tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6143002467960463322024-02-21T09:16:24.383-05:00Grush HourThe utility of the automobile continues to be threatened by inaction on congestion as congestion pricing remains largely theory. This could be solved by the autonomous vehicle if we use it right. See www.endofdriving.orgBern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.comBlogger233125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-11776729932246369392013-04-18T15:02:00.000-04:002013-04-18T15:03:58.700-04:00Metrolinx: HOT lanes should be used to break the ice for VMT charging<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">Among the critical revenue tools proposed by Metrolinx for Southern Ontario’s gridlock
problem are two that are related to “user-pay”: <span style="color: black;">High Occupancy/Toll (HOT) </span>lanes
and Vehicle Miles (or Kilometers) Traveled (VMT) charging. To-date, VMT charging on a wide area basis has not been
achieved anywhere in the world, although there have been numerous local and
limited approximations. Even the greatest of the handful of European examples
are constrained to limited access lanes or to heavy-goods vehicles. The VMT approach,
an ideal solution from the perspective of the transport economist, is often used
counter-productively by some political leaders to achieve unrelated goals. It
also enjoys little acceptance, and only a modicum of understanding among
drivers and taxpayers. VMT charging is a tool we badly need here, but we have
not yet prepared ourselves to deploy it in the time frame that funding is
needed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">HOT lanes, on the
other hand, have been deployed successfully in many US locations and meet with
much higher acceptance. They have the effect of demonstrating that a portion of
drivers are willing to pay for the time saved (i.e., to escape gridlock)—and that
those users are not “Lexus drivers”—an epithet we can expect to hear, anyway.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">In 2008, Mary
Peters, then US Secretary of Transportation, said that: “[HOT lanes are] <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; color: #222222;">a stepping stone. …[they] get people acclimated
to paying a fee for use of a section of roadway at a peak period of time. I
believe that eventually … we will go to a vehicle miles traveled form of
pricing.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; color: #222222;">There is a useful
lesson here. HOT lanes are easier in every regard. If deployed on our
400-series highways, they would have a modest congestion impact and perhaps
return some revenue. But more importantly, they would start the shift in
acceptance. They would prove that excess HOV capacity can be tolled, that this
would relieve the non-HOT lanes, that the users and non-users alike will
generally speak well of HOT lanes (after the initial week of operational hiccups
as often happens on newly tolled roads!).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; color: #222222;">Even more valuable
to Ontario is that </span>High <span style="color: black;">Occupancy
Vehicle (HOV) lanes on Ontario’s 400-series highways can be readily metered for
use as HOT lanes without capital cost to the Government. This is done with wireless
in-car location technology</span> and
<i><u>without</u></i> the use of gantries as
are used on the 407 or similar RFID/DSRC installations, such as E-ZPass.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">This wireless technology, developed in Toronto, uses several
sensors including GPS, digital maps of the roadways that are toll-enabled and a
body of algorithms to determine which lane a participating vehicle has traveled
in each road segment. It can be enforced using mobile license plate recognition
cameras mounted on assigned OPP vehicles (spot checking can be managed as a
variable cost and can often be more effective). This technology has been
developed using the “Privacy-By-Design” principles set out by the Ontario
Privacy Commissioner, <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; color: #444444;">Ann Cavoukian, </span>and
can ensure that location data is fully private to the driver, as it is not
necessary to disclose vehicle location to any party in order to ensure correct
payment is being made for use of the lane(s).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">What this this means is that
400-series HOT lanes can start in 2013. A pilot of several hundred or a few
thousand vehicles, offered to volunteers who pay for access would allow the
Government, without capital cost, to test many elements: driver acceptance,
variable pricing, privacy management, license-plate enforcement, signage, etc. It
would also afford ample opportunity to observe media and political response,
while being able to halt or redirect the pilot without loss of capital.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">Such an approach can enable Metrolinx to start gradually, to
adjust, to fill in the existing HOV capacity without capital outlay on roadside
infrastructure and to work out the path toward VMT charging over the ensuing
years.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">If the way is so safe, there is no reason not to start.</span></div>
Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-66096901768660709442013-03-01T22:52:00.001-05:002013-03-01T22:52:37.006-05:00Is the Big Move really the Big Lie?
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<span style="color: windowtext; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">“<a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/transportation/2013/02/28/from_oakville_big_questions_about_the_big_move.html" target="_blank">Is the Big Move really theBig Lie?</a>” is how Tess Kalinowski, Transportation reporter for The Toronto Star,
opened her 2013.02.28 article “From Oakville, big questions about the Big Move”.</span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Kalinowski reports that
Oakville’s Mayor Rob Burton is questioning a few things about Metrolinx’s Big
Move. On one hand he is miffed that
<a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/02/28/torontos_mayor_doesnt_speak_for_the_city_on_transit_says_metrolinx.html" target="_blank">Toronto’s Mayor Rob Ford “won’t support transit taxes or tolls”</a> and that at one
particular meeting when Ford expressed his lack of support, Burton “was
rendered “speechless” when nobody at the meeting challenged Toronto’s
mayor”. Of course there are several other
proposals afloat to raise money for The Big Move, so being anti-tolls is not
necessarily anti-Big Move. Most
politicians are anti-tolls because they believe tolls are negatively correlated
with votes. Even John Tory, now
pro-tolling was anti-tolling when running against David Miller in 2003—a
position for which he has since publically expressed regret.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Kalinowski also quotes
Oakville’s mayor regarding the Big Move: “Before we marry this thing, I really would like somebody to prove to me
that’s really the very best we can do and it costs $50 billion.” This may
seem a very surprising statement—Burton has been Oakville’s mayor since 2006,
and he is a smart, progressive, conscientious mayor. So must have been at least
aware of the planning and promotions of the Big Move. His neighbor Mayor
McCallion was on the Metrolinx board when the Big Move was planned. The Star
article even states “Burton says he takes his cues from Mississauga Mayor Hazel
McCallion.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Kalinowski continues to
quote Burton: “I’m not saying (the Big
Move) is not the best we can do. I’m asking: Is this all there is? Can we really
not make it better?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Perhaps,
Burton is on to something. Assuming The
Big Move was “the best we could do” when it was published in November of 2008, we
are now over four years later, and still with no resolution to the funding
problem. I wonder, if it were re-planned now whether it might indeed change a
bit. But more interestingly, there is
now some reason to believe that the Big Move may soon be dramatically out of
date.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Those
who observe the progress of the autonomous vehicle—the driverless car—are
saying we should expect this technology to start to impact infrastructure
investment in the next decade. While the
GTHA has clearly under-invested in transportation infrastructure for nearly
three decades and many, including Burton, believe that this $50 billion only
means that “</span><span style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">traffic
congestion and transit won’t get any worse,” it is likely the case that with a
new 'The Big Move II' (published circa 2015), $50 billion would indeed do far more for the GTHA than would the 2008 plan.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Here are a few
observations:</span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The market needs to monitor driverless cars and these new
technologies – and their associated risks – as they evolve during the next few
years. “Completely ignoring this scenario is not a good option”. — <a href="http://www.lloyds.com/news-and-insight/news-and-features/emerging-risk/emerging-risk-2012/the-invisible-chauffeurs?goback=.gde_4731574_member_209056609" target="_blank">Donald Light</a></span></i></blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white; color: windowtext; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">"Metropolitan
areas will start using this technology … as a forward-looking metropolitan
area, as opposed to being stuck in the 20th century." — </span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white; color: windowtext; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2013/01/prediction-day-cities-will-soon-compete-build-driverless-car-infrastructure/4419/" target="_blank">Thomas J.Bamonte</a></span></span></blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>"…it is important that strategic plans of this nature
recognize that spiraling advances in technology will continue to present
both opportunities and challenges that will require revisiting of the plan
on a regular basis. The public consultation process brought to
the attention of administration a potential “game-changing” technology
that could affect not only transit but the entire transportation spectrum in
the foreseeable future. This technology is the self-driving vehicle.
Such technology is already at a significant level of development and
its impact should not be underestimated. As technologies such as
this continue to evolve play a greater role in society, it will be
important to recognize the opportunities they present, and to attempt to
foresee the impact on future capital and operating investments - to take
full advantage of the opportunities to improve the community experience
for the residents of St. Albert."</i><span style="color: windowtext; mso-ansi-language: FR-CA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> </span><span style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">— <a href="http://www.stalbert.ca/uploads/files/transit/Long%20Term%20Dept%20Plan%20APPROVED.pdf" target="_blank">City of St. Albert Transit Long Term Department Plan2013-2027 (2013.02.04)</a>.</span></span><span style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"> </span></span></blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>“As autonomous and
even semiautonomous technologies become more feasible, governments —and
especially their planners, engineers, and lawyers —should not be idle .
…. Maximizing the net benefit of
autonomous driving will require researching, modeling, planning, and regulating…"
—</i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: #EEEEEE; color: windowtext; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/lawreview/vol52/iss4/8" target="_blank">Bryant Walker Smith</a><o:p></o:p></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: windowtext; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Mayor
Burton’s </span><a href="http://grushhour.blogspot.ca/2012/07/driverless-journalism.html" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;" target="_blank">"Can we really not make it better?” is more prescient</a><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> than he, or
Metrolinx, or the Province, or the Star’s readers may be aware.</span></div>
Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-1950188190051741982012-11-03T18:10:00.000-04:002012-11-03T18:11:04.456-04:00Loss aversion to Road User Charging and the Autonomous Vehicle<style>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 20.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Loss aversion</span></b> is the critical barrier to acceptance of
mileage-based user fees or VMT charging. Well known to behavioral economists,
loss aversion says humans experience losses at about 2.5 times more intensity
than an equivalent gain. Losing ten dollars feels as bad as winning 25 dollars
feels good. Coupled with an exaggerated tendency to fear losses that
incorporate uncertainty, loss aversion, is built deeply into the human psyche
with roots extending far back in evolutionary time, preserving gene pools. Loss
aversion cannot be ignored by transportation economists who wish to see a shift
to paying for roads according to use.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Motorists’
perceived losses associated with road use charging include a wide variety of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">uncertain</i> effects: additional taxation,
privacy invasion, comparative inconvenience, reduced autonomy of movement,
government spending misallocation, inequity for one group or another, etc. That
the degree of these presumed effects is uncertain—each can, in fact, be readily
avoided—merely adds to the weight of loss perception.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Our
explanations of counterbalancing gains also weigh far less than we imagine due
to their uncertainty and imperceivability. The potential repeal of fuel duties,
congestion abatement, improved environment, and better transit—if
believed—weigh little to drivers who feel at risk for larger personal losses.
Abundant uncertainty further exaggerates the 2.5-factor spread between the loss
of the status-quo and the tenuous gains of road user charging.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The way automobility and its taxation has evolved to now
precludes a reasoned switch from fuel tax to road-use tax. We need to think
about a very different route to the change we seek, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Cheh" target="_blank">DC Councilmember MaryM. Cheh</a> has just shown us one.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In September 2012, <a href="http://www.dccouncil.us/files/user_uploads/related_materials/sept19_cheh_autonomousvehicle.pdf" target="_blank">Cheh introduced a bill in DC Counci</a>l
“[t]o authorize autonomous vehicles to operate on the roadways of the
District”, provided that the vehicle “[o]perates on alternative fuels,” and
that, “[o]<span style="font-size: 11.5pt;">wners of autonomous vehicles pay a
vehicle-miles travelled (VMT) fee of 1.875 cents per mile” and that [t]he VMT
fee shall be tabulated using an autonomous vehicle’s telemetry systems.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Cheh’s proposal shows us a way out of the loss aversion
problem. If you think about the AV of a few years from now, you can imagine it
changing a lot of things. Besides the effects related to road safety,
congestion, and fuel consumption, it will have dramatic effects on public
transportation, shared vehicles and private vehicle ownership.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">And the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox" target="_blank">Jevons Paradox</a>, which says that <span style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.5pt;">when
we use a resource more efficiently, we consume more of it—in this case, road
space—suggests that we would likely experience an increase in vehicle miles
traveled. Hence, Jevons predicts that a new efficiency given us by the AV would
tend to keep congestion and fuel use—and the need for road funding—running
high.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.5pt;">AVs can sufficiently alter the evolution of
automobility to change the perception of gains and losses between fuel taxation
and VMT charging. </span>Councilmember <span style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.5pt;">Cheh is right to take advantage of
the switch to the AV to switch tax regimes at the same time.</span></span></div>
Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-87956699766292937482012-08-02T00:10:00.000-04:002012-08-02T00:29:19.350-04:00This week in self-driving cars<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">The autonomous car buzz continues to grow. I think the </span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">Jetsonian optimism of the </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">mainstream press is over the top. Many predictions are in the range of two to five years. It will take longer. (hint: the policy will be harder than the technology, and the technology is not complete.) One writer predicted that autonomy will come sooner than electrification. That one could work out in the sense that autonomous VMT will surpass electric VMT in, say, 15 years. I certainly would not bet against that... The switch to artificial intelligence will be easier than the switch to batteries. (Why? because once self-driving tech is solved, distribution will be free and the infrastructure is ready. Not so with EVs.)</span></span></div>
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Anyway, both developments will erode the fuel tax further, so now what? The autonomous car had better learn more about potholes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120801/AUTO01/208010325/1409/metro/MDOT-prepares-assess-self-driving-vehicles"><span>MDOT prepares to assess self-driving vehicles</span></a><span></span> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/goog_632501522"><span>MDOT to conduct survey on self-driving vehicles</span></a></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/eric-schmidt-google-self-driving-cars-should-become-the-predominant-mode-of-transport-in-our-lifetime/"><span>eric-schmidt-google-self-driving-cars-should-become-the-predominant-mode-of-transport-in-our-lifetime</span></a><span> </span></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.nblawgroup.com/google-executive-wants-self-driving-cars-to-keep-motorists-safe/"><span>google-executive-wants-self-driving-cars-to-keep-motorists-safe</span></a></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/drivers-seat/2012/07/28/letters-opinions-on-self-driving-cars/">letters-opinions-on-self-driving-cars</a> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.futureoftech.msnbc.msn.com/technology/futureoftech/road-test-self-driving-car-heads-city-916303"><span>self-driving-car-heads-into-city</span></a></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.heraldsun.com.au/technology/australian-robotics-researcher-says-smartphone-driven-car-is-a-year-away/story-fn5izo02-1226438711426"><span>australian-robotics-researcher-says-smartphone-driven-car-is-a-year-away</span></a><span> </span></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.motoring.co.uk/car-news/driverless-cars-will-soon-be-a-reality_46327"><span>driverless-cars-will-soon-be-a-reality</span></a></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://e360.yale.edu/feature/self-driving_cars_coming_soon_to_a_highway_near_you/2554/"><span>self-driving_cars_coming_soon_to_a_highway_near_you</span></a><span> </span></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.bmwblog.com/2012/07/30/bmwblog-interviews-chris-bangle/"><span>bmwblog-interviews-chris-bangle</span></a></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2012/07/self-driving-crash-test"><span>self-driving-crash-test</span></a><span> </span></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43384144/vp/48303608#48303608"><span>Video Berlin self-drive</span></a></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/goog_771133500"><span>environmental-benefits-of-self-driving-cars</span></a></span></div>
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</div>Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-57924504300403304842012-07-31T15:44:00.002-04:002012-08-01T18:32:59.836-04:00Peak Car? China says "not yet".<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_car" target="_blank">Peak Car is more likely to be related to an automotive-ownership saturation level</a> given a particular configuration of wealth, age and other demographic components. In countries such as the US and UK and Australia that number hovers around .7 (700/1000 pop) and is currently flat. Some hope it will climb given an economic recovery, some pray for permanent decline or at least continued stagnation. It does make sense that there would be a ceiling to automotive use<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">—</span>at least on a per capita basis. And something under .75, given the portion of a population under driving age or over driving capability, seems reasonable (as a guess, I mean, not for our cities).<br />
<br />
Regardless of where such a ceiling might be, the rest of the world, <a href="http://www.newgeography.com/content/002991-china-personal-vehicles-now-more-us" target="_blank">(especially China)</a> still wants to get to that lofty place. (<a href="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-08/01/content_15636567.htm" target="_blank">more china news re traffic</a>) Hence <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Two-Billion-Cars-Driving-Sustainability/dp/0195376641" target="_blank">Two Billion Cars is the near-term prediction</a>, hoping and praying aside. If the Sperling-Gordon "doubling" prediction is off the mark, it will be off only by a couple of years.<br />
<br />
Most of us think only about our car or the cars in our neighborhood or city. But the matter of automobility is much larger as it addresses a critical human and urban need. Wishing it would get fixed or go away won't make it so. You may personally have more or less use for an automobile. You may arrange your life to use very little or over much. But world vehicle population will double<style>
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</style><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">—</span>likely in less than 20 years.Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-50366065449171375602012-07-27T02:05:00.001-04:002012-07-27T11:29:39.855-04:00The Five Faces of Public-Private Partnerships<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">A colleague from the D.C. area who is an expert in road finance wrote
an insightful, concise and sobering note about Public-Private Partnerships. As
I have written before about monetization of Toronto’s parking assets, and as I
have found myself defending Ontario's 407, I found this valuable.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">With Dan’s permission,
I share this unaltered and unabridged.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Here is how Dan connected his work regarding what he prefers to call Public-Private Collaborations to my work in congestion pricing. I kept the original term to be sure his article is discovered by more people... </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">"The relevance of the </span></span></i><i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">Many Faces of Public-Private Partnerships</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>piece to road or congestion pricing is that many believe that P3s are the best way to implement road pricing on new alignment or HOT lanes. If so, it is best they understand the way certain detractors may use the negative rhetoric about P3s to undo worthy road pricing initiatives."</span></span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;">-----</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>THE MANY FACES OF PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #500050;">Daniel L.</span><span style="color: #500050;"> </span><span style="color: #222222;">Dornan</span><span style="color: #500050;">,
P.E. — 2012.07.21</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Let
me begin by noting that I am a strong supporter <a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=614300246796046332" name="_GoBack"></a>of
public-private collaboration to help address the fiscal and infrastructure
needs of our nation. However this support is predicated on having both public
sector and private sector participants benefit from the arrangement relative to
the degree to which they each contribute to its success. In addition, such an
arrangement should be made in a fully transparent manner with the respective
parties held accountable for their responsibilities and promised results.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">When
politicians and public officials turn to the private sector (including investment-banking
firms and venture capitalists) to help them finance public use infrastructure
as part of a public-private partnership (P3), it is prudent to understand the
short-term motives and the long-term consequences of these deals before they
are finalized.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">This
paper discusses the various ways in which P3s can be viewed, depending on the nature
of the deal, the roles and responsibilities of all parties to the deal, and the
point of view of those assessing the deal. Understanding these differing views
can help private firms become better positioned to successfully compete in the
emerging and rapidly changing marketplace for P3s.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>P3s as White Knight</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Public-private
partnerships are often touted as a panacea for addressing the transportation
infrastructure needs of states and municipalities facing fiscal challenges during
the continuing Great Recession. Proponents of P3s point to enhanced access to
private capital as a major benefit of these arrangements. They paint P3 teams
as White Knights able to rescue needed but fiscal-constrained infrastructure
projects by providing ready access to financing, innovative project delivery,
and cost-effective life-cycle asset management. These are the major advantages
of successful P3s. Unfortunately most public sector agencies are unable to apply
these processes to gain these benefits for their constituents since their time
horizons for infrastructure management are much shorter than the service lives
of these assets.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>P3s as Pied Piper</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">In
some P3 contracts, the concessionaire teams are asked to provide a sizable
up-front concession fee in return for assuming control of public use
infrastructure assets through long-term leases supported by tolls or other
revenues. These deals inevitably involve a long-term repayment schedule that is
significantly more than if the sponsoring public entities financed the projects
using tax-exempt public bonds. This is because private consortia will only do a
P3 deal if they are relatively sure that the project can generate the level of
proceeds to more than cover the up-front payment; their own capital, operating,
and maintenance costs, and an acceptable rate of return on the investment made
by the financing members of the P3 team. The revenue potential of the facility under
private management must be significant since the rates of return on private
capital are much higher than interest rates associated with tax-exempt bonds,
typically by 300 to 400 basis points (for example 6.2% versus 10.0%).</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Those
who oppose P3s out of concern that the private sector will make a profit on the
deal fail to realize that when it comes to private financing, the profit motive
is what makes these deals possible.
In all but the most altruistic cases, the Pied Pipers of capital finance
expect to be paid for their services. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>P3s as Robin Hood</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">A
particular problem arises when the up-front proceeds from a P3 concession payment
are diverted to other unrelated purposes. This occurred in 2006 when the City
of Chicago leased its rights to the Chicago Skyway and it’s future toll
revenues to a P3 consortium of Spanish and Australian firms for 99 years in
return for an up-front cash payment of $1.83 billion. In this case, the only transportation-related
use of concession proceeds was for the City’s Meals-on-Wheels program. None of
the up-front payment was dedicated to any other transportation projects or
services, except to pay off the remaining City debt on the Skyway itself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">As
a kind of Robin Hood, the City of Chicago took the proceeds from the Skyway
lease and distributed it to a wide variety of social programs and causes. At
the time, residents of Chicago did not pay much attention to this deal, even
when it promised to significantly increase tolls on the Skyway. This was
because most users of the Skyway, who would pay these higher tolls, lived in
Indiana. Like a commuter tax, Chicago effectively tolled the citizens of
Indiana to pay for social programs benefitting the citizens of Chicago.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>P3s as Alchemist</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">To
public officials desperate for fiscal relief, P3s could appear like the alchemists’
dream of turning lead (i.e., current debt, deteriorated infrastructure) into
gold (i.e., debt relief, rehabilitated or new infrastructure). The reality is
that these deals generally rely on a transfer of future revenues to the private
sector that is better able to take the risks and secure the benefits of
long-term asset stewardship. Since the public sector is typically unable to
generate these future proceeds from their maturing public-use infrastructure,
today’s public officials are more likely to embrace P3s by swapping a much
larger revenue stream that will take decades to accrue for a smaller but
immediate capital infusion in the form of an up-front concession payment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>P3s as Trojan Horse</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The
history of transportation infrastructure is replete with examples of
megaprojects predicated on overly optimistic projections of public use and
benefits and grossly underestimated estimates of costs. By the time the actual usage and costs
are known, these projects are too far along to be stopped. Another 10-15 years
must elapse before the induced economic development spawned by these
megaprojects is realized.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Likewise,
the negative consequences of P3 agreements generally only become apparent long
after the dealmakers leave office. When these arrangements enable opportunistic
officials to lease out existing public use infrastructure for many decades,
future generations may be denied access to windfall revenues these assets might
generate over the long term. In such cases, those public officials responsible
for pushing through these quick cash-out deals, their current constituents, and
their private sector partners may be the only ones who benefit financially from
these agreements. Subsequent generations may be left to feel the gambler’s
remorse resulting from these deals.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">If
P3s are Trojan Horses designed only to enable private interests to assume
responsibility for public infrastructure assets where profit and
return-on-investment are their primary concern, we may see the wholesale
transfer of the nation’s most critical and strategic highways to international
consortia accountable only to their investors or stockholders. As the saying
goes, Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Conclusions</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Pubic
stakeholders will be better served if they fully understand the nature and
details of these agreements as they evolve over the short term and mature over
the long term. The public will be best served when P3 contracts are developed
and executed in a fully transparent manner, with all participants held
accountable for their respective contractual commitments throughout the terms
of these agreements.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Private
sector firms interested in pursuing P3 opportunities in this country will be
better prepared and more successful if they understand how different
stakeholder groups view P3s. It is only by first understanding the diverse and
sometimes contrary perspectives of both advocates and detractors of P3s that
private sector firms can take the appropriate actions to be successful in
pursuing these innovative financing and project delivery approaches over the
long term, to the mutual benefit of the public and private enterprise.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #500050;">Daniel L.</span><span style="color: #500050;"> </span><span style="color: #222222;">Dornan</span><span style="color: #500050;">,
P.E.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Dornandaniel at gmail…</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">+1 703-625-2152</span></div>Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-4817421088972562932012-07-18T14:38:00.000-04:002012-09-13T00:33:24.756-04:00Driverless journalism<span style="background-color: white;">Added on 2012.09.13</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><b> Pro:</b> </span><a href="http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/45672367#/45672367/48" target="_blank">Kiss Your Bus Goodbye</a><br />
<div class="p1">
<b> Con: </b><a href="http://www.humantransit.org/2012/08/bus-stigma-and-driverless-cars-email-of-the-month.html" target="_blank">Will driverless cars abolish buses</a>?</div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #262626; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #262626; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">People
are starting to note a lot of positive implications for the self-driving vehicle
(SDV) that is resonating on either side of the car-anti-car divide. In the WSJ,
Brooking’s Clifford Winston wrote: </span><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303919504577524560756661978.html#articleTabs%3Darticle" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Paving the Way for Driverless Cars: Instead of focusing on an enormously expensive high-speed rail system, government should promote modern highway design for cars of the future.</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #262626; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">
(2012.07.17)</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #262626;">While
Winston is half right that "</span><span style="color: windowtext;">a much
better technological solution [than high speed trains] is on the horizon</span><span style="color: #262626;">", the comparison is off-base since the sweet-spot trip for
heavy rail vs that for the SDV are widely separated. Kind of like saying a baby
stroller is equivalent to a mountain bike, since both move children. I wish he
had written: “</span><span style="color: windowtext;">a much better technological
solution [than today’s car] is on the horizon</span><span style="color: #262626;">".
But he was more using the SDV story as an excuse to diminish heavy rail and
promote private investment in transport infrastructure. (While appreciating a
role for rail, I whole-heartedly support private investment.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #262626;">Winston
is also half right to claim: </span><span style="color: windowtext;">No worries about rush hour,
vacation congestion, bad drivers, speed traps and accidents.</span><span style="color: #262626;">" Urban rush hour trauma and congestion would be reduced.
The cessation of bad driving (on whose definition?) will take a long period of
attrition, but one interesting idea might be to suspend driver licenses for
“bad drivers” for a year constraining such drivers to a SDV for that year. Perhaps
onerous to some it would be life-changing and even life-saving for others. The
same with “no accidents”. There would be fewer—many fewer, eventually—but zero
would be unlikely. When I saw “speed traps” listed among the bad bits such as "rush
hour", "congestion", "bad drivers" and
"accidents", I first recalled the Sesame Street jingle:
"One-of-these-things-don't-belong-together…", then I wondered if that
provides us with a hint of an opportunistic attribute of Winston’s own driving?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #262626;">I think Winston’s concern that
“</span><span style="color: windowtext;">one-third
of the nation's highways are still in poor or mediocre condition</span><span style="color: #262626;">” is both exaggerated
and in no way a showstopper with respect to the SDV. The SDV’s lead designer, Sebastian
Thrun has admitted that the work is not done—specifically listing the
challenges of driving in snow, construction zones and “avoiding a mattress on
the roadway”. I am certain he or someone will solve the pothole problem. Thrun
started on this in 2005 and has accomplished a lot in eight years (actually the
early vision of the SDV goes back to the 1939 World’s Fair, and was electric,
no less). Thrun has been clear that the “car will be ready when the car is
ready”, so he and Google (and several other competitors) will not rush-to-release
a technology that would be unsafe or trip on potholes—nor would they be allowed
to do so. Nonetheless, the SDV will suffer from the same problem as does
commercial air carriers—while far safer than human operated cars, they will be
held to a far higher standard. And Thrun knows that, too.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #262626;">Winston’s proposal to build a
whole new infrastructure is alarming. Any scheme that puts two different roadbed
compression strengths in adjacent lanes is especially misguided as a simple
lane departure of a heavy vehicle could cause tremendous damage. If his
intention is that such lanes be physically grade separated, then flexibility
would be greatly reduced and the tiny portion of the network that would then avail
to SDVs would greatly restrict their movement. If we can’t get people to buy
EVs with restricted ranges why would they buy SDVs with restricted routes? Sounds
like the bus to me. And to imagine that because of this separation “</span><span style="color: windowtext;">driverless
cars … would not have to distinguish between cars and trucks</span><span style="color: #262626;">” is a
terrifying idea. Would you agree to be whisked along in a robotic car that
could not distinguish among vehicle sizes, one of the simplest of robotic
vision feats? Count me out.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc2y9_VC7sERGF_UaymzYMTcueQRBu82G6eUaX-HCzpS73jQreVXXKxQle2wV6XNGVSLgBQJILy1iIAs9rCnfG7fRIv3SmERDa0tY7lcH9qRNRLoTA8WLnGVSvTZXkbRWTBE2zltpboss/s1600/Wrong+understanding+of+driverless+car.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc2y9_VC7sERGF_UaymzYMTcueQRBu82G6eUaX-HCzpS73jQreVXXKxQle2wV6XNGVSLgBQJILy1iIAs9rCnfG7fRIv3SmERDa0tY7lcH9qRNRLoTA8WLnGVSvTZXkbRWTBE2zltpboss/s400/Wrong+understanding+of+driverless+car.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The illustration accompanying Clifford Winston's article is misleading.<br />
This shows a car on a guided runway, not an autonomous vehicle.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #262626; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The SDV will operate on the existing infrastructure and an
internal map can keep if off any parts of the network that would put vehicle or
rider(s) at risk. Even the signal timing problems can be addressed partly by fixing
some critical parts and adapting the vehicles to others. Consider that as the
SDV fleet grows, learning algorithms that use massive quantities of trip data
(such as do those used by INRIX to map country-wide congestion in near-real
time) can get very smart. They could easily prioritize which of the signal
timings need most urgent fixing.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #262626;">The frontier benefits of the SDV will accrue during 2022-2042 as
special, restricted applications such as replacing mostly-empty and oversized
urban buses, expensive and poorly driven taxis and shared cars. Here is where I
would like to see Winston’s call for private funding focused: urban fleets of self-driving
jitneys to replace every form of motorized shared vehicle (bus, taxi, street
car, shared car, vanpool) from the front door of your home or work right up to
the light-rail and heavy-rail transit station and vice versa. Replace them all.
Then by 2045, maybe the US Congress will be able to pass another </span><span style="background-color: white;">Surface
Transportation Reauthorization Bill in plenty of time to eulogize the last of
the personally-operated SOVs and fix the last of the traffic signals in time to
remove them all, because they will no longer be needed</span><span style="color: windowtext;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Not to lose sight of the key value of Winston’s message,
however, he is 100% right that more would be achieved per SDV dollar than per
heavy rail dollar, although both are needed.</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-27278569359408040292012-07-09T19:32:00.000-04:002012-07-09T19:33:43.269-04:00Use revenue from parking reform rather than tax property<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">The
Stintz - De Baeremaeker “OneCity” plan for Toronto Transit got a B+ from former
Toronto chief planner Paul Bedford and urban designer and author Ken Greenberg.
On a story by the <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/transportation/article/1222516--ttc-chair-karen-stintz-gets-urbanists-support-for-onecity" target="_blank">Star’s Tess Kalinowski on 2012 07 06</a></span><span style="background-color: white;">, </span><span style="background-color: white;"><i>“Bedford thinks OneCity is still too reliant on senior governments
to provide two-thirds of the projected $30 billion cost."</i></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>“Much
of the controversy … is based on its funding proposition—raising property taxes
2 per cent and applying the money to a dedicated transit fund.”</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Ken Greenberg’s understatement: <i>“The
politics that could thwart the latest and among the boldest transit visions to
come before the city in years, are inevitable,”</i> is correct. And this is unfortunately
to be expected in the merry-go-round transportation conversation we have going
for the GTHA.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">According
to a <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/suburban-leaders-oppose-stintzs-transit-tax-proposal/article4378735/" target="_blank">Globe article on 2012 06 28</a>, <i>“For the average Toronto homeowner, OneCity
would add $180 to the annual tax bill by the time the plan is fully phased in
in 2016. All the money would go to transit.”</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That’s 50 cents per homeowner per day.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Proper
parking reform—and I am not referring to the cost-of-living increase on the
GreenP machines that is expected soon—could easily cover half of that, while
reducing urban congestion at the same time. Increasing property tax increases
land rents, and that tends to discourage people from moving closer to the
center as some urbanists think they should do. Anything that moves or keeps
people farther from the center increases the use of automobiles.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“Why
should my parking money fund transit?” demands my neighbor. One could think of
increased transit use as a way to increase existing roadway capacity, since
congestion reduces performance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Whether
we use parking revenues or fuel-tax revenues to fund roads or transit, either
is better than being heavily reliant on property taxes.</span><span style="color: green;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-63359249069006243892012-07-04T21:55:00.000-04:002012-07-04T21:55:08.881-04:00Toronto New York Vilnius - Styles differ re War on Cars<br />
<div class="p1">
<span style="background-color: white;">Toronto's Mayor Ford can can pick up some tips about the War on Cars, here...</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<a href="http://blah-city.tumblr.com/post/25654653342">http://blah-city.tumblr.com/post/25654653342</a></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
…while being careful to watch for the rise of anti-parking ticket rebels, here.</div>
<div class="p1">
<a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1404309186/tyco-parks-the-car">http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1404309186/tyco-parks-the-car</a></div>Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-84109389255247898832012-06-07T19:28:00.001-04:002012-06-07T19:28:14.416-04:00Parking policy can boost modality choice<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We often use the notion of choice when
discussing mobility:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“We
should have better transportation choices.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“We
should be able to choose where we live.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“I have
no choice but to drive.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“I would
bike, but cars are dangerous leaving me no choice.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQCHVzbXY_poXDR9GCd0Tqy3tfTk1PJ30oJNxOj2CSsFfNeEZgvVpWmwi20Im7HFKL6A9WbFaZCkh5sVqs50YmtBFSBFIUnrBIyR-gcBqeLXhPNrzpUOqAsFcsWBwiyOSXfLoGuvAlzdQ/s1600/parking+cruising.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQCHVzbXY_poXDR9GCd0Tqy3tfTk1PJ30oJNxOj2CSsFfNeEZgvVpWmwi20Im7HFKL6A9WbFaZCkh5sVqs50YmtBFSBFIUnrBIyR-gcBqeLXhPNrzpUOqAsFcsWBwiyOSXfLoGuvAlzdQ/s640/parking+cruising.bmp" width="144" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cartoon from<br /><a href="http://www.transalt.org/newsroom/media/1138" target="_blank">New York Times</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A key effect of many parking policies—and some
of this is largely unintended—is to diminish our choices. I use the expression
“diminish” in both senses. Our parking policies sometimes give us fewer choices,
but more often they bias our choices in ways we do not often recognize. One
example is employer-subsidized parking. If I have cheap or free parking at my
place of employment, I am more likely to use my car. While I haven't been
completely denied the choice to use transit or a bike, the fact that I have
free or cheap parking makes the selection of those other modalities more
unlikely than they already are. Another example is street parking that is
dramatically less expensive than nearby garage parking. In this case, while I still
have the choice to use garage parking, the low cost on the street encourages me
to cruise around the block—an average of 3.5 minutes according to parking guru
Don Shoup—to find a cheap spot. Again my choice is strongly biased by a parking
policy. A third example is a policy that permits monthly parking (or better
put, the lack of a policy which forbids the practice). In this case, given a
choice of a discounted monthly parking pass versus paying the full daily rate,
it is easy for me to purchase the monthly pass. What this means, however, is
that during the month, if faced with a choice of, say, carpooling, biking or an
SOV, I would be more likely to choose to drive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There are individual remedies for each of
these. Regional or municipal governments could mandate a “parking cash-out”, i.e., an
equivalent subsidy to all employees to offset employer-subsidized parking. For
example, having non-driving employees receive an equivalent cash subsidy that
may be used for transit, bike, shoes, gas money toward a carpool, or offsetting internet costs for teleworkers, would
reduce the automaticity of driving for some people. This increases each
employee's choice, and still provides for employer subsidized parking which in
itself is not necessarily a bad thing—as long as it's balanced.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Cruising for street parking can easily be
managed by setting prices so that there is a 15% vacancy rate for parking spots.
This is another Shoup solution and ends the cruising problem, while not needing
to match garage prices (garages have a different role to play than
does street parking, anyway).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Monthly parking is a bit tougher, since it
makes sense to know you have a spot for your vehicle if you are indeed going to
drive into your office each day, or if we are talking about the condo building you
live in. However, it is possible to replace monthly passes with some form of
parking loyalty program or bulk purchase program. Rather than purchase a
parking pass for a calendar month, purchase 200 hours of parking at a bulk rate
and there is no need to spend it all in a particular month. In fact, employees
could be rewarded for making the 200 hours last longer! This would free up some
people to make divergent modal choices, since the value of the parking pass is
not ticking away if they choose not to drive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There are
numerous ways to make parking policy fairer and more responsible to the
environment and to our cities. As well, tweaks to parking policy, such as I
have described, are not nearly as politically toxic as road-use charging, but
can, if deployed thoughtfully, can lead to similar congestion-reducing
results. Unfortunately, many of
them are not readily apparent.</span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-70907886360496734302012-05-17T07:17:00.002-04:002012-05-17T07:24:04.873-04:00Toll Road Revolt in South Africa<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In Gauteng
Province (South Africa) an ambitious and expensive toll road scheme has been
put on indefinite hold 2-days before its launch due to popular, trade union,
business leader, and Automobile Association protest according to The Economist
(<a href="http://www.economist.com/node/21554553" target="_blank">It doesn’t toll for thee 2012.05.12</a>). This will have significant financial repercussions for the road
authority and the government. In easy hindsight, there is little surprise this
happened.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Road
operators are in desperate need for funding the world over. And roads get more congested every day.
But installing a one-size-fits-all tolling system on a pre-existing road
network does not go down easily. However necessary for any number of reasons,
this indeed “represents the state’s bullying power” as The Economist bluntly put
it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggudB8BlATNS6NCUTGgaao66pAaxA60ZJDBu4QRvoor4Li0ZlfQVFJMSyPwD9aRgt2b6cotshXQ5pPVv65ii5InRTz9g33kRHX3P907pgMOc9hN0VVUaUWqyAkSQVvR7pvDAVKxbH9hyw/s1600/From+The+Economist+Article.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggudB8BlATNS6NCUTGgaao66pAaxA60ZJDBu4QRvoor4Li0ZlfQVFJMSyPwD9aRgt2b6cotshXQ5pPVv65ii5InRTz9g33kRHX3P907pgMOc9hN0VVUaUWqyAkSQVvR7pvDAVKxbH9hyw/s1600/From+The+Economist+Article.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">Image from article in The Economist. Copyright:The Economist</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Adding new
lanes and tolling them as high-occupancy/toll (HOT) lanes for discretionary use
meets little resistance. But tolling major routes that have few or diminished
alternatives would generally be received poorly. People who have had free
access to roadways for as long as they remember, expect free access to remain
available as long as they live. In behavioral economics lingo, they are
“anchored” to a road-price of zero. You can’t just start charging US 12 cents per
mile on a Monday at 12:01am, which is what was to happen in Gauteng.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To have
acceptance, you have to make the individuals subject to tolling better off than
they were without tolling. Drivers don’t buy into tedious economic arguments
about highway funding and congestion and pricing and the tragedy of the commons.
They ask: “What’s in it for me?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Here is an
alternative.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Phase in
gradual fuel duty increases over a few years expressly to pay for new or
repaired roads. Preannounce the full plan to give users time to adjust (move, renegotiate
contracts, different vehicle, etc.). This will be difficult enough.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Concurrently
provide a <i>voluntary</i> choice: pay the
newly increased fuel tax or use an autonomous, in-vehicle, time-and-place of
use meter to trade road tolls for a fuel tax rebate (calculated by the same
meter). Arrange the road prices (stored in the personal in-vehicle meter’s “pricemap”)
to have drivers who avoid congestion <i>save</i>
money with the meter and other drivers to pay about the same as the fuel tax. Then
be sure that the smart in-vehicle meter offers several additional features that
those self-selected drivers would like (reduced insurance premiums, parking
conveniences and discounts, etc).
The trick is (again according to behavioral economists) to provide at
least twice the perceived value to the driver than the perceived cost
(nuisance, money, trouble) of using the meter. This is technically easy to do
(including privacy, security and reliability), but needs policy that encourages
usage-based insurance and permits wireless parking management and perhaps behavioral
rewards for safety, emissions, and the like. Without associated value-added services
and incentives with benefits that counterbalance this type of increasingly
needed tolling, governments are not offering a vote-worthy solution.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What we are
missing are policies to incent innovation and permit voluntary migration. We need
a telemetrics-payment ecosystem that allows driver services to move metering away
from one-size-fits-all gantries for users with a variety of needs.<span style="color: windowtext;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-15852614161849846292012-04-12T20:06:00.000-04:002012-04-12T21:19:39.685-04:00Dutch Rewarding Drivers to Drive Off-peak<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Is it possible that we don't need so many new roads as we think? Likely. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Is it possible to manage congestion without tolling
every road? Possibly not, but there is a way to put it off until “the next
administration”, while still addressing congestion. So think the Dutch—those masters of nationwide road tolling ideas.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />This article from a Dutch Newspaper was translated by Google, then edited for
readability. </span><a href="http://www.standaard.be/artikel/detail.aspx?artikelid=DMF20120412_071" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The original is here</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBHU3ImJDcVTqK9o79q9I4FEwnJnm-mwc7BSEHl9WVRrz742GKc1fj9TuABTSy6PgsXlKvHFqFHXxGI2RNQod624cPC0BN8w6hNtYV2HQ5oMe0m5WMhvJpJLvlVLzURun7VoW51HMBIoI/s1600/Dutch+Congestion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="287" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBHU3ImJDcVTqK9o79q9I4FEwnJnm-mwc7BSEHl9WVRrz742GKc1fj9TuABTSy6PgsXlKvHFqFHXxGI2RNQod624cPC0BN8w6hNtYV2HQ5oMe0m5WMhvJpJLvlVLzURun7VoW51HMBIoI/s400/Dutch+Congestion.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Could even be our city, eh?</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>With rewards, 3,000 fewer cars during Utrecht rush-hour</b></span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">2012 04 12</span></span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><span style="border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">Since the start of the project Spits
Free in the triangle Utrecht - Amersfoort - Hilversum driving during peak hours
about 3,000 cars fewer are using the road in that area.</span></i><i> </i><i><span style="border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">Participants will receive a reward if they avoid morning or evening
peak.</span></i></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">The deputy with responsibility for this is Remco van Lunteren from Utrecht.</span> <span style="border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">The project is now six months in
the Utrecht region and according to </span>van Lunteren, it is<span style="border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;"> a success.</span> <span style="border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">In four weeks, participants drive 1.5 million fewer miles during rush hour, says the province.</span></span><span style="border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">In
the region, 60,000 people drive daily during peak hours.</span> <span style="border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">The project involves about 5,400
motorists.</span> <span style="border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">There is a waiting list to participate.</span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">The </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">county calculates that </span><span style="border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">spitsmijders ‘earn’ an average of about 30 euros per month to drive at other times.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> P</span><span style="border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">articipants especially avoid the
rush hours on Tuesday and Wednesday.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">The
province of Utrecht recently calculated the socio-economic impact of the project.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">It is noted that a few less cars
on busy roads during rush hour already provide for the resolution of a file (the
congestion file? ed.).</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">In
some places, the road is never silent, says the province.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="border-bottom-color: windowtext; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: windowtext; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: windowtext; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: windowtext; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 1pt; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 0in; padding-right: 0in; padding-top: 0in;">Spits runs freely until the end
of this year.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">While
most governments may not be willing to hand out cash for drivers to use roads
at different times (and I don’t think they should), there are many other
direct, economic ways to reward such behavior, outlined in numerous other
blogs, here. The point is that drivers respond to economic incentives, by
shifting travel time (or mode). And there are many cash-equivalent economic
incentives that are cost neutral to the taxpayer.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We
should start looking at them.</span><span style="font-size: 9pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-31202122482391126352012-04-11T00:00:00.000-04:002012-04-11T00:24:48.783-04:00Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Edward Glaeser’s 2011 book, <i>Triumph of the City: How our Greatest Invention Make Is Richer,
Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier,</i> is a worthy read. In the middle
of a chapter called, “How Were the Tenements Tamed” is a gem about
congestion. I copy it here without
permission and in the spirit of sharing a beautiful piece of writing that is
among the clearest I have read in a decade of dedicated reading about traffic and congestion. Tim Harford, another economist I admire wrote a <a href="http://grushhour.blogspot.ca/2007/08/what-will-congestion-charging-do-to-gdp.html">brilliant passage that I cribbed</a> as well (that time with permission!).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />As you will see, Glaeser’s urban view is about much more than
congestion, so I left his context intact.</span></div>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">More Roads,
Less Traffic?</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Contagious diseases turn the great urban advantage—connecting people—into
a cause of death. Traffic congestion eliminates that advantage altogether<span style="color: windowtext;">
</span>by making it too hard to
get around in a city. Too much trash turns city streets<span style="color: windowtext;">
</span>into a health hazard; too
many drivers turn city streets into a parking lot.<span style="color: windowtext;">
</span>Providing clean water
requires an engineering solution, but providing uncongested streets requires
more than just technical know-how. Our streets only<span style="color: windowtext;">
</span>become usable when people
don’t overuse them, and that calls for the tools of<span style="color: windowtext;">
</span>the economist. Driving
creates a negative externality, because each driver<span style="color: windowtext;">
</span>typically considers only
his own private costs and benefits. Drivers don’t usually take into account the
fact that their driving slows everyone else down. The<span style="color: windowtext;">
</span>best way to fix that
externality is to charge people for using roads.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Moving water into cities and sewage out was a vast undertaking,
which<span style="color: windowtext;"> </span>tested
the very limits of engineering know-how. Traffic congestion is also an<span style="color: windowtext;">
</span>engineering challenge but <b><i>a
psychological one</i></b> as well, mainly because each<span style="color: windowtext;"> </span>improvement changes drivers’ behaviors
in a way that actually offsets the improvement. For decades, we’ve tried to
solve the problem of too many cars on<span style="color: windowtext;"> </span>too few lanes by building more roads,
but each new highway or bridge then<span style="color: windowtext;"> </span>attracts more traffic. Economists Gilles
Duranton and Matthew Turner have<span style="color: windowtext;"> </span>found that vehicle miles traveled
increases essentially one-to-one with the<span style="color: windowtext;"> </span>number of miles of new highway, and have
called this phenomenon the fundamental law of road congestion.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The traffic problem essentially reflects the impossibility of sating
the demand for anything that’s free. Roads are expensive to build and valuable
to<span style="color: windowtext;"> </span>use, yet
American motorists seem to think that a right to drive for free was<span style="color: windowtext;">
</span>promised them by the Bill
of Rights. Soviet Russia used to charge artificially<span style="color: windowtext;">
</span>low prices for consumer
goods, and the result was empty shelves and long<span style="color: windowtext;"> </span>lines. That is basically what happens
when people are allowed to drive on city<span style="color: windowtext;"> </span>streets for free.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The best way to
reduce traffic congestion was dreamed up by a Nobel Prize-winning Canadian-born
economist, William Vickrey. Vickrey first pondered the puzzles of public
transportation when, in 1951, he joined a mayor’s committee to improve New York’s
finances. He was assigned the problem of pricing subways, and he noted that “users
of private cars and taxis, and perhaps also of buses, do not, by and large,
bear costs commensurate with the increment of costs that their use imposes.”
When we drive, we consider the private costs to ourselves of the time, gas, and
automobile depreciation, but we don’t usually consider the costs—the lost time—we
impose on every other driver. We don’t consider the congestion we create, and
as a result, we overuse the highways.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The natural
economists’ solution to this problem is to charge drivers for the full cost of
their commute—which means adding a fee that charges drivers for the impact that
their car imposes on the rest of the road. Vickrey followed up his core insight
in the late 1950s in a report on the Washington, D.C., bus system, in which he
first advocated charging driven for the congestion they create. Vickrey’s
insight, inspired by the city around him, is another example of self-protecting
urban innovation. Decades before E-ZPass Vickrey recommended an electronic
system for imposing these congestion charges, and he suggested that charges
rise during rush hours, when congestion is worse.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Decades of
experience have proven Vickrey right. Building more roads almost never
eliminates traffic delays, but congestion pricing does. In 1975, Singapore
adopted a simple form of congestion pricing charging motorists more for driving
in the central city. Now the system is electronic and sophisticated and keeps
that city traffic-jam free. In 2003, London adopted its own congestion charge
and also saw traffic drop significantly.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So why is
congestion pricing so rare in the United States? Because politics trumps
economics. Imposing a new fee on thousands of motorists is unpopular, and as a
result, millions of hours of valuable time are needlessly lost by drivers
stalled in traffic. Vickrey himself died of a heart attack, slumped over the
wheel of his car, traveling late at night. I’ve always imagined that he was
driving at that hour to avoid congestion.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In America,
congestion wastes billions of dollars’ worth of lost time, but its consequences
can seem even more severe in the cities of the developing world, where crowding
is more extreme and where alternative traffic options, like subways, are
typically underdeveloped. Buildings are shorter and consequently more spread
out, and that, along with terrible sidewalks, makes to pedestrian option less
practical. In cities like Mumbai, congestion can bring the business of urban
life to a standstill, which is why fighting congestion is not about
convenience; it is a fight to ensure that the city can fulfill its most basic
function of bringing people together.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">[Emphasis mine.]</span></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
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<o:p></o:p></div>Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-30782703566304454862012-03-23T01:48:00.000-04:002012-03-23T01:48:06.661-04:00The Evolution of the Cooperative Vehicle<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<!--StartFragment-->
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>Cooperative </i></span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>Vehicle Highway Systems</i> </span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">focus on
sensors, telemetrics, intelligent driver override, roadside computation,
telecommunications, emergency technologies and so on. The stress is on
technological solutions that address a problem with a large social and human
component—e.g., human safety, congestion, efficiency, and reliable
automobility.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: windowtext;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">CVHS’ goals form a virtuous circle: reduce accident counts
and severity and improve the performance and efficiency of existing
transportation infrastructure while reducing fuel use, emissions, and
congestion. These are a lot of wins.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: windowtext;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In general, when thinking about CVHS, we see two components:
vehicle and roadside infrastructure. Also key are intelligent communications
between car and roadside, many-to-many pair-wise communications between
proximate cars, and of course communication among all of these and the cloud.
But there is another critical and elusive component—the driver. I’ll return to
this. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: windowtext;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: windowtext;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">CVHS is highly related to the <i>Connected Vehicle</i>, and
sometimes the distinction get blurred in discussion. I see them as two adjacent
phases on a continuum as we equip vehicles, roadways, and communication
networks for the Connected Age of Automobility already underway. The
<i>Cooperative Vehicle</i> is focused on safety and driver assistance including driver
override, while the Connected Vehicle is focused more on driver information and
trip assistance, including infotainment and payment services. But, a portion of
the enabling fabric can be shared. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: windowtext;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: windowtext;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A key distinction is </span></span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">that many </span><i style="color: windowtext; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Cooperative</i><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> functions involve intrusive control—generally braking
and steering—when the driver is perhaps distracted or not responding
appropriately. Meanwhile, some </span><i style="color: windowtext; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Connected</i><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">
functions have the potential to contribute to the distraction problem that is
one of the motivators for the </span><i style="color: windowtext; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Cooperative</i><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">
functions in the first place.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: windowtext;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: windowtext;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">All of this
makes the human a mystery component. Will the net benefit make us safer? Will
automation make our species’ driving skills atrophy? Will anyone be able to
parallel park in 30 years?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: windowtext;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: windowtext;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A well-reported phenomena called <i>risk compensation</i> tells us that drivers tend to invest a perceived
increment in safety by driving a bit faster or a bit more aggressively. Humans
seem to have a risk budget they are eager to spend. The problem is more than
50% of the people in accidents are victims. If you count all immediate family
members to people actually in the cars the percentage of innocents is much
higher.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: windowtext;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: windowtext;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Surely, if one begins to trust that their vehicle can handle
breaking and steering, the use of infotainment systems and gadgets (Connected
or not) will be perceived as safer. And that may not be a problem in most
cases—we hope. But how good does <i>Cooperative</i>
technology have to be before <i>Connected</i>
technology will not make us less safe? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: windowtext;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: windowtext;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There are liability reasons ensuring that <i>Cooperative</i> technology will likely never
by installed as an aftermarket upgrade, unless by the original manufacturer.
And there will clearly be resistance to letting the car “take control” from a
driver. Could aftermarket warning systems that beep rather than brake or
whistle rather than steer, be the way to erode that resistance? Could aftermarket
<i>Connected</i> <i>Vehicle</i> platforms be the Trojan Horse to get fledgling <i>Cooperative</i> <i>Vehicle</i> functionality past first base? I think so.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: windowtext;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: windowtext;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We also know from experience that mandatory safety equipment
requires user acceptance, which in turn implies slow introduction and
consumer-led market penetration prior to mandate. This may be the best reason
that aftermarket <i>Connected</i> <i>Vehicle</i> technology that has at least
some <i>Cooperative</i>-like functions will
the best accelerator to <i>Cooperative
Vehicle</i> evolution.</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-54830748496809691742012-03-16T00:08:00.000-04:002012-03-16T11:13:11.290-04:00One Hour Free Parking Could be Worth Millions to Toronto<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Toronto needs a few things related to transportation. It needs more mass transit—either subway or light rail—I won’t choose sides. Toronto appears to need more parking judging by the fact that there is seldom a spot available when you want one. Or maybe it needs a different kind of parking management, because there are usually enough parking spaces in most circumstances, but they are priced to have some areas 100% full and cars waiting to take a spot and nearby areas nearly empty when they could be making money for the city.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">And Toronto needs more money.</span><br />
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Now before you set this aside in disgust at the idea of more parking in a world that is already flooded with cars, many already parked, and the rest circling around the block looking for a spot, consider that there are not enough parking spaces in some areas because they are priced wrong and there are empty spots nearby, because they are signed wrong. I assert that if we could address this, there would suddenly be plenty of parking without creating any new parking spots or lots or garages—and Toronto could take a big bite out of its deficit.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">My first target is One Hour Free Parking. There is far more of it than we use, and it could be sold if only we could manage it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Not long ago, I decided to park my car near the Greenwood subway station and take the train downtown to a meeting. Since I might be longer than 3 hours, I decided not to risk using the pay-and-display meters on the main street, Danforth, so I drove to the next street north. One-hour parking. And the next one, too. So I went up one more and finally ended up parking about 0.5 km away from the station. Because I had cruised back and forth looking for free parking I had essentially driven an extra 1.5 km while passing well over a hundred, empty, one-hour-free spaces. I figured I needed to park about three hours and did not wish to risk a $30 citation. But, I got my free spot!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">I would have been happy to pay for parking by the hour, one or two streets off of the main drag, as long as I would not be ticketed if I returned a bit later than planned. If it was a bit cheaper, as well, I’d be happier yet.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">“So what”, you might think. “Go find a GreenP lot along the Danforth to use.” I could have done that, but the two nearby lots were installed just after this. (And think of the expense to the city of keeping precious corner parking lots on main thoroughfares which could be sold and developed into commercial or residential property that generated tax revenue while all of the empty one hour free parking could used to store parked (and paying!) vehicles do not. The City is paying a huge and double cost to provide undersubscribed One Hour Free Parking. Millions every year, I’d say.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">One hour free parking has two other problems. The first is that it is very expensive to enforce. A parking officer has to pass by twice to confirm that someone is overstaying, that means that since one hour free parking is not much in demand, enforcement revenue is sporadic and will produce little or no net income for the city compared to the enforcement income available from meter violations from the pay-and-display machines on the heavily used main drag. The second problem is, because one-hour free parking is used on streets where there is somewhat less demand so that the city can hardly afford to use costly pay-and-display machines there, since revenue per machine would be very low.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">There is another solution and that is to manage on street parking in these marginal areas where enforcement is expensive and where most people need more than one hour anyway with wireless in-car parking meters that hold all the pricing rules and payment instructions internally (to keep your location 100% private). These automatically detect parking in payable areas and generate a parking bill for monthly payment. This means Toronto could allow participating motorists to pay a little less (but not free) to park a block or two away from the major streets that use pay-and-display machines. Since these spots are away from the commercial retail storefronts, cars could park there longer then the current time limit, although they would continue to pay for the duration of their stay. Toronto could even grandfather one hour free parking for the first year or two, since many people will feel it reasonable that someone willing to walk a block or two be able to park free for a few minutes to run an errand. I disagree, but that hardly matters. Such a system with its pricing rules buried inside like a smartphone app is remarkably flexible.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">And some of the money could be used for mass transit, and some of it could be used for local improvement of the streets in those residential areas.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">But the most important part is that having a place to park is something motorists want. In fact, the four most important things for motorists, as shown in parking studies, are, in order: (1) finding a parking place easily, (2) not getting a ticket, (3) having a convenient way to pay, and (4) cost. The scheme I describe satisfies all four, and would make motorists very happy. Hence this scheme, in Mayor Ford’s parlance, helps relieve the “war on cars”—all while helping with Toronto’s deficit.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">What’s important about this is that it is neither pro- nor anti-car and that is because I am neither pro- nor anti-car. What I am observing is that the parking spaces that we do have are simply not well deployed they are underpriced in some places causing them to be over demanded. And right beside those places are unusable spots that could be slightly less in price so the net of it is that drivers could be happier, the city could have more money, and cars reduce circling around so that emissions are reduced. Best of all, this scheme requires no change in current rules—it can be entirely voluntary. Any driver not interested in parking this way can simply park as they do now. Refuseniks would be better off, because there would now be more spaces in the pay-and-display areas, while their bolder brethren are better off saving a buck by parking a block or two away. It is also the case that it is much easier to spot check a vehicle using this technology then it is to use the “tire marking” methods needed to enforce one hour free parking. This is a win win win win win scheme. It can’t get much better than that.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Or can it?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">It turns out that the same technology can be used anywhere—curbside, lot, or garage. And that means that we can introduce <i>graduated</i> parking on street. Graduated parking means that instead of getting a ticket for staying past a time limit, the parking fee simply escalates slightly. This encourages turnover, gives the city money for every minute over the limit, reduces the need for enforcement and its attendant costs, and makes the entire experience of parking much more pleasant.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">And if you do not like cars, look at it this way: if others are going to use cars anyway it makes sense to charge properly for parking, to reduce the number of cars that are circling around looking for parking, and to reduce the cost of enforcement. I estimate that the current city parking enforcement team in any city can manage 2 to 4 times more parking spots with this new technology. That means that we can have much more sensible parking policies without any layoffs and without new hires. Altogether I estimate that over a five-to seven year period it is possible to put two to four times the number of parking spots under this kind of “pay-as-you-park” management (any form of parking can be managed this way) and that this can be managed with the same staff complement. That would mean that we could at least quadruple net income from parking to our city. Since much of that comes from efficiencies, the burden on drivers is very small compared to the convenience and timesaving in finding a parking spot. Win win win win win.</span></div>Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-10303736546920404802012-02-07T19:21:00.000-05:002012-02-07T19:21:06.063-05:00The war on cars, 1970<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/6833672805/in/photostream/">Eric Fischer comments</a> on this <span style="background: #FEFEFE;">ad for Motorists United, from</span> <i><span style="background: #FEFEFE;">Car Life</span></i><span style="background: #FEFEFE;">,
July, 1970: </span>“It's…[a]lso interesting that their anxieties were all about regulation of the vehicles themselves rather than allocation of street space or availability of parking.”</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfPuf7hUBbHDYJbH_xPOtxtQznKLTjV5B8VTwGcwuJbBTrH35_Pindv5j0xJ2QIq9vYAgCleY2Ykf5hWRP0Pmke8FMlbjzZZ-k9lubhSJxMJbuIs916eIdChJ_vIWyxLw9zPetrQEiX9Q/s1600/The+Do-Gooders+are+killing+your+car.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfPuf7hUBbHDYJbH_xPOtxtQznKLTjV5B8VTwGcwuJbBTrH35_Pindv5j0xJ2QIq9vYAgCleY2Ykf5hWRP0Pmke8FMlbjzZZ-k9lubhSJxMJbuIs916eIdChJ_vIWyxLw9zPetrQEiX9Q/s640/The+Do-Gooders+are+killing+your+car.jpg" width="475" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Rifling through the online comments on most newspaper articles today,
nearly 42 years later, about congestion pricing, nothing has changed. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“...anxieties are all about the evil government tracking monster rather than allocation of street space or availability of parking.” Sanity be damned. F-R-E-E-D-O-M!</span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-22199325793301640612012-02-03T09:48:00.000-05:002012-02-03T09:48:44.198-05:00Does Peak Car mean Peak Road?<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In a
recent online discussion group about congestion I posted this question:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In
the face of US reports of plateauing VMT and the increase in the average age of
our automobile fleet, it would seem that the demand for new lane miles would be
easing. Does anyone know if this is happening? Or is the lag in demand too long
to test this effect, yet? Or is the pent up demand too great for an effect to
be visible. Where can I go for such data?</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Another
participant, Todd Litman of the </span><a href="http://www.vtpi.org/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Victoria
Transportation Institute</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">, provided an insightful reply that is worth
sharing (with permission):</span></div>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That's
an interesting question, Bern. There is a growing discussion among transport
planners, particularly those involved in strategic planning, about the
implications of peaking VMT. During the last century, vehicle ownership and
travel grew steadily so it made sense to invest significant resources to
expanding roads and parking supply; there was little doubt that additional
capacity would be needed, it was simply a question of how soon. The main
indicator used to evaluate transport system performance, roadway level-of-
service, only reflects inadequate roadway supply. Transport models that
extrapolated past trends into the future were used to predict that roadways
would experience "gridlock" without future expansion.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But
per capita vehicle travel peaked in most developed countries about the year
2000, and total U.S. VMT peaked about 2007. This results from structural trends
including aging population, rising fuel prices, improvements to alternative
modes, increased urbanization, increasing health and environmental concerns,
and changing consumer preferences. The research cited below indicates that in
developed countries, motor vehicle travel is unlikely to grow much overall in
the future; there may be modest increases in VMT in areas with significant
population or industrial growth but most areas will see traffic volumes hold
steady or decline in the future.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This
has important implications for transport policy and planning. It indicates that
traffic and parking congestion will be less important problems to address than
in the past, while demand for alternatives (walking, cycling, public transit,
telework and delivery services) will increase. Congestion is a problem in many
urban areas, but it is unlikely to get much worse, and it is just one of many
transport problems, so congestion reduction is no longer the dominant transport
planning objectives. In response to the combination of these changing demands,
aging roadway infrastructure and declining fuel tax revenues, transport
agencies are placing more emphasis on system maintenance, operations and modal
diversity, and less on system expansion.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">For
more information see:</span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Phil
Goodwin (2011), "Peak Car: Evidence Indicates That Private Car Use May
Have Peaked And Be On The Decline," Urban Intelligence Network (<a href="http://www.rudi.net/node/22123">www.rudi.net/node/22123</a> ).</span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Todd
Litman (2005), “Changing Travel Demand: Implications for Transport Planning,”
ITE Journal, Vol. 76, No. 9, September, pp. 27-33; at <a href="http://www.vtpi.org/future.pdf">www.vtpi.org/future.pdf</a>.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Todd
Litman (2012), “Optimal Transport Policy For An Uncertain Future” at http://www.planetizen.com/node/54215</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">David
Metz (2010), “Saturation of Demand for Daily Travel,” Transport Reviews, Vol.
30, Is. 5, pp. 659 – 674; summary at <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1006/10060306">www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-
articles/1006/10060306</a> and <a href="http://www.eutransportghg2050.eu/cms/assets/Metz-Brussels-2-10.pdf">www.eutransportghg2050.eu/cms/assets/Metz-
Brussels-2-10.pdf</a>.</span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Adam
Millard-Ball and Lee Schipper (2010), “Are We Reaching Peak Travel? Trends in
Passenger Transport in Eight Industrialized Countries,” Transport Reviews, Vol.
30 (<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01441647.2010.518291">http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01441647.2010.518291</a>).</span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Steven
E. Polzin, Xuehao Chu and Nancy McGuckin (2011), "Exploring Changing
Travel Trends, presented at Using National Household Travel Survey Data for
Transportation Decision Making," Transportation Research Board; at <a href="http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/conferences/2011/NHTS1/Polzin2.pdf">http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/conferences/2011/NHTS1/Polzin2.pdf</a>.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Clark
Williams-Derry (2011), "Dude, Where Are My Cars?", Sightline
Institute (<a href="http://www.sightline.org/">www.sightline.org</a>); at <a href="http://daily.sightline.org/blog_series/dude-where-are-my-cars">http://daily.sightline.org/blog_series/dude-where-are-
my-cars</a>.</span></blockquote>
<!--EndFragment-->Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-55844711082757123702011-12-26T00:18:00.000-05:002011-12-26T09:24:21.449-05:00Maybe it is good that neither the US nor Canada can fix the fuel tax<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">I
write here a lot about the need to shift from fuel-tax to a pay-as-you go
road-use fees. A lot of people write about this. Recently Jack Opiola wrote some more in ITSI (“<a href="http://www.itsinternational.com/features/article.cfm?recordID=4848">Evidence buildingfor distance-based charging</a>”). <a href="http://www.itsinternational.com/features/article.cfm?recordID=4848"></a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Opiola’s point is that we
could increase acceptability by giving drivers 2 or 3 choices of methods to pay
for road use rather than encourage hostility by mandating a single technology,
namely GPS. He goes one further by saying: “the
market place would supply the necessary technology and data collection
services, certified to ensure the system works consistently. …the Government
could contract the tax collection function to private companies, with
competition driving down administrative costs. Government would provide
oversight and certification of private sector providers to ensure fairness.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://grushhour.blogspot.com/2011/02/european-vs-american-road-pricing-view.html">I agree completely</a>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">On the way to the
explanation, he points out a few things worth thinking through. I cherry-pick a
few:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“Last
month the (US) federal government announced a sizeable increase in the
corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards for new vehicles, bumping the
required average of 35.5 miles per gallon in 2016 to 54.5 miles per gallon by
2025. …this policy will have a devastating impact on highway funding if US
Congress does not take corresponding action to identify revenue not based on
fuel consumption.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“…some
cars on our streets already contain much of the technology to meet the new CAFE
standards. Fuel efficiencies of many hybrid electric vehicles are approaching
50 miles per gallon and steadily raising the fleet averages. Now entering the
marketplace are fully electric and plug-in style hybrids - Nissan's LEAF and
Chevrolet's Volt, among others. Every major automobile manufacturer is
preparing at least one electric, plug-in hybrid, or advanced hybrid model for
market entry in the next two to three years.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“These
vehicles, capable of nearing or exceeding the calculated equivalent of 100
miles per gallon, will generate little fuel tax. It is estimated the entire
fleet will need about 40% of the fuel it currently consumes, reducing tax
revenue by about two-thirds.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Increasing
the fuel tax “would create an ever-widening inequity between owners of highly
fuel efficient vehicles and those [that] pay a far heavier burden by continuing
to operate conventional cars.”<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% yellow;"></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“Alternative
funding sources must be found to maintain the health of highway systems…
Policymakers have considered replacements for the fuel tax, such as sales
taxes, registration fee increases, personal or real property taxes, income tax,
value-added tax, tolling high capacity highways, taxes on oil company profits
and others.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“But
each shifts the burden of paying for the roads from one type of user to another
or to non-users. In almost all of these cases, the proposed alternatives are
less equitable than the current system.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“The
fuel tax is based on use, but its consumption linked formula is woefully out of
date and not correctable.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">“Since
two congressional commissions on transportation funding endorsed VMT as the
most viable alternative to the fuel tax in 2008 and 2009, the US has done
little to advance the discussions.”</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The net of this is that in
the next few years the structure of road-use funding via fuel taxation will remain unchanged and this will boost sales
of alternative (non-fossil) vehicles, whereas shifting from fuel-tax to road-use fees now
would dampen those sales. This is one case where government inability to act
may have a partially-positive outcome. Although, Oregon might prove an exception.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Perhaps we should shelve the
discussions about VMT tax and Mileage-based User Fees for a few more years.
Technology will soon drain so much revenue from our highways and roads that a
future government will have little choice, anyway.</span></div>Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-50622313607338473052011-12-17T01:33:00.000-05:002011-12-17T01:39:02.231-05:00Spying on your life or saving your life?<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Over in AutoSavant you can <a href="http://www.autosavant.com/2011/10/20/spying-for-savings-progressive-snapshot/">enjoy a dose of scare mongering about a device to meter driver behavior for PAYD insurance</a>. Any device that monitors, views, films,
captures, measures, listens, collects, or sniffs data about anything humans do
seems to be fodder for phobic journalism and paranoid commenters. PAYD
insurance indeed has privacy issues.
But they are addressable.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The real reason for PAYD insurance is to distribute risk
more fairly for drivers and more manageably for insurance companies (right now
your zip code is used (among other things) to help assess your risk profile).
In addition to tentatively threatening privacy and increasing affordability for
more than 50% of drivers, PAYD insurance also enhances safety, and reduces
vehicle miles traveled (VMT).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Unfortunately, instead of discussing privacy, cost, safety
and VMT in a balanced fashion (which I would say should be about 5%, 25%, 50%
and 20% respectively, this journalist weighed these four matters at 90%, 10%,
0% and 0%. This is to do a huge disservice to his readers.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">When I read the article there were 39 comments. 54% were
against the PAYD device (stoked by the writers privacy fears), 28% were for the
device for reasons of fairness, safety or cost savings and 18% were neutral or
incoherent. Statistically speaking, these 39 commenters are somewhat smarter
than the journalist (usually only extreme opinions show up in these open
forums).</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 10pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">~~~</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Technology has been extending average life spans for many
hundreds of years. Medical advances (e.g., near-mandatory vaccination programs)
come to mind. Not long ago, seat belts were considered an invasion of privacy,
now a majority of us put them on without thinking about it. Tonight I was
stopped in a mandatory alcohol check-point. I was asked if had anything to
drink this night. Was that an unfair imposition on me? (I drink a glass of wine
once a month and had none this night.) I have been twice sniffed by <span class="st">narcotics </span><i><span style="font-style: normal;">detection dogs while in
airports. Another privacy invasion?</span></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Driving safer saves lives. About half of the victims of road
accidents were driving comparatively safely. Progressive's program may save
opt-ins a couple hundred dollars, and it also saves lives. Anyone with a family
member killed by another driver would applaud this form of insurance; many with
a family member who has killed someone in an accident might also consider this
a good idea. 15 years ago I had a brother-in-law who took his own life a few
weeks after killing someone in an auto accident.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Compare how many Americans have been entrapped in a legal matter
unrelated to road use with evidence provided by tolling data or automotive
insurance data vs how many innocent Americans are disabled or dead because of
automobile accidents.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">A similar product to Progressive’s, available in Australia,
(betterdriver dot com dot au) promises to save teen lives. Here the party
watching is the teen’s parents. Big Daddy if not Big Brother. Fewer complaints, it seems, because they are
our kids.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The key issue is NOT the metering of driving behaviour, it
is the USE of that data. There must be strong, and strongly upheld, legislation
that this data only be used for the purpose of fair insurance pricing and
safety. The readers who comment: “you are being monitored” may be right, but it
is not the monitoring that is harmful, it is the potential for abuse. We need
to address the potential for abuse, rather than reject a powerful tool for
automotive safely.</span></div>Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-26151520151392823552011-10-24T00:37:00.003-04:002011-10-24T00:54:06.552-04:00Fuel Tax vs Property Tax<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Why do we to pay two taxes
for roads?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">One of the most common
objections to VMT charging or mileage-based user fees is “I already pay (for
roads) with fuel taxes”. While I have heard or read this many hundreds of
times, I have never heard anyone complain, “I already pay (for roads) with
property taxes.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">It is interesting that we are
so very sensitive to (or aware of?) of fuel tax, but not so much to property
tax. And why do we pay two taxes for our roads, anyway?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">A <a href="http://www.uctc.net/access/35/access35_Paved_with_Good_Intentions_Fiscal_Politics_.shtml">2009 article from Access Magazine</a> explains this neatly.</span></div>
<blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: windowtext;">Early in the 20th century most
US “…cities had the technical and financial means to widen their streets,
install traffic signals, and carry out other operational fixes. But they lacked
the means to shoehorn extensive freeway systems into dense urban areas. One
problem was that the tax instruments available to local governments were not
appropriate for the task. Local governments had the authority to levy taxes and
special assessments on property and businesses, but not, for example, on fuel.
The property tax is a sensible mechanism for financing local streets and roads,
because these streets link individual land parcels to the world and help give
them value. It is thus logical for property owners to help pay for local street
construction. Freeways, however, affect the value of property across the entire
metropolitan area, not just of nearby parcels. This makes it hard to justify
special assessments on freeway-adjacent properties, since the majority of a
freeway’s benefits accrue to travelers and landowners over much larger areas.
(Indeed, being too close to a freeway can <i>lower </i>land values,
particularly for residential property.) … </span><span style="color: windowtext;">A potential solution to these problems emerged in the 1920s
with the development of the gas tax. As a way to finance freeways, gas taxes
had much to recommend them: they placed the tax burden on users of the system,
they were relatively easy to administer and collect, and they were robust.
Property tax revenues nationwide plummeted 72 percent during the Depression
years of 1930 to 1939, but fuel consumption and its associated tax revenues
proved surprisingly resilient. Except for a small dip at the beginning of the
Depression, <i>fuel consumption rose every
year until World War II</i> (emphasis mine).</span></span></div>
</blockquote>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
</div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;">So a fuel tax
was indeed a valuable innovation 100 years ago. It would remain a valuable
innovation if the purchasing power of fuel tax were consistent with the needs
of building and maintaining roads. But it is not. As fuel economy improves, as
the purchasing power of the road building and maintenance dollar shrinks, and
as we refuse to increase the fuel tax, its efficacy continues to wane. And that
is only half the problem with the fuel tax. It also does not respond to
congestion.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;">And while the
property tax is also insensitive to congestion as a pricing signal, its correlation with road use is even more tenuous than is the fuel tax. This makes it less fair than fuel tax—since a young renter who contributes to her landlord's property tax payment and who does not use a car overpays for road use.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">So we have two
taxes that are ineffective in managing demand, one of which we cannot adjust
and the other of which we seem to have minimal awareness of. While
mileage-based user fees could solve both problems given the right policy
design, we seem particularly attached to a status quo that is unable to give us
the roads we need, and that increases congestion.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Our attachment
to a tax structure that is keeping in place a very serious problem for both
inter-urban and intra-urban mobility is critically bankrupt and a huge barrier
to solving congestion and its attendant ills.</span></span></div>Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-88333114319956103502011-08-26T01:10:00.001-04:002011-10-24T02:05:18.887-04:00Collaborative Telemetrics<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">If
Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers are right in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Mine-Yours-Collaborative-Consumption/dp/0061963542">their recent book “What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption”,</a> we can expect a rise in
peer-to-peer car sharing. P2P car
sharing turns any owner of an automobile into a single-car car-rental company,
with reservation services provided online. Right now one of the US operators,
<a href="https://relayrides.com/">RelayRides</a> out of Cambridge Mass, installs technology to lock and unlock the
vehicle using a near field communication card that the renter-member keeps in
her purse meaning that key-exchange does not require owner attention. That’s a
start.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Traditional
car-share operations such as ZipCar, lower automobile ownership, reduce demand
for parking space, reduce automotive miles traveled, and likely reduce traffic
congestion in peak times. P2P car sharing offers all these things—and more. VMT
supply can be increased dramatically without investing in more vehicles, car
owners can have their neighbors make their car payments for them, it can make a
greater variety of vehicle sizes and types available to a car share renter, and
the vehicle storage depot problem mostly goes away.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">While
traditional car sharing has economic incentives for people who only need
occasional access to a vehicle, P2P carsharing has economic incentives for car
owners. This is disruptive, making it something to watch. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer_car_rental">Wikipedia lists 13 P2P car share operators</a> world-wide—with the 1<sup>st</sup>
launch in Germany in 2001. Half of these launched or are launching in 2011.
Tellingly, one of the founders of ZipCar, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Chase">Robin Chase</a>, is also the founder of
<a href="http://www.buzzcar.com/fr/content/">Buzzcar</a> a P2P service in France. I predict 100s of these will be set up in as
many cities and only after we figure out how to do it will the market pick a
handful of winners.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">The
key to P2P carsharing work is trust. You need to trust that my car will be
clean, safe and operational and I need to trust that you will respect my
property. Trusting strangers from whom you might buy something is well-managed
with online purchasing from auction sites like eBay or the used book jobbers
that trade on Amazon. If you rent your car online—as you would if you were a
car owner in a P2P car-share transaction—your reputation (well, your car's
reputation) will be gleaned from your users by the site that manages the
transaction. But what about the renter's reputation? After all, you will not
want your car to be subject to automatic speeding or red-light tickets and
parking fines. How will you know if a renter abuses your accelerator or clutch?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">There's
other things such as insurance and perhaps wanting a different rate from
someone who uses your car for two hours to drive a hundred highway miles vs
someone using the same two hours to drive just couple of miles to visit his auntie.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Telemetrics
systems can address all of this. An in-car meter that measures speed, braking,
steering could automatically establish a driver’s reputation for the car owner.
While there is no need to track the driver, “driver-style can be calculated as a
reputation factor and the car owner can decline or accept further rental
requests based on that reputation. While we are at it, the same meter can
manage distance traveled, usage-based insurance, even parking payment, bridge
or tunnel tolls, and so on.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">What
is now possible is for P2P car share operators to equip a member’s vehicle with
a meter sufficient to calculate the entire trip cost on an equitable usage
basis for automatic billing and permit the car owner to select driver style thresholds,
so that she need not be concerned with any of these matters.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.skymetercorp.com/transport-sectors/leasing.html">Collaborative Telemetrics</a> could make P2P
carsharing the “Killer App” of 21<sup>st</sup> century automobility.</span></div>Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-86451002462313828882011-07-15T11:30:00.003-04:002011-07-15T11:53:06.742-04:00Fair to the poor<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">The Greater Toronto Area has experienced a noticeable
increase in all-day conferences and hefty consulting reports about road pricing
and infrastructure funding. A decade ago it was once every few years. Now it’s
monthly. Each of these conferences and reports carry the same message–our
transportation infrastructure is inadequate, crowded and crumbling. And our
purse is empty. While this is true of large cities more often than not, Toronto
has it worse than many—Toronto’s population is growing especially rapidly and
we have not invested at the rate we should have over the past quarter century.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.bot.com/Content/NavigationMenu/Policy/VoteOntario2011/Reaching_Top_Speed.pdf"><i>Reaching Top Speed</i></a>, a June 2011 report from the Toronto Board of Trade points
out that the full bill to refurbish and operate transportation infrastructure
in the <a href="http://www.metrolinx.com/en/regionalplanning/bigmove/big_move.aspx">GTA over the next 25 years</a>—$100 billion, before overruns—is a figure 22%
greater than the <i>combined</i> cost of the
Big Dig, the Chunnel and the Three Gorges Dam.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">This same report identified several “funding tools” the top
five of which were road pricing, congestion pricing, fuel tax, regional sales
tax, and parking surcharges. These lean heavily toward fees on automotive use,
although the rebuild is heavily transit oriented. The report suggests that
these could raise $1 billion per year–or about half of the capital expense
required for the 25-year plan.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">There are important differences among the five tools listed.
The most effective for managing gridlock is congestion pricing; the least
effective is the sales tax. Congestion pricing is politically the most
incendiary; the least is likely sales taxes or parking surcharges. But the
touchiest subject is fairness. Among these, congestion or road pricing is often
said to be unfair to lower income families. But is road pricing worse than a sales tax for poorer
families?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">This <a href="http://www.uctc.net/access/36/access36-justpricing.pdf">problem was looked at recently by Lisa Schweitzer fromUSC and Brian Taylor from UCLA</a> (Access, Spring 2011), albeit in the context of
pure road funding. As we choose amongst funding tools, we should weigh their
observations.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">As a funding mechanism, sales taxes are <span style="color: windowtext;">collected pennies at a time and hidden in many transactions
making it virtually impossible to see what one is paying for roads. S</span>ales
taxes make the poorest households worse off since the people in these
households are paying something while driving little—certainly much less than
people from richer households. This makes increasing regional sales taxes to
fund roads doubly regressive.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Road use fees, which can be made fully transparent, take
money from only those that use the roads, i.e., mostly middle- and
higher-income families. Schweitzer and Taylor find that switching from tolls to
sales taxes shifts the burden from users to non-users and away from
middle-income people onto both the rich and the poor–i.e., road tolls are better
than sales taxes for the lowest-income families (although they increase
pre-existing access barriers).</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">How any of us pay for good urban transportation is a very
complex social issue—hence the burgeoning industry in conferences and
consultant reports, and the dearth of workable solutions.</span></div>
Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-67714618306663077342011-06-04T23:50:00.010-04:002011-06-09T00:58:45.217-04:00Toronto’s same old road-pricing script<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">(updated 2011.06.08)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">The past 12 days have produced a noisy buzz of articles in the Toronto Star regarding the need to use road-pricing of one sort or another to raise capital for GTHA transportation needs and to quell congestion. The basic script for the discourse this past week is identical to the script playing in every city and every country for the past 15 years <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/national/racv-backs-global-call-for-fuel-tax-switch-20110605-1fnhi.html"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(this week's example from Oz!)</span></a>:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Experts: “We need road-pricing!”</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Drivers: “ We don’t want it!”</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Politicians: “And we won’t do it!”</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Journalists: “There is no solution, the sky is falling!”</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">Repeat…</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">One exception to the above script is a <a href="http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/article/1002340--denial-on-road-tolls-needs-to-end">Star editorial</a>, presumably written by a journalist, that says: “We have no choice but to use road pricing, so get over it.” The Star is half right—the no choice part is correct. But we are not simply going to “just get over it”.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">It turns out the Experts are correct—we must deploy tolling. The Drivers are right—they really don’t want tolling. And the Politicians are telling the truth (this time)—they won’t do it. The only ones who are wrong are the journalists—because there is a solution.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">That solution involves the voluntary selection of services, privileges, rewards and discounts in exchange for behavioral changes. Think of an analogy to the Airmiles™ system, but far, far richer. This approach, already tried and proven viable in France, Holland and the United States (among others), can be accomplished using automated, self-enforcing, privacy-assured, in-car road-use meters. It is possible, given current telemetric technologies to measure where and when a vehicle is driven or parked and to calculate, using a secure on-board database, rewards and discounts based on behaviors such as eco-driving, reduction in car-use, avoidance of peak hours, use of smaller vehicles, avoidance of congested routes, etc. Rewards can include parking cash-outs, or transit passes. Parking discounts or transit passes can be provided for not moving a vehicle during peak times or in congested areas or for using an alternative vehicle. Services include traveler services and pay-as-you-drive insurance that can save drivers money while reducing congestion. Privileges can include a guarantee of no parking tickets, graduated parking access to HOT lanes, fuel-tax rebates in exchange for road-pricing and parking spot reservation via a related parking finder.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">It is possible to reward drivers based on comparative behavior. If the monthly aggregate driving behavior of several thousand drivers were established, drivers in the upper deciles could be rewarded (automatically, without disclosure of location) via discounts to their service accounts. There are literally hundreds of easy ideas such as this that a road-use metering system can automate. If a couple dozen were made available, there would be “something for everyone”. Some drivers would in fact save money, rather than pay more, as most journalists assume.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Such a system would be operated by private industry, bolstered by distributing consumer rewards from urban retailers seeking business, regulated by government to ensure equitableness, privacy and access, and (eventually) would permit switching from fuel tax to road-use fees.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">A <a href="http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/nchrp/nchrp_w161.pdf">study by RAND (October 2010) described this</a> (section 6.2.3), and <a href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/2011_rfei-drivesmart.pdf">NYCDOT currently has a RFEI asking private industry</a> how they might set this up.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">So it is possible. And it will be done. And it can start soon—this year, if someone wanted to. It just won’t be done by government mandate...<span style="color: windowtext;"><b> </b></span></span><br />
<br />
<div class=""> <a href="http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1005120--hepburn-ford-is-right-toll-roads-are-nuts"><strong>Hepburn: Ford is right, toll roads are nuts</strong></a><br />
<div class="ts-label_standard"> <div> <span class="td-author">Bob Hepburn</span> <span>June 08, 2011.</span> Tolls and congestion fees mere cash grabs on motorists with no realistic option except to drive to work.</div><div><br />
</div></div></div><div class=""> <a href="http://www.thestar.com/opinion/letters/article/1004355--pros-and-cons-of-road-tolls"><strong>Pros and cons of road tolls</strong></a><br />
<div class="ts-label_standard"> <div> <span>June 08, 2011.</span> Denial on tolls needs to end, Editorial, June 4</div><div><br />
</div></div></div><div class=""> <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1005133--cohn-legislature-united-against-road-tolls-and-carbon-taxes"><strong>Cohn: Legislature united against road tolls and carbon taxes</strong></a><br />
<div class="ts-label_standard"> <div> <span class="td-author">Martin Regg Cohn</span> <span>June 08, 2011.</span> Remember the environment? In Ontario, pollution has slipped from mainstream to slipstream.</div></div></div><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/article/1002340--denial-on-road-tolls-needs-to-end"><b>Editorial: Denial on road tolls needs to end</b></a> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;">June 04, 2011. Two authorities — one provincial and the other working for Toronto — agree road tolls are needed to pay for key public transit projects.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;"><b> </b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1002596--gta-needs-gas-hikes-road-tolls-congestion-charges-to-fund-transit-experts"><b>GTA needs gas hikes, road tolls, congestion charges to fund transit: Experts</b></a> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;">Brett Popplewell June 04, 2011. Add all these charges and this city might solve the gridlock that has Toronto moving more slowly than almost any other city in the Western world.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;"><b> </b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1002470--oslo-does-it-stockholm-does-it-london-does-it"><b>Oslo does it, Stockholm does it, London does it</b></a> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;">Brett Popplewell June 04, 2011. Congestion charging and tolled highways are inevitable for Toronto, according to Harry Kitchen, a professor of economics at Trent University. It’s just a matter of the public and the politicians accepting the reality that this city, in its current state, is grinding to a halt. Why? Because roadways are jammed...<b> </b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1002014--65-of-torontonians-say-no-to-road-tolls-72-want-bike-lanes"><b>65% of Torontonians say no to road tolls; 72% want bike lanes</b></a> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;">David Rider June 03, 2011. Torontonians strongly oppose the idea of road tolls to pay for Mayor Rob Ford’s promised Sheppard subway line, says a new opinion poll.<b> </b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="http://www.thestar.com/opinion/letters/article/999696--road-tolls-worth-considering"><b>Road tolls worth considering</b></a> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;">May 31, 2011. Road toll ‘reality check’ stirs up Toronto council, May 28<b> </b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="http://www.thestar.com/wheels/article/999979--watchdog-recommends-road-tolls-to-reduce-traffic-pollution"><b>Watchdog recommends road tolls to reduce traffic, pollution</b></a> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;">May 31, 2011. Ontario’s environmental watchdog is recommending a “serious discussion” be held on road tolls to lessen traffic and reduce greenhouse gases.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;"><b> </b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/999900--go-with-road-tolls-environment-commissioner-tells-gta"><b>Go with road tolls, Environment Commissioner tells GTA</b></a> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;">Richard J. Brennan May 31, 2011. Ontario Environment Commissioner Gord Miller is pushing for more toll roads in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area to reduce single-passenger traffic.<b> </b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/article/999742--mayor-ford-won-t-support-tolls-to-fund-sheppard-extension"><b>Mayor Ford won’t support tolls to fund Sheppard extension</b></a></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;">Daniel Dale and Paul Moloney May 30, 2011. Doug Ford, the mayor’s brother and trusted adviser, said emphatically that “road tolls are not going to happen.”<b> </b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/article/999735--james-sheppard-subway-not-now-maybe-not-ever"><b>James: Sheppard subway? Not now, maybe not ever</b></a></span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;">Royson James May 30, 2011. The Sheppard subway extension is a lost cause as NIMBY residents, council opposition and high cost conspire to kill the plan.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;"><b> </b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/article/998862--road-toll-reality-check-stirs-up-toronto-council"><b>Road toll ‘reality check’ stirs up Toronto council</b></a></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;">Madhavi Acharya-Tom Yew May 28, 2011<b> </b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/article/998593--james-ford-s-subways-will-require-tolls-and-grants"><b>James: Ford’s subways will require tolls and grants</b></a> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: windowtext;">Royson James May 28, 2011. It will likely take new road tolls and congestion charges and other revenue tools to help deliver “the biggest transit deal in North America, or perhaps the world,” says the man hired to pave the path toward the $4 billion Sheppard Subway. An exclusive report by the Star finds that new road tolls and congestion charges will be needed to deliver the $4B Sheppard subway.</span></span></div></div>Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-62709018374998721892011-05-15T23:00:00.000-04:002011-05-15T23:00:13.597-04:00Fork in the Road<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">By now you know that prices for carbon-based fuels will continue to go up more frequently and more aggressively than they will be coming down. You already appreciate that this makes the extraction of costlier and dirtier carbon fuels more likely—fuels like oil from tar sands, coal, and natural gas from fracking. Likely you also appreciate that since these fuels can only increase in costs, this is what has been making innovations in alternative vehicles and fuels more attractive for innovators and investors.<br />
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This means there are two competing ways out of the corner into which we are painted. One will impose changes in modal choices and on how and where we build and live. The other, on the kinds of cars we drive and energy we use. Hence we will soon arrive at a societal decision point that I am arbitrarily targeting for 2020, alluding to useful puns on “good vision” and “hindsight”. This is also far enough away that my predictions will be forgotten giving me some freedom from fear of retribution for my heresy.<br />
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I propose that we think about this 2020 decision point as a fork in the road called “Cars-as-we-now-know-them”. I propose that at this fork, we have two fundamental choices. Toward the Right, we have the “New Automobility”—alternate forms of energy for mobility. Regardless of whether this is biofuels, electricity, compressed air or fuel cells, motive force will increasingly originate from renewables such as solar, wind and a dozen other ways to trap the sun. This route will make cars, energy, and mobility greener, cheaper and more plentiful. We will have more cars and generate more VMT. Congestion will threaten every last spare minute, and we will have a devil of a problem to fund infrastructure. The more of us that take the Right branch, the greater our societal evolution—and the more we will need road pricing.<br />
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Toward the Left, we have the “New Modalities”—we will change our modal mix to tons more of carpooling, vanpooling, transit, biking, walking, telework and moving toward the center of dense cities. This route means changes in transit and urban livability and in health, settlement density and planning. The more of us that take the Left branch, the greater our societal revolution—and the more we will need road pricing.<br />
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I have traveled both branches of this fork in my thinking over the past nine years, first the Left branch, then the Right. That is in the permanent record. Good people line both branches. We will not make uniform choices, but perhaps we can make informed ones. The question now is: “which approach will dominate the final numbers?” <br />
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Will we turn 50% toward New Modalities and 50% toward New Automobility? Or will it be 10:1 in favor of one or the other? The evidence, I argue is in favor of the New Automobility—simply because it is the path of least resistance. Rather than moralize, just look at the mathematical imperatives of entitlement, habit, culture, innovation, investment, desire, fear and inertia. To set these things aside in favor of pure and correct systems thinking makes us worse than blinkered.<br />
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We need to explore both branches, dark or light, of the fork we are arriving at. At least as we start making these choices in the coming years, someone will have thought about their consequences. In the end, thoughtful solutions are all that can win the future back for us (or not).<br />
</span></div>Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614300246796046332.post-90734898664233048792011-04-16T10:32:00.001-04:002011-04-16T10:33:42.842-04:00Millions of Dollars in Free Parking<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I live on the east side of Toronto, a dozen blocks from the Greenwood subway entrance. Last Friday, I wanted to lunch with a friend at Islington and Bloor. To take my car would cost me about $8.00 in gas, lease, and wear. Rather than drive, it made sense to park my car a block or two away from the Greenwood station and use the subway. It would be at least as fast (it was midday), it would be cheaper given Gaddafi gas prices, I would get a couple of blocks of exercise, and I could read a book about traffic congestion (a personal obsession) on the train.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Four superb and completely selfish reasons.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Pleased with my plan, I drove off. When I got near the Greenwood station, the nearest street was marked one-hour parking. Made sense — can’t have tons of folks like me crowding out these local residents. I went North to the next street. One-hour parking. And the next one, too. So I went up one more and finally ended up parking four blocks north of the Coxwell station in the wrong direction. I had in essence “cruised” an extra 1.5 km looking for free parking while passing well over 100 empty one-hour spaces — I figured I needed three hours in total and did not wish to risk a $30 ticket.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">These one-hour spaces, on all the residential streets three or four blocks on either side of our subway lines—and around other major facilities that are either poorly or expensively served by parking lots (the East Toronto hospital is one example)—form radii of parking spaces constrained to one-hour parking to prevent abuse. Makes sense. Or does it?</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The great majority of these one-hour spaces remain empty after the residents leave for work and until they return home. If left unmanaged, they would be filled by freeloaders— such as me—who would leave their car in front of a stranger’s house and take public transportation to save $10 or $20 in downtown parking fees. One can argue that having people who live a couple of kilometers from a subway station use one of these residential areas and take subway rather than drive downtown (I know many who do this) would do three things: (1) reduce vehicle kilometers traveled for all such commute trips; (2) put more riders on the subway; and (3) raise revenue to help maintain the streets and sidewalks of those residential areas—thereby reducing the property-tax demand for those residents.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I would have been happy to pay $.50 or $.75 an hour for a spot a block away from Greenwood—more if the weather was crappy. The city has an opportunity here, to manage those spaces for the benefit of the residents living there, and for the benefit of Torontonians who live less close to the subway. Benefits include: increased transit use, lower emissions, less congestion, saving money for drivers, reducing property tax demands for the residents affected. The only losers in this are the downtown parking garages. But if the scheme I am about to describe were operated by Toronto Parking Authority’s GreenP, then the TPA would not need to lose a nickel.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="color: #e69138; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">How to do it</span></b></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In order to execute such a scheme, participating vehicles must be self-metered and self-enforced. The reason is the city can ill afford to add new curbside parking meters or new signage , or a new army of parking enforcement officers. As it is now, these one-hour parking areas must be visited twice to apply tire-marking enforcement methods—a very expensive matter—which leads to a strategy of occasional spot-enforcement anyway (I get ticketed maybe once in ten for violating these restrictions).</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Such self-managed meters already exist. Using a new technology called financial-grade GPS, they use a completely private method of determining the correct parking fee based on an internal parking “price-map”. Each meter is unique to a participating vehicle, pays parking monthly either on a debit or credit bases and never reveals the location of the vehicle to any party other than the driver. (There is a 100% driver-private way for the parking operator to audit the system—no person can get to know where a spouse is parked since location data does not leave the vehicle).</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">So a commuter who wished to park in one of these areas would affix a meter, which is the size of smartphone, on her windshield behind the rearview mirror. A small indicator lamp shows that the meter is working so that a parking enforcement officer can safely ignore any legally parked vehicle (blocking driveways and fire-hydrants are citable matters, of course). The absence of a lit indicator lamp that shows a device that is tampered or nonoperational, and such vehicles would receive citations exactly as though they had no meter—no need to get Draconian over tampering a device you volunteered to put in your own vehicle!</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Parking officers who enforce these one-hour free parking areas would do exactly what they always do, while simply ignoring any correctly parked vehicle with a correctly flashing indicator lamp.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Participating commuters may prepay or post pay as the city may prefer. In fact both could be offered.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Lest this appear somewhat complicated for a few million dollars and a few hundred thousand parking spots that may be 20% or 30% utilized, consider that this same technology can manage residential parking reducing the fees for residents who may park less on their streets when they travel or when they put their car in their driveway or who may agree pay to park on another residential street to visit late or overnight. Consider that the same technology can manage any street parking—later on. Consider that any participating commuter who drives a hybrid for all electric vehicle could be given a 20% discount when using Toronto Parking Authorities facilities (the technology works for garages as well).</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">But the most powerful single value for self-enforced time and place-based parking meters is the management innovation of Dave Hill (until recently Chief Operating Officer, Winnipeg Parking Authority). Calling it “Graduated Parking”, he set up a pilot that permitted the use of on-street parking to extend beyond the initial two-hour limit of participating parkers who were willing to pay an increasing fee for each 15-minute parking time slice. This method even permits the first hour to be free, if the City wishes to grandfather this privilege.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">With prices appropriately designed, parkers who stay beyond a normal one, two or three hour limit will pay a slightly heftier fee for the extra time, but being self enforced will require no citation. This permits the city’s parking enforcement staff to manage more square miles of onstreet parking with the same staff contingent while reducing city court costs and increasing revenues—revenues that are needed for our streets and sidewalks...</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">...revenues that can help keep a lid on Toronto residential property taxes</span><span style="font-size: small;">—</span><span style="font-size: small;">which is in line with Mayor Ford’s promise to hold the line on property taxes.</span></div>Bern Grushhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484717588261701565noreply@blogger.com2