Vehicular manslaughter

The present of autonomous vehicles is replicating the past of the automobile: Toys of the rich, released onto the street,without regulation and limitation, killing people. And leaving the survivors without legal recourse.

Funny, if I accidentally kill someone with a hammer, it's manslaughter. But if I accidentally kill someone with a car, it's not. That's not by accident--laws were changed to hold drivers harmless. And today, laws are being changed to hold autonomous vehicles harmless.

This is contrary to every human idea of justice. You can go back 5000 years, to Babylon and Ur, and read the CLAY TABLETS of laws, saying if your horse ran down someones child, you are responsible for it. Ownership implies control, control implies responsibility.

Some will argue that car crashes are accidents--unforseeable, unpreventable mishaps.  You know what causes most crashes? SPEED. I've looked at the accident statistics, and the number of times that the officer cites speed as one of the causal factors runs about 75% of the time. (Most of the rest of the time being 'weather', which is another way of saying someone was driving too fast for the roadway conditions). So it's not an accident--it's reckless behavior on the part of drivers. Yet everyone speeds, so speeding seems reasonable. Everybody does it. But it contributes to people dying as much or more than drunk driving does.

Personally, I blame the built environment. I find myself speeding all the time. Because the roads are built for it. Long, straight roads, with wide lines, clear sight lines. All an accident, a misapplication of design guidelines for rural highways to urban streets, when cities coveted the enormous subsidy the Federal government was providing for highways (90% of the cost--you spend $1, and the Feds give you $9).

Uber as Transit costs much more than Transit

Somebody tried it. A suburban muni with suburban muni problems (low density residential, poorly connected street network, distributed destinations, etc)

BUT

The article notes

Since the introduction of ride-sharing companies such as Uber, transit use has fallen in major American cities nearly 2%, and those losses are cumulative: since Uber first started in San Francisco in 2010, bus ridership has dropped by more than 12%.

If you weren't aware, transit service in San Francisco is not actually all the great. There is BART (flabby and run down), and Muni Metro, but most of the action is on buses. Which run on narrow streets, in mixed traffic. So the buses are slow, and unreliable. Which is what made UBER viable (and attractive) in the first place.

UBER is going to destroy all the low-quality bus routes. In San Francisco, and everywhere. The productivity (riders per route mile) for such routes is already low. If it drops a bit lower, then the service gets cut to lower frequency. And so fewer people ride it, in the classic transit death spiral. The only stuff that is going to be immune to this are the high-quality service, the bus routes good enough to attract bus riders. A frequent network route.

So my vision is this: A limited route network (about 1 mile between lines), running at very high frequencies. And UBER to fill in the gaps, with a subsidy based on distance from a frequent network stop. People nearby continue to have an incentive to walk to the stop, people far away can still get their. (With some fudge factor for the disabled/elderly). 

Transit grids

I know I'm a bit late to the party, but today it hit me: How a 'polar grid' can be expanded into a frequent network. It's simple: rather than the center being a point, it becomes a line, a very high frequency transit spine. And while it's not as central as a single point, it's much larger.

Think of it this way: The point stretches into a line

The point of a central connection point is to bring all the routes together, to facilitate transfers between the routes. If you think that the point is to provide service to that point (and nearby district, you are missing the point of a network: That the combination of links is greater than the sum of the parts.

Transit Maps

Transit maps really need to be done at two scales-- a diagrammatic 'system map', and a scaled 'station area map'. Trying to do both with a single image has serious problems for either purpose.

Soapbox a bit on VMT

To soapbox a bit on VMT: VMT is not a measure of transportation demand. It's a measure of transportation consumption, like gasoline. Vehicle miles traveled means mileage on your car, time lost in congestion, and wear and tear on the road.

It's been used for a long time because it's an easy metric to interpret. You invest in places where that investment is likely to be used.  But while that make sense when you are the Bureau of Public Roads in 1956, trying to decide which highway to pave next, it's less useful today.

Because most of the VMT today isn't on rural highways. It's on urban roads. And urban roads are different than rural highways--they aren't 'corridors' but networks (pfah to 'corridor studies' everywhere). All the roads interconnect, and there are multiple pathways between two different points. And in a network, ideally, you want people to take the shortest point between two routes. Because every mile on the network is road capacity consumed, and pollution generated. But that never happens, because we have freeways, which are much much faster than surface streets. And so there is always the temptation to detour to the freeway, drive along the freeway, and then drive back to where you wanted to go. And which you pick all depends on how fast the freeway is compared to the surface streets.

There is an entire field of modeling, known as transportation demand modeling, designed to overcome the limitations of corridor studies. Millions of dollars every year go into developing, maintaining and using these models, designed to answer the question of WHICH corridor traffic will use to get between two points. (Or combination of corridors, or combination of streets, or series of network segments, etc). All in order to best predict which route is going to be most crowded in 10 years, so they can get a jump on things.

There is a fundamental shift there--from providing connectivity between places (rural highways) to make places more accessible to one another, to ensuring mobility between places (urban highways).

Here is the fundamental of urban economics: There is an equilibrium between land costs and transportation costs. Anything you do to change the cost of land or the cost of transportation shifts that equilibrium. But nothing can change the fact that there is an equilibrium. Lower transport costs, and you lower land costs. But as transport costs rise (traffic, tolls, etc), land costs rise as well.

But here is the rub in urban transportation: The cost of each increment of speed improvement isn't linear. Every increment costs more. The second lane costs more the first. The 8th lane costs more than the 4th. Because the first increment is always built using the easiest/cheapest way. So that's used up, and the second increment has to make do with the second best bit of right of way: The part that requires demolishing a whole house, digging deeper into the edge of the hill.

But I've strayed from the topic at hand: Soapboxing about VMT. VMT is a cost of travel. For corridors, it's a reasonable way to allocate funds. For urban networks, it's silly: The most VMT doesn't necessarily indicate the best (most direct) route between places--just the fastest. And so we keep dumping money into congested routes, hoping they will get better. But they never do. The fastest route is still the fastest route, and if you make it a little bit better, more people use it. The scientific name for it is 'induced demand', as people divert from other corridors, other times, and other modes of travel.

Now, let's talk about urban area VMT? Is SLC the best, if we have the most VMT? Or the most VMT per capita? Or the most VMT/GDP? NO. Exactly, the opposite, actually. VMT/capita is a measure of how much the average person HAS to drive (HAS to pay) to get done the things they want to do. And VMT/GDP is a a measure of how much transportation (as an economic input) that has to be consumed per unit of GDP. It's like hours of labor: The amount of resource that must be consumed per unit of output. Economists have a term for that: "Labor productivity".  How much labor is required to make a dollar worth of value? HINT: a high number is not a good thing--it's the sort of thing that characterizes sub-Saharan Africa, or under-industrialized countries. They lack all the things that makes labor efficient: Tools, machines, training, education. So high VMT/GDP is a bad thing. It means the regional economy (the economy of the urbanized area) is inefficient.

So when the DOT sees VMT on a road going up, they feel like they should dump some money there. But when you add up all the VMT on all the roads, that's a cost. So when the DOT dumps money where there is VMT (to create more VMT), it's not actually a good thing. (Nor does it actually make your commuter any shorter--remember that the best/fastest route is still the best/fastest route, and if you make it faster, more people will take it, until it gets worse, and is no longer the best route).











 simple metric: What's a good place to put transportation dollars? Where people