Tag Archives: transportation

those fantastic American bike lanes

Recently I was talking about passive house, an extremely innovative energy standard that has taken root in Europe, Germany in particular. What I was surprised to learn was that the genesis of the idea was in the United States. There seems to be a pattern where innovative ideas come out of the United States but get implemented elsewhere. For example, here are a couple surprising articles about bike (cycling) lanes in the U.S. For example, protected bike lanes were all the rage right around the turn of the 20th century, before automobiles became the dominant technology. The historical images in this article are fascinating – it was not unusual for the bike lane to be paved and the horse and buggy lanes not. The layout of some of the bike lanes looks very familiar from today’s recreational trails.

Much more recently, the U.S. Federal Highway Authority had a serious standard for protected bike lanes in the 1970s, and it seemed like they were likely to move forward. Of course, we all know they did not. But again, in Europe, they did on a large scale. I don’t know whether the Dutch and Danish designs were copied or inspired by the American designs, but they did start to take off right around that time.

“rebooting” cars

Here’s a long article on some projects to integrate smart phone-like technology into cars. Basically, either you plug in an actual smart phone, or your car itself gets software updates. The former makes more sense to me, because why would you want to invest in technology that is trapped inside a car, when you don’t want to be trapped inside a car any more than absolutely necessary?

I’ve also been thinking for a long time about the contrast between innovative, nimble companies in Silicon Valley vs. the old-guard Detroit auto companies. I’ve wondered if the auto companies would evolve to be more like the tech companies, find ways to team with them effectively, or just fade away and be replaced by them. I see the third option looking closest to reality. I don’t believe cars are the technology of the future (at least, not one of the dominant technologies), but even when we do see car companies integrating technology effectively, it is not the old-guard Detroit companies doing it. I wonder if they will fade away or go out with a bang. Remember, during the financial crisis they survived only with a government bailout, and that happened because they made a decent case of their importance to the larger economy. Will they be able to make that case next time if our transportation system has evolved to use a wider range of technologies produced by a wider range of companies?

 

June 2015 in Review

Negative stories:

Positive stories:

NYT and Cutting Edge Transportation

There was a time when I thought that if the New York Times told me something, it must be true. Like there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, for example. I am a bit more skeptical these days, and I thank the New York Times for opening my eyes to seeking out more diverse sources of news. Still, they have suddenly noticed that autonomous cars and ride sharing are happening, and I think they may be on to something! I just hope these things are not like beards, which are now officially uncool because the New York Times has called them a trend.

sharing apps

Here’s an article in Washingtonian about new transportation sharing apps and delivery services, and how they are changing the demand for car-dependent neighborhood design in Washington D.C. It’s a feedback loop that just continues to pick up steam once it starts. And this is before computer-controlled vehicles really come into their own, which is going to change everything.

That process works like this: First, it gets easier not to have a car. In recent years, things such as improved public transit and 69 miles of new bike lanes in the District alone have made Washington an easier place to navigate without driving.

Next, new digital businesses—Uber, Instacart, Car2Go—capitalize on this market. (Google has even made noise with a far-fetched idea to roll out a ride service featuring driverless cars.) One of the things these services collectively do is make up for some of the things you lose—say, access to a wonderfully big, suburban-style grocery store—by not driving.

Then the rate of car ownership tumbles: For the 18-to-34 demographic across the region, the share of people who drove to work fell by 7 percentage points between 2000 and 2013, according to the US Census. The District alone gained 12,612 car-free households between 2010 and 2012.

Finally, as a result, lawmakers and regulators have no choice but to catch up—which means even more bike lanes, liberalized transit rules, and denser neighborhoods whose residents make appealing customer bases for bike sharing, and cars by the hour, and novel delivery options for economy-size packs of toilet paper. It’s a cycle that reinforces itself.

May 2015 in Review

Negative stories:

  • MIT says there is a critical long term decline in U.S. research and development spending, while spending is increasing in many other parts of the world.
  • Lake Mead, water supply for Las Vegas and several other major western U.S. cities, is continuing to dry up. The normal snowpack in Washington State is almost completely absent, while much of Oregon has declared a state of emergency. As the drought grinds on, recycled water (sometimes derided as “toilet to tap”) is becoming more common in Calfornia. This is not bad in itself – on the contrary it is an example of technological adaptation and closing the loop. It does have a cost in money and energy though, which are resources that are then not available for other things like education or infrastructure or whatever people need. In other words, drought makes us all a little bit poorer.
  • We’ve hit 400 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not just some places sometimes but pretty much everywhere, all the time.
  • There may be a “global shortage of aggregate demand“, and most countries are not dealing with it well. In many developed countries, increases in average longevity could lead to a trend of long-term deflation. This could eventually happen in almost all countries.
  • Climate change is going to make extreme weather more frequent and more damaging in U.S. cities. The 2015 El Nino could break records.
  • There just isn’t a lot of positivity or hope for better passenger rail service in the U.S.
  • Human chemical use to combat diseases, bugs, and weeds is causing the diseases, bugs and weeds to evolve fast.
  • Unfortunately there is no foolproof formula to make education work.

Positive stories:

  • Less leisure time could mean less sustainable outcomes, because people just have less time to think and act on their good intentions. I’m putting this in the positive column because although people in the U.S. and many other countries still work long hours, the trend so far is less work and more wealth for human population as a whole over very long periods of time. Obviously the transition is not smooth or painless for all workers all of the time.
  • I found a nice example of meta-analysis, which aggregates findings of a large number of scientific and not-so-scientific studies in a useful form, in this case in the urban planning field.
  • May is time to pull on the urban gardening gloves.
  • Melbourne’s climate change adaptation plan focuses on green open space and urban tree canopy.
  • Painless vaccines may be on the way.
  • The rhetoric on renewable energy is really changing as it starts to seriously challenge fossil fuels on economic grounds. Following the Fukushima disaster, when all Japan’s nuclear reactors were shut down, the gap was made up largely with liquid natural gas and with almost no disruption of consumer service. But renewables also grew explosively. Some are suggesting Saudi Arabia is supporting lower oil prices in part to stay competitive with renewables. Wind and solar capacity are growing quickly in many parts of the world. Lester Brown says the tide has turned and renewables are now unstoppable.
  • Commercial autonomous trucks are here.
  • The UK may have hit “peak car“.
  • Seattle is allowing developers to provide car share memberships and transit passes in lieu of parking spaces.

trains

The sad Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia reminded me of this sad article, Why Can’t America Have Great Trains? An excerpt:

Compared with the high-speed trains of Western Europe and East Asia, American passenger rail is notoriously creaky, tardy, and slow. The Acela, currently the only “high-speed” train in America, runs at an average pace of 68 miles per hour between Washington and Boston; a high-speed train from Madrid to Barcelona averages 154 miles per hour. Amtrak’s most punctual trains arrive on schedule 75 percent of the time; judged by Amtrak’s lax standards, Japan’s bullet trains are late basically 0 percent of the time.

And those stats don’t figure to improve anytime soon. While Amtrak isn’t currently in danger of being killed, it also isn’t likely to do more than barely survive. Last month, the House of Representatives agreed to fund Amtrak for the next four years at a rate of $1.4 billion per year. Meanwhile, the Chinese government—fair comparison or not—will be spending $128 billion this year on rail. (Thanks to the House bill, though, Amtrak passengers can look forward to a new provision allowing cats and dogs on certain trains.)

A few decades ago, news of another middling Amtrak appropriation wouldn’t have warranted a second glance; passenger rail was unpopular and widely thought to be obsolete. But recently, Amtrak’s popularity has actually spiked. Ridership has increased by roughly 50 percent in the past 15 years, and ridership in the Northeast Corridor stood at an all-time high in 2014. Amtrak also now accounts for 77 percent of all rail and air travel between Washington and New York, up from just 37 percent when it launched the Acela in 2000.

Trains connect cities and ignore the empty spaces in between, while highways serve those empty spaces. In our U.S. “republican” system (in the original dictionary sense of the word), our politicians disproportionately represent those population and economic dead zones, so that anti-city and economically unproductive nonsense policy positions pay off in power and re-election. These same politicians also find that it doesn’t hurt to throw a little racism, homophobia and xenophobia into the mix just for good measure. It’s about fear of those people in the city who are not like you.

cars are over in the UK

Most Americans haven’t caught on yet, but the tide has turned against widespread car ownership. Here’s an article in the Guardian about the tide turning in the UK:

London, which has pioneered congestion charging and has a well-integrated system of public transport, has led the move away from cars over the past decade, during which time 9% of car commuters have switched to other forms of transport. “People in London have a lot of options and there’s been huge growth across all modes,” says Isabel Dedring, the American-born deputy mayor for transport in the capital. “There’s been a massive increase in investment in public transport…”

Dedring says London has always been progressive in terms of public transport – its narrow, twisting roads were never conducive to the automotive domination that occurred in many US and European cities in the 1960s and 70s, when the car was king. But from the turn of the millennium, there has been a concerted attempt to encourage switching to other modes of transport, and the past decade has seen a 30% reduction in traffic in central London.

“Traffic levels have gone down massively,” says Dedring, “partly because of the congestion charge, but also because we are taking away space from private vehicles and giving it to buses through bus lanes and to people through public realm [developments].” And now to cyclists, too, with the planned “cycle superhighways” and cycle-friendly neighbourhoods being trialled in three London boroughs.

 

autonomous truck

With all the talk of self-driving cars, I figured self-driving trucks and buses wouldn’t be far behind. And here is a self-driving truck, already licensed in a few U.S. states. It sounds like there is still a human driver in it for now. But in the long term, I imagine this is bad news for human driver as an occupation. It should be good news for the safety of humans on the road in general. It seems like it could favor the economics of road freight vs. rail. Then again, it might make much narrower travel lanes practical, leaving plenty of room in the right of way for other infrastructure like high speed rail, high voltage lines, pipelines, etc. Time will tell.