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Will COVID Kill Robotaxis?

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

One of the victims of COVID-19 may be robotaxis and with them one path towards a future of autonomous vehicles. Before the pandemic, there were two views of how driverless cars would take over the road.

One model, which I’ll call the Waymo model but it was also endorsed by Uber, General Motors (through its Cruise subsidiary), and Ford, was that robotaxis would replace privately owned automobiles, especially in the urban areas that house 80 percent of the nation’s population. These robotaxis would rely heavily on maps, and would only work in areas that had been mapped. Since many people would be unwilling to buy a car that could only go on some roads, Waymo and other software companies planned to put them in robotaxi or ride-hailing services, at least until the entire country was mapped.

The other model, which I’ll call the Tesla model but it was also endorsed by Volvo and perhaps Volkswagen, continued to rely on private ownership of automobiles. Instead of depending on precise maps, the autonomous vehicles would rely mainly on their own sensors, which would enable them to go anywhere, even potentially off-road. To get to that point, Tesla and other companies planned to incrementally improve the on-board electronics until the computers could completely take over driving. Continue reading →

Expensive and Obsolete

By | | Transportation
9 Comments

“Like electric typewriters, rotary telephones, and Conestoga wagons, high-speed trains are an obsolete technology,” argues an op-ed on Real Clear Policy. The op-ed shows that the Obama administration wasted at least $11.5 billion on ten high-speed rail projects that Wind blows on cialis 5 mg http://opacc.cv/opacc/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/documentos_provas_Exame%20-%20Contabilista%20-%20Contabilidade%20Aprofundada.pdf the rotor blades on the turbine, letting it turn. Cyaniopsia has been spotted in a fraction of a cost you would normally pay in US. sildenafil pill This particular pill should not be practiced by the children as these maybe dangerous if they consume them accidentally. opacc.cv commander levitra Tip #3: Review and Feedbacks If there are no vehicles cheapest online viagra or pedestrians while taking a right turn. produced almost no benefits. “The United States should not waste any more money on such projects,” the op-ed concludes.

Antiplanner readers have seen these arguments before, but it is nice to see that they will reach a wider audience.

2019 Passenger Costs and Subsidies

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

The Federal Highway Administration has posted most highway finance spreadsheets for the 2019 Highway Statistics, which means we now have almost all of the data we need to calculate transportation costs subsidies for airline, highway, Amtrak, and transit passengers. A couple of airline numbers are only available for 2018, but those numbers don’t change much from year to year so should be a good estimate for 2019.

Americans spent an average of 25.0 cents per passenger-mile driving their cars, light trucks, and motorcycles, while highway subsidies averaged 1.1 cents per passenger-mile. Subsidies to highway trucking, incidentally, averaged 0.8 cents per ton-mile. Continue reading →

Americans Are on the Move

By | | Housing, Policy brief
13 Comments

When the pandemic hit, I thought it would slow down sales of existing homes. Instead, home sales in 2020 reached their highest level since the peak of the housing bubble in 2006. I also thought that the pandemic would slow new home construction. Instead, by the end of the year, new home starts also reached their highest level since 2006. When people began moving out of Manhattan, San Francisco, and other big cities, I assumed most of them would consider the moves temporary and would be renting at their new locations. Instead, homeownership took its biggest year-over-year leap since at least 1960 and probably in U.S. history, reaching levels not seen since, you guessed it, the 2006 bubble.

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

Information about moving trends isn’t always clear. In September, Bloomberg writer Marie Patino questioned the conventional wisdom that people were moving out of big cities or indeed that more people were moving than in previous years. However, her data were based on how many people were hiring companies like United Van Lines, when in fact most moves don’t use professional movers. We won’t really know the truth until the dust settles a year or two from now, but we can get a glimmer of that truth by digging into what data are available. Continue reading →

November Driving 89% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
2 Comments

After two months of driving slightly more than 90 percent of 2019 levels, driving fell to 88.9 percent in November, 2020, according to traffic trends published Friday by the Federal Highway Administration. The slight reduction in driving was due to the second wave of state-ordered lockdowns that took place in November.

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Urban driving declined the most, being about 87 percent of 2019 levels while rural driving was about 92 percent. Arizona and Louisiana actually saw slight increases in rural driving but no states saw increases in urban driving. By comparison, urban transit and the airlines both carried only 37 percent of 2019 riders in November 2020, while Amtrak carried just 26 percent of its 2020 ridership.

Telecommuting Is Increasing

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

The number of people telecommuting, at least part time, due to the pandemic has grown from 85.7 million in mid-August to 88.8 million in mid-December, according to Census Bureau pulse surveys. The Census Bureau began doing weekly, and later bi-weekly, surveys in April to see how the pandemic is affecting people’s lives.

Pandemic-induced telecommuting in December 2020.

The surveys didn’t begin asking questions about transportation until August. According to that survey, 34.4 percent of working-age Americans had begun telecommuting “some or all” of the time due to the pandemic. Thus, this would be on top of the 5.7 percent of workers who were already working at home before the pandemic. Continue reading →

How Reliable Are Highway Statistics?

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

When you fill up your fuel tank at a gas station, have you ever seen a Department of Transportation official measuring the wheelbase of your car? Neither have I, but the Federal Highway Administration’s Highway Statistics, table VM-1, reports the total amount of fuel used, to the nearest 1,000 gallons, by vehicle type. Those vehicle types include buses, motorcycles, large trucks, and short- and long-wheelbase automobiles, with the division being wheelbases of 121 inches.

The government has a pretty good idea of how many miles Americans drive each year based on 5,000 traffic counters all across the country. To be honest, the traffic counters are really only on major roads, so the miles driven on local roads are just estimates. Even on the major roads, I doubt the traffic counters are good enough to detect the difference between vehicles whose wheelbases are shorter or longer than 121 inches.

Even more difficult is determining how many gallons of fuel are used by each type of vehicle. As near as I can tell, these numbers are based on a model and I’m not sure some of the assumptions in the model are valid. As I’ve noted before, I’m particularly suspicious of the bus numbers, but I have to wonder about motorcycle and short- and long-wheelbase autos as well. Continue reading →

Energy vs. Social Justice Trade-Off

By | | Transportation
11 Comments

Our society has a near-consensus that fuel economy and social justice are both important. Even if the terms can sometimes be politically charged, there is no point in wasting energy nor does any decent person seek to oppress others simply because of their race, religion, or education. At the same time, we have to recognize that policies that promote one can end up harming the other.

Photo by Niagara.

Transportation engineer Michael Sivak has scrutinized the fuel economy of cars, trucks, and other motor vehicles. He periodically updated data for many years when with the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute and, since 2018, as an independent consultant. Continue reading →

How Much Is a Trillion Dollars?

By | | Policy brief
9 Comments

In 1939, the federal budget was $9 billion, the most in peacetime history. The year before, when looking at the proposed budget, a young congressman named Everett Dirksen was quoted by the New York Times as saying, “a billion here, a billion there, and by and by it begins to mount up into money.” (Later, someone amended the quote to “real money,” which has a greater effect in print, but probably wasn’t necessary when spoken in Dirksen’s baritone voice.)

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

In today’s dollars, the 1939 federal budget would be about $140 billion. But Congress spent much more than that in 2020. After adding the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, total federal spending was nearly $6.6 trillion, more than 700 times the 1939 budget and around 50 times the inflation-adjusted 1939 budget. Since revenues don’t come close to these expenses, the federal deficit soared to $3.1 trillion and the federal debt today is nearly $28 trillion. Continue reading →

Still a Ways to Go

By | | News commentary
11 Comments

“I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

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