Transportation in Transition, Again and Always

In 1982 Milton Pikarsky and Christine Johnson published a paper titled "American Transportation in Transition."

Here are the opening paragraphs:

Today, the United States is in a transportation crisis which is of a chronic nature. It may not be sudden like the gas lines of 1974, but it is consistent and the pressures of this crisis are deepening. And because its gradual nature allows people and institutions to adjust, the crisis changes the transportation system more fundamentally than transitory gas lines or transit stop pages.

The current picture of public transportation is bleak. Indeed, each new wrinkle in the financial problems faced by the transit industry brings warnings that a breakdown of public transportation service could initiate a domino effect resulting in an urban economic collapse.

And the conclusion:

Private citizens will have to adjust to the fact that traditional transportation is likely to cost more. To reduce some of those costs, they may have to become vanpool riders or drivers, participate in neighbourhood auto mobile cooperatives, or occasionally rent automobiles or use taxis as alternatives to purchasing second cars. A variety of private transportation providers may once again become party to the transportation social contract. There is evidence that developers, too, may become party to the contract. In an attempt to make their suburban residential and commercial space more attractive, many developers are underwriting bus or shuttle services or arranging van- and carpools.  

Given the position and needs of the various principal actors, it is likely that private employers and providers will become much more involved with the direct provision of surface transportation in the future. In the best and worst of extremes, an individual could face a variety of options and a maze of prices depending on the mode, time of travel, destination, and the number of people travelling. The solution to these new transportation problems may define the future role of the public sector. Rather than owning and operating systems, the public sector may become more of a travel information broker, a facilitator, a technical adviser, and a manager of a set of service contracts.  

There is little question that the process of renegotiating the transportation social contract has begun. Each party is slowly exploring and carving out a new niche. The process will be long and progress slow. We feel certain that at the outcome, when we speak of public transportation, our concept will have grown to include a range of services and providers; rapid rail, bus, vanpools, commuter clubs, subscription services, taxis, jitneys, apartment shuttle, the private automobile, and the rental auto mobile, each serving the trip length, type, and density that is most cost-efficient. 

This piece is over 30 years old. I agree with just about all of it, and I argue many of the same things today. With all of the excitement about ridesharing and transportation network companies it is worthwhile keeping in mind such services are neither revolutionary or new ideas. Perhaps they are finally here to stay, or perhaps not. (I suspect they are, likely with different companies than exist now, but I'll save my reasoning for another time.)

Public transit's demise has been predicted for a long time, as well, and transit operates in a world of permanent financial crisis. Transit finance may not be ideal, but our transit systems have survived and many have improved. Overall, though, transportation is still in transition, and we are still expecting the next big thing to show up.

Welcome to the Future

This past week New York City auctioned 200 new taxi medallions for record prices. The high bid was about $2.5 million for a “minifleet” package, and the accessible medallions fetched record prices as well. These prices and the people who paid them send strong signals about what will happen with the taxi industry in New York. The rent seeking behaviors will continue, the regulators are captured by the industry they are supposed to regulate and taxi policy in the city is expected to remain at the status quo of constrained supply and unmet demand. I suspect that the boro taxi program will barely survive but not be expanded, and Uber and other ridesharing services are screwed. In short, what we have now for taxi services is pretty much all we get. I worry that most or all of our transport systems have similar constraints. Welcome to the future. 

So are we conscripted to a future just like the present? Can we solve pressing concerns?

Recently David Levinson write a nice post about what traffic might be like in 2030. It is a nice future scenario that is dramatically improved on current inefficient systems. I agree with much of it but am concerned that regulatory and labor constraints have cemented too many of our systems in place and the future will end up looking a lot like what we have now. Here are some areas of particular concern and in no particular order:

• ·      Concession agreements are in place that are far longer than existing technologies will last. For instance, the Chicago parking meter concession requires that the city compensate the LLC for any loss of value to street parking during the course of the 75-year agreement. This means that even if cars and driving decline, Chicago may have to pay a penalty.  This affects Chicago’s incentives for reform.
• ·      Labor contracts require too many people working jobs that should be automated, such as train drivers.  This limits new options and services. There will also be a persistent bias toward historical rush hour service even though rides demanded will spread out across nights and weekends. We will also likely replace all passenger cars with driverless cars before we get any driverless transit vehicles. 
• ·      Taxi services are not regulated for the benefit of passengers, nor are the taxi industries all that interested in expanding services.  They prefer to protect their rent seeking. Taxi interests will block new entrants and ridesharing. This is especially problematic because of the nights and weekends issues raised above.
• ·     Cities are branding themselves and this will reduce their economic competitiveness in the long run. Brooklyn, Portland, Austin and others all cultivate their identities at great expense and effort. This suggests that they will fiercely protect what they see as core features, including the built environment and transport technologies. Building restrictions and business preservation will become more restrictive over time, reducing the dynamics of city change.
• ·      Municipal budgets are strained from obligations that do little to improve the lives of current and future residents. Pension obligations are of particular concern as it is extremely difficult to raise taxes to pay for salaries to retired people. These obligations do not have an easy policy answer but will limit future investment resources and flexibility to address currently unknown concerns.
• ·      Much of the infrastructure expansion that has occurred over the past few decades (roads, transit, stadia, etc.) makes municipal budgets worse off in the long run. How cities and states decide to dismantle infrastructure is a crucial issue over the next few decades. As the public rarely has the option of exit deliberate decline will be slower than needed.
• ·      Public investment in infrastructure is not currently aimed at or promoting the greater good. Business elites, downtown interests and others are capturing public spending on transit to serve private interests at the expense of riders. See the streetcar trend as an example. Cities, regions and the nation are not bound together by clear goals, so policy is directed to do something, anything, without a good sense as to what is supposed to be achieved. Again to the streetcars, if they are good for economic development then the budget spent on them should be judged against all other economic development uses of that money. Yet we never discuss opportunity costs like this. Infrastructure investment is pursued as an end unto itself. We tend to focus too much on physical changes (which are small in aggregate) at the expense of service changes that may have larger effects on travel and economic activity.

We are also in a prolonged period of sclerotic governance. While all levels of government have strong roles for ensuring access to opportunities, public safety and economic health, the process of governance is currently not up to the tasks. I see stronger forces protecting the status quo than pushing for reform (see the taxi industry as an example).

So traffic may decline but we may not be able to adjust our systems adequately to address the changes that occur. If our systems of governance work to maintain what we have then the future will look very much like the present.  So how might we re-orient our governance systems to meet future needs? I will return to this in a later post.

This Week in Flying Cars

Jalopnik notes that an experimental flying car called a "Maverick" crashed into a tree in Canada.

Jalopnik is also creating a list of the greatest flying car concepts.

CNN.com takes a look at various flying car ideas.

Terrafugia--the one company closest to bring a "roadable airplane to market--announced that it is developing a plug-in hybrid model.

Burritos, Travel Substitution and Air Drones

Technological change happens all the time, and affects how we travel. Some technological change allows us to move faster or improves accessibility, and other technological change allows for substitution of personal travel for other travel. An example of travel substitution is food trucks, where trucks bring the food to people who would otherwise have had to travel for similar consumption. Online shopping is another well-known example of substitution. In many cases travel substitution is welfare enhancing and can spur productivity gains. Again, in the case of food trucks, before the recent boom in trucks no one knew people everywhere really wanted Korean food on tortillas topped with salsa and cheese. Let's assume this innovation makes us all better off.

Food trucks developed from the LA taco trucks (delightfully called roach coaches), and I hope Mexican food is the key to the future of food delivery because just like with the taco trucks, the truly great ideas are all about burrito delivery.

Here is the evidence:

(These have been around awhile)
-The Burrito Tunnel (I've written about this before)
-The Taco Copter

(And because three data points are irrefutable)
-The Burrito Drone


So I predict that the next hot trend for street food will involves commercial uses for air drones, and the cuisine of choice for truly innovative travel substitution is Mexican. In support of this prediction, here is a story from this week's New Scientist magazine titled "Welcome to the personal drone revolution." And here is a self-explanatory company. This may be a bigger deal than finally being able to get a decent burrito in Morningside Heights.

Revisiting the Introduction of the Second Regional Plan of New York Process Papers

The Regional Plan Association has produced three regional plans for the New York region. (Website here, wikipedia here.) The famous first one was introduced in 1929. The second was in 1968 and the third in 1996. Here is the introduction to the a supporting document about the planning process for the Second Regional Plan written in 1967:

Footloose describes our era.                                
The factory is freed from its sources of raw materials, from rivers and railroads. The worker need not be within walking distance of his job as a century ago nor even within walking distance of subway, railroad or street railway as sixty years ago. Recreation areas for day-long trips can be anywhere in the metropolitan region-and most will be crowded on nice days wherever they are.                                                
Fast-changing also describes our era.                      
The bulldozer can turn a slum into a desert in a few days. Landscapists can turn it into a park shortly after-or construction workers into houses or offices. Nor does it take long for residents to turn a nice neighborhood into a slum.                                     
Fantastically productive also describes it.   
Our economy now produces three times as much as in the booming years of the '20's (measured by the same dollar), and production of goods and services per capita leaps by about one-fourth each decade.                       
The planner, accordingly, is increasingly freer of economic and transportation limitations. Many locations are about equally efficient for production and distribution of goods and services-and with our increasing wealth, other values more often than before challenge efficient production and distribution as important criteria.                                            
With basic economic necessities of diminishing importance in regional planning, issues more related to personal taste come to the fore, and planners have become sensitive to the possibility that the choices they would make for a metropolitan area may not be the same as others would make.   

This describes a very different approach to cities and regions than we have today. We have (hopefully) learned a lot about  cities, for instance certain industries favor proximity and agglomeration more than is suggested above. In addition, it is clear that transportation limitations continue and remain critical to address. However, this is a more optimistic introduction than I would expect from a planning report today. Maybe what we write these days will also seem optimistic to those who read it in 45 years.

Ultimately, the notion that transportation policy is largely guided by heterogeneous preferences and quality of life issues hasn't quite come to pass, though I'll argue there is more evidence of personal tastes influencing policy on a large scale nowadays than was the case in the 1960s.

                              

In The Future No One Will Know How To Drive

The above video is of a New Scientist reporter experiencing a "road train." From the story:

The most alarming thing about taking your hands off the steering wheel when hurtling along the road at 90 kilometres an hour is just how quickly you get used it. There is a brief moment of initial uncertainty, but then you quickly stop worrying about who is control and just sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.
Welcome to the brave new world of semi-autonomous cars. I say "semi" because this car is not entirely driving itself. Volvo calls it a platoon: a convoy of moving cars that are wirelessly coupled together, one behind the other, into a road train, all under the control of a single professional lead driver.

I do expect that people will get used to not driving pretty quickly, though the road train technology doesn't seem as likely to take off as fully autonomous vehicles. Here is another story about autonomous cars that explains that cars communicate around corners and substantially reduce collisions. And here is a CNN/Wired piece that suggests no one will need a drivers license by 2040.

22 Years for a Traffic Light

As a follow up to yesterday's post about a 34 year campaign for minor changes to alternate side parking regulations, here is a triumphant story about the mere 22 years it took to get a new traffic light in Brooklyn. From the Brooklyn Paper story:

Williamsburg residents rejoiced when the city installed a traffic light at the intersection of Woodpoint Road and Withers Street this week — 22 years after neighbors first requested it.
“We’re really excited, we’ve been fighting for an extra light,” said Community Board 1 member Tish Cianciotta. “We’re meeting people in the street, and they’re saying ‘Thank god!’ ”

Cianciotta says she finally swayed the city after 2010 Census data proved the area has experienced a population surge and now needs streets that are friendlier for pedestrians.Cianciotta, her husband, Guido, and members of the Withers Street Block Association started pestering the city to slow motorists at the busy corner in 1992 — but officials swatted down their requests, nixing a 2008 push for traffic calming measures even though a police cadet died in a motorcycle at the intersection three years earlier.

 Another data point that suggests it takes a really long time to change policy in many cases. For meaningful reform to transportation and land use planning you have to play a long game.

It Takes 34 Years to Implement Minor Parking Reform

One issue I think about a lot through my research is how to transition from poor policies to good policies. Such transitions take time and are not easy to implement. Parking reform is a major focus of mine, and I'm always looking for evidence of the temporal aspects of reform. Today I can add a new data point: it takes 34 years to implement a reduction in street cleaning from four days per week to two days per week.  34 years! From the story at DNAinfo:

SUNSET PARK — Drivers may finally have a reprieve next week when the city's Department of Sanitation reduces alternate-side parking from four days a week to two in parts of Sunset Park and Greenwood Heights.


The change marks the culmination of a 34-year campaign to limit alternate-side parking in the two Brooklyn neighborhoods. Brooklyn's Community Board 7 was the first to take advantage of a new law that sets the rules for reducing the frequency of street-sweeping and its attendant car shuffling. 



I'm no fan of free curb parking in New York, but I'm also not a fan of the alternate side parking policies.  The community was able to reduce cleaning frequency through a pilot program:

Any community that achieved at least a 90-percent cleanliness rating on its residential streets for two consecutive years could reduce alternate-side parking on those streets to just twice a week.
"If the streets are clean, if the community keeps them clean, and if they're residential, non-commercial streets, and if the community board votes to do it, then the alternate-side parking can be reduced," Lander said. "The law does require that the streets stay clean, and that's part of the community's commitment — it's to help keep streets clean, as sort of the trade-off for the added convenience for not having to move your car every day."

It is worth noting that the main benefit for residents is that they don't have to move their cars as often. The policy victory it is now a little bit easier to not use your car. During the week there is a disutility to owning a car in these neighborhoods, and this new policy reduces the disutility a little bit. It is absurd that long term parking is provided free by the city, but that is the way it is. Perhaps in another 34 years we can have another marginal improvement in parking policy.

This Week in Parking News

It was a big week for parking news, mostly because New York City issued a RFQ for operations of the city's 80,000+ parking meters.

In Rolling Stone Matt Taibbi goes unnecessarily ape shit about the New York City RFQ:

Well, Chicago isn’t alone anymore. Hizzoner Michael Bloomberg in New York has decided to do his own version of the Chicago infrastructure bake sale; the city announced that it is putting up nearly 90,000 parking meters for lease. They’re expecting to get over $11 billion in upfront money from the deal, which is great news if you’re Mike Bloomberg, who gets to use that money to patch current budget holes instead of making tough cuts or raising taxes. The news is less awesome for the next half-dozen New York City mayors, or for the citizens of New York, who now will get to spend most of the 21^st century grappling with its increasingly monstrous deficits with a major tributary from the city’s revenue stream shut off.
A New York parking meter deal, like the Chicago deal, would be a perfect example of the deeply cynical short-term thinking of many American politicians these days. These deals involve a sitting executive selling off a valuable piece of city property at a steep discount to private financial interests (often, to friends or campaign contributors), in order to solve a current cash flow problem that, surprise, surprise, will still be there the year after you finish spending the proceeds of your sale.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/new-york-to-repeat-chicago-s-parking-meter-catastrophe-20120613#ixzz1xtXcZIgt

Felix Salmon calms him down at Rueters and discusses dynamic pricing:

Which brings me to Matt Taibbi’s latest tirade, complaining about the idea that New York could raise as much as $11 billion by selling off its parking-meter rights. Anybody who wins this contract will have a contractual obligation to implement smart variable-pricing technologies, which will have to include apps showing where the spots are, the ability to pay by phone, and other ways of making everybody’s life easier. How is this not a good thing? Well, Taibbi’s upset that prices will rise:

Meter rates in some New York neighborhoods are already at $5 an hour. A Chicago-style price hike for fat-cat investors might leave us paying thirty bucks an hour to oil barons in Qatar and Saudi Arabia in order to park for dinner in the West Village.

I hate to break this to Matt, but has he seen the pricing at New York’s garages recently? Drivers would kill for the opportunity to pay $5 an hour. Matt lives in Westchester and therefore doesn’t pay New York City taxes, but he still seems to think that New York City should subsidize the cost of his jaunts in to the West Village for dinner. But even if Matt were somehow deserving of such a subsidy, which he isn’t, it’s a false economy: it might feel good to be able park for cheap, but it feels much worse to be stuck in traffic all the time. And the overwhelming majority of West Village diners manage to find a way of eating there which doesn’t involve a parking spot. Why should theysubsidize Matt’s parasitical suburban lifestyle?
New York is not Chicago, where the mayor was forced to give up all control of the parking meters in order that prices might be able to rise to their optimal level. Instead, the city will retain control of pricing philosophy, holidays, and the like, while also receiving an enormous check.

[I'm not sure where Matt Taibbi or Felix Salmon get the $11 billion figure. $11 billion is cited as part of the Chicago deal in a syndicated Business Week story. The RFQ explicitly states that the city is not looking for a large upfront payment. The city is looking for long term management of their meters but will maintain the ability to set prices and enfiorcement. I have my own opinions of the RFQ but will save them for another time. It's not terrible, nor is it likely to be transformative.]


Other parking news:
Santa Monica will now have its parking meters reset after each use, so no more finding meters with time remaining. Drivers will also not be able to re-feed the meters.

The New York Times has a video that describes some high tech meter systems. The parking segment starts around the 8:15 mark. The footage is from the IPI Conference last week.

This local story about Fort Green, Brooklyn, explains how difficult it is to alter parking policies:

The Fulton Area Businesses, the Fort Greene and Clinton Hill business improvement district, hosted its “Fulton Street Community Visioning Project” at BAM — and the first phase of the discussion showed a neighborhood divided over what an improvement even is.
Attendees broke up into groups to discuss what they want to see on the stretch between Ashland Place and Classon Avenue. Residents offered suggestions as varied as new bike lanes on Fulton Street and Lafayette Avenue, turning Brooklyn Technical HS’s football field into an ice rink in the winter, adding more lighting and plantings to the street, or adding some public furniture to attract public arts to the bustling street.
Others sought improvements to the long-closed greenspace in front of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
But some business owners counterintuitively opposed moves to attract more people to the already bustling street because their customers can’t find parking.
“No one in the neighborhood can find parking,” said Zuri, who owns an eponymous spa on South Portland Avenue, but declined to give her last name. “To add more seating in front of establishments is heinous.”

[One major issue for planners interested in reducing parking requirements is that the profession of planning has spent the past 60 years telling everybody that planners know exactly how many parking spaces are needed for each and every possible use. For planners to now say parking isn't required--even though it isn't--strains credulity with the public.Planners have a lot of work to do to build trust that we know what we are talking about regarding parking.]

VW's Hovercar: The Future of Flying Cars is Maglev

This is a month or so old, but I missed it. The above video is of a VW hovercar concept (check out the hovercar negotiating what appears to be an anarchist parking lot at about the 2:50 mark!). Here is a story from the Environmental News Service about the contest VW had in China that inspired the maglev car. Rather than consider the impracticality of embedding electromagnetic sensors into road networks let's just revel in the awesomeness of the vision. Other winning concepts were the "Music Car" and the "Smart Key."

This Week in Flying Cars

Jalopnik.com had a great piece about the 10 craziest flying car failures. Link here. My favorite is pictured above. Name one thing that looks safe there.

David Graeber in the Baffler looks at the economics of flying cars here.

Paleofuture--which if you don't read you really should--looks at how 1923 thought 1973 flying cars would look here.

As a bonus, here is a link to another failed dream: the self-making bed.

Jetpacks, Flying Cars and Electric Planes

The above video is one approach to jetpacks. Below is another from Martin Jetpack. Or check out Jetpack International.


The LA Times has a story about flying cars, though it is really about roadable planes. The focus is Terrafugia:

Now, a Massachusetts company hopes to commercially market a flying car — although "driving plane" might be a more accurate description.
At last week's New York International Auto Show, Terrafugia Inc. of Woburn, Mass., unveiled the Transition, a two-seat aircraft with foldable wings. Pending regulatory approvals — which by no means are assured — the company plans to sell the contraption by 2013 for $279,000.
"You can pull out of your garage, fill up with 91 octane at a gas station, drive to the nearest airport, unfold your wings, perform a preflight check and take off," said Terrafugia Chief Executive Carl Dietrich.
So far, he said, about 100 people have put down $10,000 deposits to be among the first buyers.
The idea of a flying car may seem like a pipe dream, but the company says modern technology, such as GPS devices, air bags and high-strength composite material, has made the Transition safer for the consumer. The company even offers a vehicle parachute system.

Gizmodo highlights an electric plane. From the post:

Recently unveiled at the Aero Expo in Freidrichshafen, Germany, Pipistel's new Panthera four-seater plane can be ordered with a standard, albeit highly efficient, gas engine. But it's also available in an all-electric model for those preferring an aircraft that produces less air and noise pollution.
Understandably, the Electro edition, which will rely solely on state-of-the-art electric batteries, has a considerably shorter range than the gas model. About 250 miles compared to 1,150 miles on fossil fuels. But charging it at the airport should be considerably cheaper than filling a fuel tank. And since most people will probably be leery about flying in an electric plane given the stories of electric cars randomly stopping, the Panthera comes equipped with a high-speed full airframe parachute system which will deliver it safetly back to Earth if there's a problem.

Here is the company's website.

Getting Closer to Autonomous Cars

Some points of interest about autonomous cars:
From USA Today:

 The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will start studying aspects of autonomous driving in August with a one-year pilot project in Ann Arbor, Mich., to test 3,000 cars with equipment to communicate with one another to prevent accidents. Officials have expressed support for technology that addresses distracted driving and prevents accidents.

Issues still to be resolved include who is liable in a crash and whether drivers of autonomous cars are legally exempt from bans on texting.

And Google's car took a blind guy to Taco Bell:

Much has been written about how self-driving cars may ease traffic and solve the texting-while-behind-the-wheel problem. But there’s another benefit: Such autos will allow people previously unable to drive to become more independent. In the video below, Steve Mahan, who is 95 percent blind, takes a Google self-driving car for a spin.

The promise of increased mobility for visually impaired  travelers is great. Using a "south of the border" run to demonstrate how cool the technology is probably won't gain any converts from people who think Americans are fat because of cars, however. (I'm not one of those people.)