Response to Hall on our Transportation Future

When I was a boy (a few decades ago) my parents took me to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.  An authoritative tour guide guaranteed us kids that we’d all be travelling to the moon by the time we were grown-ups.  It was inevitable to any thinking person and would come fast.   Guess what?  I still haven’t been.

It turns out that just because something is technological possible, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to become an immediate mass market experience.   I was reminded of that vivid childhood event while reading Richard Hall’s latest blog post in the Patch.

Gee Whiz Roads

For Hall, intelligent systems that automatically drive our cars are just around the corner and will make roadway congestion a thing of the past.  No need to consider other alternatives to cars.

It’s true that drivers will have growing amounts of data at their disposal, informing them about congestion, accidents, weather, parking availability and many other useful things.  Our cars may also soon be able to automatically select the best available route to take. 

However, the problem of roadway congestion isn’t about drivers picking the wrong routes.  Very often, there are no alternate routes.  And, even when alternate routes do exist, drivers already do a good job of finding them and bringing all the routes into a kind of equilibrium – often so that all options are equally lousy.  

Road congestion is about volumes exceeding capacity.  The futuristic technology of automated, interactive, vehicle systems that allow for “car-chaining” might reduce congestion, at least temporarily.  However, the capacity benefits of car-chaining stem mainly from having cars drive remarkably close to one another, which sets up the possibility of catastrophes.  Somebody will have to be liable for the inevitable failure in an individual vehicle or even a whole vehicle-to-vehicle communication system. 

Hall glosses over this vexing problem and simply calls for legislation to make the whole liability issue disappear.   In reality, that may take a very long time to resolve.  Moreover, even if drivers surrender control of their cars (assuming Americans would willingly accept such a thing) it will result in a one-time boost in capacity.  Once computers control our vehicles and fully optimize driving, the capacity gains will end.   

Plus, just as the benefit of widening roads doesn’t last forever because of the triple convergence phenomenon, the same will be true with any capacity benefit from automated highways.  There will simply not be a congestion-free future where the capacity of all our roads always magically exceeds the demand.  

In fact, long before we see automated highways, we may well see the expansion of High Occupancy Tolls (HOT) lanes or much more widely deployed automated tolling systems exacting charges from drivers during peak times.  Transportation economists have long argued for tackling congestion by making drivers to pay when and where roads are congested.  The new and emerging technologies praised by Hall make this road pricing much more technologically feasible.  Various forms of road pricing could make roads less congested, but also more expensive, boosting the competitiveness of telecommuting, bikes and transit. 

Gee Whiz Green Cars

As with congestion, Hall sets about trying to dismiss the air quality rationale for automobile alternatives.  He touts the electric car revolution just around the bend.  In his mind, there’s no environmental need for bikes, buses or trains when cars are about to stop polluting altogether.

The reality here is incredibly sobering.  Since 1990, the U.S. on-road fleet average fuel economy has only gone up from 18 mpg to 22 mpg, or a paltry increase of 0.17 mpg per year.  Given that the last couple of decades have seen: the rise of global warming consciousness, tightening emissions standards, and thousands of feel-good, green car ads, you are forgiven for being surprised at how little has actually changed on the ground.  

With one of those “only in Marin” kinds of phrases, Hall argues that BMW’s newfound interest in making an electric car is the game changer.  I’m not sure how much Richard knows about America, buts it’s worth noting that the Ford Motor Company has sold more F Series pick-up trucks in the last two months than all auto manufacturers combined have sold plug-in vehicles in the last 5 years.  This is with government agencies accounting for a sizable share of those electric vehicle sales, and with taxpayers subsidizing those vehicles in California to the tune of $10,000 each. 

While Hall squirms at the idea of subsidizing transit projects, he completely ignores the taxpayer subsidies and other policy machinations involved in helping to carve out the meager toe-hold that electric cars have in the auto market. 

Like the zero-congestion future, the breathless optimism about the impending zero-emission future is part of the attempt to dismiss and reject automobile alternatives.

Gee Whiz Transit

Since not everyone can afford a BMW i3, Hall accedes to allowing for some transit to help the poor get around.  However, in a replication of the odd Bob Silvestri argument, the transit must be an on-demand shuttle with no fixed routes, schedules or stops – the latter trio being considered too reflective of Soviet central planning.

As I explained in a previous post, this is essentially a call for transit services to become more like taxi service which would be nice, but also orders of magnitude more expensive for taxpayers. Fixed routes, schedules and limited destinations are not the spawn of Karl Marx.  As with the private airline industry and private bus services, they are merely a tool to manage operating costs.

The response to this response is usually that the on-demand shuttles would be driverless (naturally) and therefore free from having to worry about labor costs.

Obviously, a world in which shuttles don’t need a driver is also a world in which buses and trains don’t need a driver.   Freed from requiring a driver (the single biggest operating cost input) fixed-route public transit will suddenly become much more cost effective.  In short, fixed route service will always be much cheaper than an on-demand service, with or without a human driver.  

The imagining of the newish and techy-sounding shuttle (you summon it with an app) is again part of the attempt to dismiss regular transit service – but with no actual consideration of how the gee whiz shuttle would function in the real world or what it would cost. 

The Core Issue

In Hall’s mind, if roads were clear, cars were clean, and the poor had a high-tech way to get around, there would be no good arguments whatsoever for considering other forms of transportation.  We could throw bike paths, rail service, ferries, fixed-routes buses, and other nonsense into the dust bin of history – and the whole smart growth movement along with it. 

This ignores the core issue.  The popular frustration with auto-dominant urban design is not just about being stuck in traffic, breathing in pollution, or having teens, seniors, the disabled and the poor being stranded without a car.  At root, people are not entirely satisfied with how some of these places look and feel. 

Increasingly, people don’t want to live in places where a kid can’t safely walk to school or where riding your bike is a kind of death wish.  They don’t want a landscape that is wildly sprawled out and ruled by asphalt and freeways and strip malls.  

I concur with Hall that some advocates may be overzealous in their attempts to make Marin a touch more like Europe and are willing to overly restrict choices or spend excessive sums of public money to try to make that happen.  However, that’s not anywhere close the whole story.    

The current real estate market is begging for more walkable, urbane, village-like, and authentic places.  Generic subdivisions and strip commercial centers are losing appeal.  Many people want transportation priorities that match.  Stopping this demand from being expressed actually involves throwing of sand in the gears of the marketplace and a great deal of government regulation and central planning.

Hall says that what developers want (in other words, what the market wants and what people want) “is not the future.  The future is self-driving cars.”  He laments that misguided “planners” are diverting our road money to other kinds of projects.  

In the recent case of the failed Highway 101 Greenbrae Corridor project, however, the diversion of funds from a big Caltrans road project to a variety of more humble and multi-modal alternatives was not driven by transportation planners.  It was powered by the grass roots.   

The future is seldom predictable and we have no way of knowing exactly how new technologies might play out or affect the physical landscape.  However, I’m willing bet that the future is going to be heavily shaped by our preferences about the kind of communities we want to live in. 

I’m starting to doubt, though, that I’ll ever be going to the moon.