogt notes that the car’s computer not only tracks every other vehicle and pedestrian in its view, it simulates that vehicle or person’s movement and tries to predict where they are going so as to avoid any collisions. Since the accompanying map shows that the vehicle is tracking dozens of other moving objects at any given moment, this is pretty impressive. Continue reading →

Are Accidents of History Irreversible?

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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There’s a popular belief that the federal government began subsidizing public transit and Amtrak to protect the environment and help provide mobility to low-income people. In fact, while energy and poverty later became excuses for continuing subsidies that had already begun, neither of these issues were on Congress’ collective mind when it began subsidizing transit in 1964 and created Amtrak in 1970. Instead, both of these programs are little more than accidents of history.

Click image to download a three-page PDF of this policy brief.

Transit: Saving Big-City Downtowns

The environment wasn’t even an issue when Congress created the Urban Mass Transit Administration and started giving federal grants to local transit agencies in 1964. Nor was helping poor people a major concern. Instead, the primary goal of federal transit funding was to protect the value of downtown properties in a few big cities. Continue reading →

Bus vs. Rail in Manhattan

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The formerly free-market Manhattan Institute, which has lately become a shill for transit and other big-government subsidies, has taken a stand against spending $10 billion on a bus terminal in New York City. The only problem is that, instead of the bus terminal, the Manhattan Institute proposes to spend multiple tens of billions of dollars on new underground rail transit lines connecting Manhattan with New Jersey.

The Port Authority Midtown Bus Terminal. Photo by Hudconja.

The 1937 opening of the Lincoln Tunnel led to hundreds of buses roaming the streets of Manhattan after bringing commuters and other travelers from New Jersey. To reduce congestion, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey built a midtown bus terminal near the Manhattan entrance of the tunnel in 1950. That terminal cost $24 million, less than $210 million in today’s dollars. Continue reading →

Forum on State Transportation Issues

By | | Housekeeping
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State transportation issues during and after the pandemic will be the topic of an on-line forum next Wednesday, February 17. The Antiplanner will join several other experts, including Robert Poole, Baruch Feigenbaum, Marc Scribner, Wendell Cox, and Mariya Frost, to discuss highway, transit, and similar issues from noon to 1:30 pm Pacific Time (3:00 pm to 4:30 pm Eastern Time).

The forum is aimed at state policy think tanks, legislative staff, and other people who deal with state transportation issues agencies, budgets, and policies. Presentations will be based on Transportation and COVID-19, a group of articles published in December. More information and event registration are available from the Washington Policy Center.

Speaking of seminars, University of Oxford Professor Bent Flyvbjerg, noted expert on megaprojects, is holding an on-line class on Reference Class Forecasting. The projected cost of constructing the typical light-rail line rises by 40 to 50 percent between the initial cost estimate and project approval. The actual cost of constructing it rises another 40 to 50 percent between project approval and project completion. Continue reading →

News Bulletin: Young People Are Naive

By | | Transportation
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“One thing Millennials are’t killing?” the headline on an article from National Public Radio read last week: “Public transportation.” Such a story might have been relevant a year or two ago. Today, when transit ridership is down by more than 60 percent, it is an example of spectacularly poor timing, like writing about how we should all invest in GameStop.

Millennials (ages 25-44) are a little more likely to commute by transit than previous generations, but members of Generation Z (ages 16-24) or less likely to do so.

One thing NPR is good at is putting a human face on the data published by various government and private entities. The problem in this story is that they forgot to see if the data actually backed up their anecdotes. They don’t. Continue reading →

High-Speed Rail Line Cancelled

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

A planned high-speed rail line between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur has been cancelled, the governments of Malaysia and Singapore announced last month. The 217-mile line was expected to cost $17 billion, or $78 million per mile, and that was deemed too expensive for Malaysia after it was impacted by the pandemic.

Proposed high-speed rail route. Map by Seloloving.

Before the pandemic, the route was served by conventional trains and buses that took six hours as well as more than 80 airline flights a day, more than any other two cities on earth. The high-speed train would have taken 90 minutes (compared to an hour by plane) and was supposed to capture most of the air travel and contribute to the economic growth of the countries. Continue reading →

Transit 2020: Subsidies Up, Ridership Down

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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The transit industry carried 37.5 percent as many riders in December 2020 as it had in December 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. This is a slight increase over the 36.9 percent carried in November. For the year as a whole, it ended up carrying 46.1 percent as many riders as it had transported in 2019.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

The industry had begun the year carrying about 6 to 7 percent more riders than the first two months of 2019, suggesting that it might have been about to turn around the decline that it had experienced over the previous five years. The pandemic foiled this recovery, and the industry avoided total disaster only by the American Public Transportation Association and transit agencies convincing Congress to give transit $25 billion in April and $12 billion in December, with more on the way. This has taught the transit industry a perverse lesson: it doesn’t have to actually carry many passengers to continue to receive subsidies. Continue reading →

A Global Leader in Obsolete Technology

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg wants to make the United States the “global leader” in high-speed rail. That’s like wanting to be the world leader in electric typewriters, rotary telephones, or steam locomotives, all technologies that were once revolutionary but are functionally obsolete today. High-speed trains, in particular, were rendered obsolete in 1958, when Boeing introduced the 707 jetliner, which was twice as fast as the fastest trains today.

Slower than flying, less convenient than driving, and far more expensive than either one.

Aside from speed, what makes high-speed rail obsolete is its high cost. Unlike airlines, which don’t require much infrastructure other than landing fields, high-speed trains require huge amounts of infrastructure that must be built and maintained to extremely precise standards. That’s why airfares averaged just 14 cents per passenger-mile in 2019, whereas fares on Amtrak’s high-speed Acela averaged more than 90 cents per passenger-mile. Continue reading →

New Flyer Announces Level 4 Bus

By | | Transportation
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Bus manufacturer New Flyer has announced that it has level 4 autonomous buses ready for sale. Level 4 means no human driver will be necessary as long as the bus says on its designated route.

New Flyer’s autonomous bus will have at least a dozen LIDAR, radar, and optical sensors. Click image to download a brochure about the bus.

The intelligence for the buses will be provided by Robotic Research, which until recently focused mainly on developing small delivery vehicles that can operate on sidewalks. Moving from tiny delivery carts to 40-foot buses is quite a leap. Continue reading →

Transit Subsidies of $108 Per Ride

By | | Transportation
1 Comment

Yesterday, the Antiplanner predicted that at some point people would realize that transit is a waste. That point may have already been reached in Portland, which has voted down new taxes for transit the last four times they have been on the ballot. Moreover, on Monday a Portland television station reported that TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, is spending $108 to subsidize each and every ride on the Westside Express Service (WES).

The report quotes the Cascade Policy Institute‘s John Charles as saying, “They should just admit it was a mistake.” Even a representative of the Association of Oregon Rail and Transit Advocates agrees that “it’s too expensive.” Continue reading →