Tag Archives: transportation

what’s new with super-sonic flight

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NASA and Lockheed Martin claim to have a prototype supersonic jet whose sonic boom sounds “like a car door slamming heard from inside”. This could open the door to commercial supersonic flight over populated areas. Well, we don’t even have commercial super-sonic flight over the oceans at the moment, which would be helpful to long-haul travelers. The article doesn’t say when this might happen, but it doesn’t sounds soon. The article does mention that there is at least one other company working on a supersonic passenger jet which “it hopes” could be “in the air” (for testing presumably?) “later this year”.

automatic speed regulators

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Automatic speed regulators on private vehicles – YES PLEASE. This is an idea that will save lives, and its time has come. Won’t somebody please think of the children?

The article suggests limiting speeds to 100 mph, but come on! Why not limit them to the local posted limit? Or if saving lives that way is too interventionist for “‘Merica”, then install the technology and let insurance companies massively penalize people who choose to turn it off. This could be a middle ground between self-driving cars and people who insist on the preventable mass murder of letting human beings continue operating deadly highway vehicles on city streets, once it is no longer necessary.

September 2023 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: “the accumulation of physical and knowledge capital to substitute natural resources cannot guarantee green growth“. Green growth, in my own words, is the state where technological innovation allows increased human activity without a corresponding increase in environmental impact. In other words, this article concludes that technological innovation may not be able to save us. This would be bad, because this is a happy story where our civilization has a “soft landing” rather than a major course correction or a major disaster. There are some signs that human population growth may turn the corner (i.e., go from slowing down to actually decreasing in absolute numbers) relatively soon. Based on this, I speculated that “by focusing on per-capital wealth and income as a metric, rather than total national wealth and income, we can try to come up with ways to improve the quality of human lives rather than just increasing total money spent, activity, and environmental impact ceaselessly. What would this mean for “markets”? I’m not sure, but if we can accelerate productivity growth, and spread the gains fairly among the shrinking pool of humans, I don’t see why it has to be so bad.”

Most hopeful story: Autonomous vehicles kill and maim far, far fewer human beings than vehicles driven by humans. I consider this a happy story no matter how matter how much the media hypes each accident autonomous vehicles are involved in while ignoring the tens of thousands of Americans and millions of human beings snuffed out each year by human drivers. I think at some point, insurance companies will start to agree with me an hike premiums on human drivers through the roof. Autonomous parking also has a huge potential to free up space in our urban areas.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Venice has completed a major storm surge barrier project.

autonomous vehicle brakes and gently bumps fire truck going through a red light on the wrong side of the street

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Every minor autonomous vehicle incident is headline news, while meanwhile we just accept 40,000 Americans (and something like a million human beings worldwide) per year dying in and around cars operated by human drivers. It’s not that we should accept the risk posed by autonomous vehicles, it’s that we should recognize that it something like an order of magnitude lower than the risk of human-operated vehicles, which is huge. Every time the news reports one of these incidents, they should tell us how many people, including children, were killed and gruesomely injured since the last time they reported such an incident. We also need safe street designs and we need to stop pretending vehicles designed to be safer in highway collisions are also safe in urban environments with pedestrians and bicyclists. Something like golf carts traveling 15-20 mph would be a much safer, cheaper, convenient, and less polluting way to get around in the city.

Whoever is Responsible for The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, LOCK THEM UP!

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This thing is a major serial killer of around 40,000 Americans every year, including children, and gets away with it! Essentially, it sets the design standards that determine what road and street designs can get federal funding, and it ends up flowing down to a lot of state and local design standards. Making the relative modest changes recommended here by the National Association of City Transportation Officials would help, but really I feel like this is thinking pretty small. Maybe if we held the known serial killer, the Federal Highway Administration, to account it might deter the many copycat killers known as state and local transportation agencies.

NACTO

This also reminded me of this Freakonomics podcast: The Perfect Crime. If you want to kill somebody and get away with it, just run over a pedestrian with your car.

Americans may value walkable communities after all?

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The other day I lamented that the nation’s population and economic center of gravity seems to be moving toward less walkable and sustainable areas. So if people and companies are voting that way through their market transactions, what do we make of a survey where a majority of people self-report that they do in fact want to live in walkable communities, and real estate markets tend to reflect this. It’s a logic puzzle, but I’ll offer a few thoughts.

First of all, when people are polled on what they want in a house and a community, they also say they want ample free parking. It sounds great to have ample free parking AND walkability, but the laws of geometry simply don’t allow this. This is because most cars are sitting still most of the time, you need large amounts of parking to accommodate peak demand (for example, a mall during holiday shopping season), and cars need a lot of room to maneuver in addition to the space they take up when they are parked or trying to get from point A to point B. People do not understand this – when everybody has a car, the space required to accommodate the cars requires things to get too far apart to also have walkability. People walk less and less gets spent on walking infrastructure, and it becomes a vicious cycle.

Geometrically speaking, the only ways to solve this conundrum might be alternative vehicles such as bicycles and golf carts which don’t need so much room to maneuver and can be parked very efficiently. The problem is, these vehicles are not safe to be in around high-speed highway vehicles and trucks. So all these forms of transport really need their own lanes and signals to make it work. This is way too much change and perceived expense for America’s can’t-do urban planning crowd. And the public tends to turn on anything they see as infringing their freedom to drive fast and park anywhere they want for free. No matter what they say in a survey.

Linear cities might theoretically work. This seems very science-fiction, but you could maybe have a nice skinny walkable city with a sea of parking lots on one side of it, so everybody is within easy walking distance of everything they need including their car. But in this case, the only reason to own a car would be to go on an inter-city trip, and rail or buses would make more sense. If anyone knows of a previously undeveloped continent where this can be tried, let me know.

Gentrification, perceived and/or actual, is another issue. What I see in Philadelphia is that clean, safe, walkable, green neighborhoods with good schools are in very short supply. Prices get bid up for things that are in short supply, so wealthier people live in these areas. Wealthier people are also more vocal about demanding infrastructure and services from their government. So they demand, and they get. Meanwhile, less well-to-do neighborhoods notice all this, and they complain. The government can’t or won’t spend the money to provide excellent services and infrastructure to all neighborhoods, so a very convenient and cheap solution is to provide them to nobody. The only beneficiaries are slum lords and owners of nuisance businesses like junkyards and building material warehouses in the middle of residential neighborhoods (yes, I have somewhere very specific in mind when I bring this up), some of whom are politicians or in bed with politicians. This is all a downward spiral.

shoddy Chicago bike lanes

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I have gone through a number of emotional stages with Philadelphia’s bike lanes, from denial to anger to apathy. They are poorly designed, maintained, and almost completely unenforced. This article talks about the state of Chicago’s bike lanes, which sound and look about the same. No, this doesn’t make me feel better about Philadelphia. Two times as much poor design and children dying is twice as bad. But this article at least does have some ideas, some of which Chicago is at least trying on a limited time frame and in a limited area.

  • “install cameras on city vehicles and street poles in two pilot areas Downtown to identify parking violators and mail them a ticket” [If people knew there were cameras on every police car, bus, and other fleet vehicle, they would clean up their act in a hurry. You could forgive a first ticket for people who agree to put a camera on their cars. Citizens should be able to snap a picture and upload it too. And this seems like a great use of AI. Computers could process all the imagery, flag ones that look like likely violations, and then a police officer could review and issue the tickets.]
  • do something about “dangerous construction zones and poor maintenance of city streets” [Amen. These are not just bike issues, they are driver and pedestrian and human issues absolutely everybody should be able to get behind.]
  • Communication. [Yes, signage can be poor and sometimes drivers and delivery people legitimately do not understand they are doing something wrong.]
  • “Improve shoddy bike lanes.” [um, yes, it shouldn’t need to be said but this is the #1 thing. Just adopt the Dutch Street Design Manual now and be done with it. U.S. cities really need some kind of loading zone, delivery, and contractor parking solution though. The way streets are designed now, these 100% necessary activities are illegal and that doesn’t make any sense. My brightest idea is to have a 15-minute parking space (or whatever time frame makes sense) at the four corners of each intersection, have these be reservable through an app, consider charging for them, and strictly and/or automatically enforce time violations.]
  • “first-time violators and anyone ticketed within 30 days of a camera being installed will be given a 30-day warning”
  • Fines that scale with income. [I’m not sure about this, but charging commercial vehicles more could definitely make sense. Charging less for a first offense, or forgiving a first offense if someone takes a refresher course or agrees to become a snitch (i.e. install a camera on their car or house) could all make sense. Community service as an alternative to paying fines could make sense. Fines shouldn’t add up to the point where anybody goes to jail unless they have hurt someone. Penalties for drivers who hurt someone should be severe in my view though, and this should apply regardless of what the pedestrian or cyclist was doing. The moral weight has to fall on the operator of the larger, heavier vehicle.]

Adding an anecdote about a crushed toddler is a nice touch in this article. We are all against that right? Or do some of us only care about babies before they are born?

solar panels over parking lots in France

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France is requiring solar panels over surface parking lots with 80 or more spaces. This makes sense for a lot of reasons. But not mentioned in the article is acting as a sort of tax on surface parking lots. I don’t know if it happens in France, but in the U.S. a land speculator can buy a property in the middle of a neighborhood, sit on it for years or decades waiting for a chance to flip it for a profit, and pave it over and make a few bucks on parking in the meantime. This makes neighborhood less walkable, hotter, and contributes to flooding and pollution. So I say make them give something back. Or they can use that land for something better (even a multi-story car garage if this is really needed). And in the meantime, you are producing energy from a renewable source that can even be used to charge the vehicles parked there.

you can charge electric vehicles while they are driving

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As the title of the post says, you can charge electric vehicles while they are on the move.

The solar panels are on one side of the facility’s service road and will ship power up the hill to the maintenance and trades area. That pad also has the generator; a system for converting direct current from the solar panels to alternating current for the buildings and street lights; a system for capturing radiant heat from the generator; and an IT setup to keep everything running…

Utah State’s ASPIRE center will begin installing a 50-meter demonstration section at its Logan, Utah, test track in the next two weeks, said Tallis Blalack, the center’s director. Working with California wireless provider Electreon, the center intends to install a one-mile electrified section of road surface in central Detroit next year in conjunction with the University of Michigan.

The center also is working with another provider to design a segment of electrified highway for Disney World in Florida over the next four years. 

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I like this idea because there is a lot of real estate out there along highways, and installing solar panels that can charge vehicles as they go by would seem to make a lot of sense. Maybe this could also replace some or all of the gas tax revenue we are going to lose as we convert to solar. The money could be plowed back in to road maintenance and safety upgrades.

ideas for improving Amtrak

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Amtrak needs tens of billions of dollars in capital investment to get its trains up to the standard of middle income countries in the rest of the world (let’s not aspire to the European or Japanese standards of 50 YEARS AGO just yet). However, this (Philadelphia Inquirer, paywalled) article has some low-hanging-fruit ideas for how Amtrak could move more people at lower cost. Amtrak has apparently rejected all of them.

  • Instead of running old and new trains and different speeds and with different classes of cost, run just the new trains with two or three different class compartments. This would allow them to run more often and move more people at lower cost. It would also be safer because the newer trains are less likely to derail and more survivable if they do derail.
  • Maintain public ownership of the lines and stations, but consider competitively contracting some of the operations and support services. These would be for fixed time periods, so if it didn’t work out you could go back to status quo.

Okay, actually that was a list of only two. They also need to upgrade or replace many curves, bridges, and tunnels that limit speeds. My big, naive idea has always been to start laying high speed rail lines along the interstate highway system. This already connects our population centers. It would automatically connect with buses and other forms of local transporation. You already have the public right of way and at least some of the crossing, utility, bridge and tunnel issues worked out. Autonomous vehicles maybe/should/could decrease traffic and free up capacity and width requirements at some point. You can double deck them where needed. We might be able to build out a modern electric grid this way too. Expensive? Sure, it’s an investment in the long-term future of the economy and country.