M II A II R II K
Senior Member
Could ultra-smart cars leave light rail in the dust?
03/07/2010
By Chuck Plunkett
Read More: http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_14515504
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Americans waste about 4.2 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, a soaring increase in gridlock that has occurred because we've become obsessed with FasTracks-style solutions that don't work. That's the argument of "Gridlock: Why We're Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It," the newest book by Randal O'Toole, the libertarian transportation expert who warned the Denver area in 2004 that FasTracks was wildly optimistic — and who has been proven correct.
- Spending billions of transportation dollars once used to repair and expand roads and highways on pricey transit systems that move less than 5 percent of the population has brought the greatest transportation system in the world to a dramatic slowdown. That roadblock to mobility threatens our prosperity and freedom, O'Toole argues.
- Charting the advantages brought about by the overwhelming use of automobiles, and contrasting it with the ever-falling use of mass transit (despite claims that ridership at new transit lines is rising, per capita use of transit has been getting smaller for years) or interest in so-called "transit-oriented development" communities (which have to be subsidized to attract residents whose driving habits hardly change), O'Toole argues we should never again allow our city planners to utter any iteration of the belief that "We can't build our way out of congestion." Historically, the opposite has been true.
- The most exotic solution sounds awfully futuristic. O'Toole argues that technology that is already available, and which is rapidly advancing, would allow ultra-smart passenger cars to follow GPS directions on their own to get passengers where they are going. Using the lightning-fast reflexes of robots, driverless cars would shoot along at high speeds, instantaneously avoid slowdowns and thereby revolutionize existing roadways to quadruple their capacity — even during rush hour.
- We have automakers who are making cars that are near driverless (like Audi and Volkswagen), but the highway owners, the states, aren't lifting a finger. So I want to put pressure on the states to sit down with automakers and set standards. Say, "What is going to be the technological path? Are we going to have some kind of highways by 2015 that are exclusively driverless? Are we going to have some roads that are open to driverless? How are we going to do it?"
- There are already car-sharing companies in many cities. You just go out and pick up a car and you pay a daily fee for using it and you drop it off and that's it. Volkswagen has a website (Volkswagen2028.com) where they imagine that in 2028 all cars are driverless, most cars are shared. You can own your own car if you want, or in the video they show people walking through the park and they say, "I want a car. OK, what kind of car do you want today?" They call on their iPhone, order a sports car and one drives itself up, they get in and drive off.
- I can't foresee exactly what will happen, but I don't see a need for a lot of high-capacity transit systems. We have millions of different origins, millions of different destinations. High-capacity transit doesn't make sense in our society. The idea that we should be building a whole bunch of it for the day that we run out of oil, when it turns out that cars are more energy-efficient than trains no matter what you power them with, doesn't make sense.
- Look at New York City and Chicago. They're looking at spending tens of billions of dollars to rebuild their systems. In most cases, that's money they don't have. Almost all the transit accidents you've heard about in Washington, D.C., have been due to maintenance problems. In 2002, they projected they would need $12 billion over the next decade to refurbish, and they only got like $1.5 billion. The first light rail system was built in 1981 in San Diego, so it will be 30 years old next year. So we'll see these problems start to crop up in San Diego, then a few years later in Sacramento and Portland and so on.
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03/07/2010
By Chuck Plunkett
Read More: http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_14515504
#################################################
Americans waste about 4.2 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, a soaring increase in gridlock that has occurred because we've become obsessed with FasTracks-style solutions that don't work. That's the argument of "Gridlock: Why We're Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It," the newest book by Randal O'Toole, the libertarian transportation expert who warned the Denver area in 2004 that FasTracks was wildly optimistic — and who has been proven correct.
- Spending billions of transportation dollars once used to repair and expand roads and highways on pricey transit systems that move less than 5 percent of the population has brought the greatest transportation system in the world to a dramatic slowdown. That roadblock to mobility threatens our prosperity and freedom, O'Toole argues.
- Charting the advantages brought about by the overwhelming use of automobiles, and contrasting it with the ever-falling use of mass transit (despite claims that ridership at new transit lines is rising, per capita use of transit has been getting smaller for years) or interest in so-called "transit-oriented development" communities (which have to be subsidized to attract residents whose driving habits hardly change), O'Toole argues we should never again allow our city planners to utter any iteration of the belief that "We can't build our way out of congestion." Historically, the opposite has been true.
- The most exotic solution sounds awfully futuristic. O'Toole argues that technology that is already available, and which is rapidly advancing, would allow ultra-smart passenger cars to follow GPS directions on their own to get passengers where they are going. Using the lightning-fast reflexes of robots, driverless cars would shoot along at high speeds, instantaneously avoid slowdowns and thereby revolutionize existing roadways to quadruple their capacity — even during rush hour.
- We have automakers who are making cars that are near driverless (like Audi and Volkswagen), but the highway owners, the states, aren't lifting a finger. So I want to put pressure on the states to sit down with automakers and set standards. Say, "What is going to be the technological path? Are we going to have some kind of highways by 2015 that are exclusively driverless? Are we going to have some roads that are open to driverless? How are we going to do it?"
- There are already car-sharing companies in many cities. You just go out and pick up a car and you pay a daily fee for using it and you drop it off and that's it. Volkswagen has a website (Volkswagen2028.com) where they imagine that in 2028 all cars are driverless, most cars are shared. You can own your own car if you want, or in the video they show people walking through the park and they say, "I want a car. OK, what kind of car do you want today?" They call on their iPhone, order a sports car and one drives itself up, they get in and drive off.
- I can't foresee exactly what will happen, but I don't see a need for a lot of high-capacity transit systems. We have millions of different origins, millions of different destinations. High-capacity transit doesn't make sense in our society. The idea that we should be building a whole bunch of it for the day that we run out of oil, when it turns out that cars are more energy-efficient than trains no matter what you power them with, doesn't make sense.
- Look at New York City and Chicago. They're looking at spending tens of billions of dollars to rebuild their systems. In most cases, that's money they don't have. Almost all the transit accidents you've heard about in Washington, D.C., have been due to maintenance problems. In 2002, they projected they would need $12 billion over the next decade to refurbish, and they only got like $1.5 billion. The first light rail system was built in 1981 in San Diego, so it will be 30 years old next year. So we'll see these problems start to crop up in San Diego, then a few years later in Sacramento and Portland and so on.
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