This week I'm joined by the Transit Center's Shin-pei Tsay to talk about a report they wrote on transportation advocacy and innovation. It's a great look at things advocates have done to change transportation fortunes in their cities and has tips for those who want to make change.
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Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
Most Read: Are Self Driving Cars Just Us Ignoring the Real Issues?
I'm going to start a new series on the blog called "Most Read". It will feature the most read article from the day before on The Direct Transfer Daily as well as some thoughts I have on it. It's been hard to blog lately but I need to get into it again to put some half baked thoughts to screen.
Today's most read piece was one by Jim Bacon entitled "The Slow, Inevitable Demise of Traditional Mass Transit" In it he talks about WMATA's declining transit patronage in the region and that part of the blame goes to the union while local government support will not be able to keep up with demands.
He then mentions the blue state transit model failure which just seems like tossing red meat to me.
When Kevin DeGood came on the podcast, he had the numbers to prove it. Data liberalization is amazing! He found 5.5 percent of roads carry 55 percent of the traffic. That's definitely not paying for itself and it shows an over-reliance on highways in major cities that carry so many cars, they can't keep up. The interstates between cities many times do actually cover costs in gas tax revenue. Once we get into the details. interesting findings come out.
But let's step outside this often debated construct for a bit and talk about "shared-ridership revolution". At first blush after watching the debate for a while, I'm going to come out and say I don't like it. Sure there are first mile/last mile solutions that make sense and they can be useful in a pinch, I just don't like the inevitability of self driving cars and the demise of transit in cities because I think its short sighted. I think Tom Vanderbilt's article on futurism pushed me more towards the skeptical side as well. He shares points other have made...
That is a GEOMETRY problem that these apps won't solve because they are projecting in their current paradigm. Suburban car problems. Kind of like lots of tech and apps being 20 year old man problems. If everyone in a city decided to hail a self driving car, we'd still have traffic but even more of it! Think about those 60 bus riders each in those little google cars. Still taking up way more space!
The problem in my mind is that we continue to try and solve issues we created ourselves in a strange circular fashion. Technologists have always been saying we are going to keep moving out and will need mobility solutions for that change. But going back to the "pay for itself" argument and the actual usage of roads, we find that the free roads are used to the point of congestion and are not actually supported at current "usage fee" rates.
So the question for me then is, are self driving cars the next freeway? Why are we trying to solve a problem (congestion and living too far from work) with more vehicles when all we have to do now is price roads accordingly and free up land uses? When self driving car corridors get overused, are we going to have to price those corridors too? Did we just build a whole system that went back to the old problem because we wanted a techno fix for something that only required economics?
Cities are still thriving. People want to be near other people. And while ride sharing is useful in cities now, it's only useful because transit many times is not. Guess what the problem is usually with transit and even biking and walking. CARS ARE IN THE WAY! Give me self driving buses that come every two minutes in a grid with their own lanes. Do you think we'll need as many self driving cars in cities then? I bet at some point we'll even have to create congestion cordons just for self driving cars.
So why are people saying transit will be changing under the disruption of the "shared ridership revolution"? Instead of this circular problem I feel like we're creating, why not just address the main problems? Housing affordability and road pricing. Tech can't seem to wrap its collective heads around those problems though because right now, those are political problems. So let's just build a car that will drive itself.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Today's most read piece was one by Jim Bacon entitled "The Slow, Inevitable Demise of Traditional Mass Transit" In it he talks about WMATA's declining transit patronage in the region and that part of the blame goes to the union while local government support will not be able to keep up with demands.
He then mentions the blue state transit model failure which just seems like tossing red meat to me.
By “blue state,” I refer to a set of attitudes that are most prevalent in blue states: a sympathy for transit unions, which means high compensation costs and low productivity; a reluctance to charge riders the full costs of providing their service, which depresses revenues; and a proclivity to seek federal aid, which comes with expensive regulatory strings attached.I don't have sympathy for bad work rules but I do think people should be paid fair wages. I'm not necessarily pro union when these things are blatantly wrong but since when did anyone pay the full cost of the transportation service they use? Well, everyone pays full cost but it's just snuck out of your pocket instead of a direct charge. As many have said before and many will say again, why do we always have to pull out the "pay for itself" trope. We know that nothing does! If we did our cities would look a LOT different as there's a lot of subsidies flying every which way.
When Kevin DeGood came on the podcast, he had the numbers to prove it. Data liberalization is amazing! He found 5.5 percent of roads carry 55 percent of the traffic. That's definitely not paying for itself and it shows an over-reliance on highways in major cities that carry so many cars, they can't keep up. The interstates between cities many times do actually cover costs in gas tax revenue. Once we get into the details. interesting findings come out.
But let's step outside this often debated construct for a bit and talk about "shared-ridership revolution". At first blush after watching the debate for a while, I'm going to come out and say I don't like it. Sure there are first mile/last mile solutions that make sense and they can be useful in a pinch, I just don't like the inevitability of self driving cars and the demise of transit in cities because I think its short sighted. I think Tom Vanderbilt's article on futurism pushed me more towards the skeptical side as well. He shares points other have made...
As the psychologist George Lowenstein and colleagues have argued, in a phenomenon they termed “projection bias,” people “tend to exaggerate the degree to which their future tastes will resemble their current tastes.”To me, bike share isn't usually the main focus of the topic while "Ride Hailing" otherwise known as Uber or Lyft is. But these are just more convenient taxis and they are still two tons of metal running around on constrained streets in urban areas. People also focus on self driving cars as if they are a panacea but I don't know if people noticed that 10 car BART trains and Muni buses and LRVs are always crush loaded at rush hour. I'm sure many WMATA buses and trains are the same way.
That is a GEOMETRY problem that these apps won't solve because they are projecting in their current paradigm. Suburban car problems. Kind of like lots of tech and apps being 20 year old man problems. If everyone in a city decided to hail a self driving car, we'd still have traffic but even more of it! Think about those 60 bus riders each in those little google cars. Still taking up way more space!
The problem in my mind is that we continue to try and solve issues we created ourselves in a strange circular fashion. Technologists have always been saying we are going to keep moving out and will need mobility solutions for that change. But going back to the "pay for itself" argument and the actual usage of roads, we find that the free roads are used to the point of congestion and are not actually supported at current "usage fee" rates.
So the question for me then is, are self driving cars the next freeway? Why are we trying to solve a problem (congestion and living too far from work) with more vehicles when all we have to do now is price roads accordingly and free up land uses? When self driving car corridors get overused, are we going to have to price those corridors too? Did we just build a whole system that went back to the old problem because we wanted a techno fix for something that only required economics?
Cities are still thriving. People want to be near other people. And while ride sharing is useful in cities now, it's only useful because transit many times is not. Guess what the problem is usually with transit and even biking and walking. CARS ARE IN THE WAY! Give me self driving buses that come every two minutes in a grid with their own lanes. Do you think we'll need as many self driving cars in cities then? I bet at some point we'll even have to create congestion cordons just for self driving cars.
So why are people saying transit will be changing under the disruption of the "shared ridership revolution"? Instead of this circular problem I feel like we're creating, why not just address the main problems? Housing affordability and road pricing. Tech can't seem to wrap its collective heads around those problems though because right now, those are political problems. So let's just build a car that will drive itself.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Need Urban News to Read? Sign Up for Our 9 Year Old News List, The Direct Transfer Daily.
Monday, September 14, 2015
Podcast: Your Brain on Two Legs with Antonia Malchik
This week we talking with Antonia Malchik who recent wrote a piece at Aeon Magazine called "The End of Walking" We talk about experiences walking around the world and in foreign countries. We also talk about the importance of your brain in motor function.
Thursday, September 10, 2015
Podcast: The Urban Displacement Project
Miriam Zuk of UC Berkeley joins me this week to talk about the Urban Displacement Project. They take a look at gentrification and displacement in the Bay Area. Definitely have a listen.
Monday, August 31, 2015
Podcast: Remaking California's Transportation System
This week I'm publishing a audio series that I did for the NRDC Urban Solutions program that discusses California's greenhouse gas policies and their effects on transportation policy. It's gotten some good reviews but also a bit wonky, so I know you all will enjoy it.
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