Mobility

Correcting Misconceptions about Autonomous Vehicles: Reason Magazine Edition

by Marc Scribner on May 10, 2013 · 4 comments

in Features, Mobility, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Privacy, Regulation

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In the June issue of Reason, one of my favorite publications, Greg Beato has an article discussing the public policy implications of autonomous vehicles, such as Google’s Self-Driving Car. While I appreciate libertarians (being one myself) taking this technology seriously, Beato makes a number of questionable assumptions and outright factual errors in the piece. Here’s my quick attempt to address some of them.

Beato begins with obligatory Google-bashing common among techies, who seem to either love Google or despise it. (This is probably too simplistic, but this is how it looks like to a Silicon Valley outsider.) The legal issues with respect to Google’s collection of unprotected Wi-Fi data are complicated from a libertarian perspective, those related to Google’s settlement with the FTC “for bypassing privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser,” as Beato puts it, are not. No one’s privacy was ever violated. All Google was guilty of, as technology policy and privacy analysts here at CEI noted at the time, was

failing to realize a software tweak by Apple rendered one of Google’s help pages inaccurate. There is no evidence that any users were “taken in” or harmed by this inaccurate help page, nor does the FTC allege that Google knew or should’ve known that its help page was wrong. A four-commissioner FTC majority even admitted that Google’s alleged wrongdoing didn’t last very long or earn the company much money.

This is hardly the privacy-invading sin Beato implies it was, but he is obviously setting the stage for his arguments for additional public skepticism of autonomous vehicle technology.

But much of the beginning of the article focuses on the huge potential benefits of vehicle automation, which are large and which we at CEI have highlighted in the past. But at the halfway point, Beato drops this:

But is everyone really so eager to see the automobile, which stands as one of history’s great amplifiers of personal autonomy and liberty, evolve into a giant tracking device controlled by a $250 billion corporation that makes its money through an increasingly intimate and obtrusive knowledge of its customers?

Beato is correct that the automobile is one of the great technological liberators of mankind from the time-consuming drudgery that was previously associated with personal mobility. But the implication that Google is intent on destroying privacy protections by deploying a mobility-enhancing technology is over the top. Autonomous vehicle users in the future, just like users of any digital technology that transmits telemetric data, will be opting in. Google and other potential providers, in turn, will likely be responsive to privacy concerns. The real concern is the ability of law enforcement and other government bodies to access this private information.

But Beato instead makes questionable assumptions regarding technology that is not yet available to consumers, always a dangerous tack to take. For instance, Beato claims, “Even if it were possible to operate the car in some kind of ‘manual’ mode, you would likely still be sending information back to headquarters.” “Even if”? “Likely”? As far as the ability to operate a fully autonomous vehicle manually (i.e., not in autonomous mode), this will be standard. In fact, more than one of the four (not three, as Beato incorrectly states later in the article; they are Nevada, Florida, California, and Washington, D.C.) jurisdictions that recognize the legality of these vehicles (not where they are legalized – more on this in a moment) explicitly requires this feature.

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Government’s Chinatown Bus Shutdowns Based on “Statistical Malpractice”

by Marc Scribner on May 9, 2013 · 0 comments

in Mobility, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

Reason’s Jim Epstein has an article up that does a nice job debunking a National Transportation Safety Board study, prompted by a 2011 bus crash in the Bronx that killed 15 people, that led the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to shut down a number of supposedly unsafe small bus companies:

In 1997, Chinese-born entrepreneurs began regularly scheduled long-distance bus services that picked up passengers on the street. Tickets were priced so low that it was hard to figure how the operators could be breaking even, much less making a profit. Faced with declining market share, Greyhound and Peter Pan imitated the Chinatown model by teaming up to create a new venture called BoltBus. Then Coach USA got into the game with Megabus. Today, “curbside” buses—lines that begin and end their routes at the sidewalk as opposed to a traditional station—make up the fastest growing form of intercity travel in the U.S.

But over the past two years, the government has forced 27 bus companies based in Chinatown to close. The regulatory clampdown was fueled by a government study that found curbside carriers were disproportionately killing their passengers. Released by the National Transportation Safety Board, a federal agency, the study concluded that curbside bus companies were “seven times” more likely to be involved in an accident with at least one fatality than conventional bus operators. That finding was reported by The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Businessweek, USA Today, the New York Daily News, WNYC, and Reuters, among others. Although the study did not single out Chinatown bus companies the headline in Businessweek read, “Chinatown Buses Death Rate Said Seven Times That of Others.”

The study is bogus. Not only is the “seven times” finding incorrect, the entire report is a mangle of inaccurate charts and numbers that tell us virtually nothing meaningful about bus safety. There’s no evidence that curbside or Chinatown buses are any less safe than any other kind of bus.

How did the study authors figure curbside bus companies are “seven times” more prone to fatal accidents? For starters, they counted 37 accidents during the study period involving curbside buses in which there was at least one fatality. When I rebuilt the study data and contacted the companies involved, I found that, in 30 of those 37 accidents, curbside buses were not involved. In fact, 24 of those 30 misclassified cases involved Greyhound’s conventional bus fleet. (Greyhound’s curbside subsidiary BoltBus had no fatal accidents during the study period.)

The National Transportation Safety Board denied my requests for the study data, even though it was a taxpayer-funded report with an impact on policy. After my Freedom of Information Act request also failed to return the information following a six-month wait, I began reconstructing the study data from other sources.

Proceeding on the time-honored hunch that people who are hiding something have reason to do so, I generated a list of the 37 fatal crashes using a database obtained from a federal contractor that collects nationwide accident data. I analyzed that data with help of Aaron Brown, a quantitative analyst with the hedge fund AQR Capital Management. Brown was the first to point out major flaws in the NTSB’s methodology in an article published by Minyanville.com, accusing the study authors of “statistical malpractice.” I also consulted with Ed George, a professor of statistics and department chair at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school, who examined the study for the purposes of this article.

“When I first read the NTSB report, I thought this is just terrible statistics,” says Brown. “But it goes way beyond that. It’s almost as if someone took some random data and shook it together.”

Read the whole thing over at Reason for an overview of the NTSB’s incredibly sloppy study methodology. Cato’s Randal “The Antiplanner” O’Toole has more.

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Jerry Brown’s Legacy Train Wreck

by Charles Katebi on April 30, 2013 · 2 comments

in Economy, Features, Mobility, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere

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California Governor Jerry Brown, along with an entourage of high-profile business and financial leaders from the Golden State, recently traveled to China on a trade tour. The agenda included government and private sector partnerships in electric vehicle production, trash-to-electricity technology, and green energy research and development.

But the tour’s main purpose centered on garnering Chinese financial interest in what Jerry Brown hopes to be his defining legacy: high-speed rail for California. (Embarrassingly for Brown, China indicted its former top rail official on corruption charges during the governor’s junket.) China is currently sitting on $3.4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves. Traditionally, these have been invested in foreign government bonds. But in recent years, China has moved to diversify its holdings away from government bonds—which have been yielding historically low interest rates—and into more lucrative brick and mortar assets. Needless to say, the China’s banks and sovereign wealth funds would be fools to invest in Jerry Brown’s white elephant for several reasons.

First, the project’s estimated costs are ballooning before construction has even begun. Since a statewide ballot initiative in 2008 authorized the creation of a high-speed rail network, projected construction costs for the entire endeavor have ballooned from $34 billion. In a revised business plan published in 2011, the California High-Speed Rail Authority estimates construction will now cost $98 billion to $117 billion, and the estimated completion date of the full first section was pushed back by 13 years. In 2012, the rail authority claimed it found $30 billion in estimated savings, primarily by abandoning the initial full-build plan that would have required completely dedicated and electrified infrastructure and moving toward a “blended” model. Basically, this means the initial system will not be true 21st century high-speed rail, in that it will share tracks with electrified mass transit and trains relying on diesel motive power. The downward cost estimates are also the result of modified inflation projections that assume rates over the course of construction will be lower than previously assumed. These are the estimates before a single track has been laid.

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Why FAA’s Child Seat Campaign Is Deadly

by Adam Sandberg on April 22, 2013 · 9 comments

in Features, Mobility, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

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Federal law allows airline passengers with children under the age of two to travel with their children on their laps. This option, which has existed since the 1950s, has been under attack for quite some time by various agencies and consumer protection advocacy groups. These opponents claim that a lap-seated child is not afforded the same safety as other passengers, and may risk injuring or killing himself or other passengers in the event of strong turbulence or a crash. There are a very small number of plane crashes in which a lap-seated child died and in which the evidence suggests that he might have survived in a Child Restraint Seat (CRS). Nonetheless, requiring all children to be strapped in on an airplane is not a particularly good idea. As it turns out, CRS in airplanes would raise the cost of air travel for families with toddlers, making some of them travel in ways that pose a much larger threat.

Back in the 1990s, when FAA proposed mandating the use of CRS in airplanes, several researchers showed that this could result in another 13 to 42 added fatalities over 10 years in highway accidents. Since the CRS requirement would force families traveling with a child to purchase a ticket for an extra seat, the increased cost would make some travelers drive their cars instead. This, however, would make them subject to the risks of accidents on America’s highways. Because air travel is generally much safer than car travel, FAA withdrew its proposed regulation in 2005.

These findings where confirmed by FAA in 2011, when it concluded that requiring the use of CRS would increase total transportation deaths by 72 deaths over 10 years and by 115over 15 years.

Allowing toddlers to fly on their parent’s lap is therefore quite a good idea.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) opposes giving parents this option, and it criticized FAA in a not-very-persuasive 2004 study. The option is also opposed by the Association of Flight Attendants. Lap babies, however, are probably not the flight attendant’s favorite passengers. My guess is that they’d like to see babies on planes not only in a seat of their own, but bound and gagged.

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Amtrak And The Progressive Sleight Of Hand

by Charles Katebi on April 19, 2013 · 7 comments

in Bailout Watch, Mobility, Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

Progressives have always assumed that if something is good, it must be provided through coercive force by a central government. This is illustrated in progressive support for continuing large Amtrak subsidies. Various liberal policy outfits including the Brookings Institution and the Center for American Progress have been recently celebrating the mild uptick in the government-subsidized passenger railroad’s ridership levels. The train served a record 32.1 million passengers in 2012, a 55-percent increase since 1997. In earlier times, liberal advocates would have congratulated themselves on the success of a government program’s drive to self-sufficiency and move to let it fend for itself in the private sector, in the same way federally controlled Conrail was privatized and later sold off to CSX and Norfolk Southern. But this doesn’t cut it for today’s progressives, who appear to believe Amtrak’s recent uptick in ridership is reason for increasing federal subsidies. This is because they are well aware that Amtrak’s supposed success is largely a mirage.

The rise in ridership appears impressive, until one realizes that 1997 was a severe low-point for train travel. If measuring Amtrak’s total passenger miles starting in 1991, its increase over the past 22 years is a pathetic 8 percent. Its condition looks even worse when considering that population growth has increased over this period by 25 percent, pushing Amtrak’s share of intercity passenger travel down from 0.45 to 0.36 percent. Passenger rail is alone in the dismal state of its ridership. Despite the airline industry’s financial instability, not to mention the costs incurred due to the September 11 attacks and the TSA, airline ridership increased by 68 percent. Even intercity buses carry three times more passenger miles than Amtrak does, while the vast majority of intercity travel is made by private automobile.

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Railroading The Railroads

by Charles Katebi on April 12, 2013

in Mobility, Regulation

In recent years, members of Congress have worked with various interest groups for the purpose of imposing new economic regulations on the freight rail industry. This action has been partly led by concerns over the scale of consolidation that has occurred in recent years.

The consolidation of this industry is the end result of gains in efficiency and productivity that have come about from railroads having greater freedom to adjust their behavior to cater to the needs of their shippers. Prior to deregulation, a regulatory board called the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) had veto authority over most major decisions of freight carriers. The ICC forced firms to maintain service in unprofitable regions, imposed rate ceilings, and bizarrely also required railroads to keep their shipping rates artificially high    Needless to say, railroads under this regulatory regime lacked the revenue or the incentives necessary to maintain healthy railway networks.

With the freedom that came with deregulation, carriers cut waste by discontinuing unprofitable lines and poured cash—more than $500 billion since the enactment of 1980’s Staggers Rail Act—into upgrading and expanding infrastructure in order to cater to the greatest number of shippers at the highest level of quality. According to the Association of American Railroads, as of June 2012, inflation-adjusted rates charged to shippers have dropped by 45 percent since the Staggers Act. Larger carriers that could exploit their economies of scale were able to use their size to charge the lowest rates.

Many are now calling for new regulations to mitigate the perceived harm that post-deregulation railroad consolidation has imposed on shippers. Unlike most sectors, railroads currently retain limited exemptions from antitrust law. Some shippers only have access to only a single carrier with which to transport their products. Critics of the status-quo are now accusing large railroads of abusing their market power to charge excessively higher rates to shippers that do not have any viable alternative to doing business with them. Their proof is in the slight increase in shipping rates that has come about since 2004. In addition, the three large Class I publicly traded carriers (BNSF is wholly owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway) recently reported profit margins exceeding 15 percent.

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Incentives Matter, Even For Transportation

by Charles Katebi on April 2, 2013

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Mobility, Regulation

CEI’s Marc Scribner previously commented on how advocates for greater investment in transportation infrastructure frequently disregard the infrastructure measure that really matters — the rate of return on investment. Supporters of greater federal involvement in the provision of roads and transit continue to view these productive assets as utilities. If only they were properly funded, they say, the American public could once again enjoy a world-class travel experience. Even if the federal government threw trillions of dollars into the inefficient bureaucracy that distributes funding for transportation improvements and expansions, the nation’s population will continue to put pressure on our transportation networks in the future.

Marc and others have observed that this congested state of affairs offers an opportunity: if such high demand for motorways carried a price, these assets could be more effectively managed by the private-sector in providing the infrastructure for millions of commuters, but at a fraction of what is currently being paid. While attention has recently been placed on how much of the motorways’ congestion problems lies in their status as free public commons, the same vacuum of incentives for investment and maintenance plague our country’s ports and airports as well.

When paying for long-term investments, airports issue tax-exempt bonds. Because airports lock in long-term fixed costs, they take measures to lock in fixed incomes by forcing airlines into rental contracts for runway space for 25 to 30 years. All else being equal, no rational business would lock themselves into contracts of such duration. Unfortunately, state and local government in the U.S. hold a monopoly on the provision of runways, barring private airports from offering more reasonable terms to carriers. Airlines have no choice but to sign on to these generation-long contracts.

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CEI Podcast For March 28, 2013: The TSA’s Illegal Body Scanners

by Ryan Young on March 28, 2013

in Mobility, Podcast, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

Have a listen here.

The TSA’s controversial full-body scanners were implemented illegally, since the TSA never put them through the required comment-and-review rulemaking process. Despite a court order, the TSA is still dragging its feet on complying with the law. Fellow in Land-use and Transportation Studies Marc Scribner has the latest developments in the case.

Sorry, Progressives, But The ASCE Infrastructure Grade Boost Wasn’t The Result Of Obama’s “Stimulus”

by Marc Scribner on March 20, 2013 · 1 comment

in Features, Mobility, Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

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I am generally very skeptical of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ (ASCE) “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure,” as this self-interested group 1) gives the U.S. failing or near-failing grades, and 2) has a strong incentive to hype the “crumbling infrastructure” line since construction and maintenance — often with taxpayer dollars — is how their members put food on the table. Cato’s Chris Edwards and The Washington Post‘s Brad Plumer both highlight this fact. This year, ASCE gave America an infrastructure GPA of D+, an improvement over 2009′s D grade.

Ideological boosters for trillions of dollars in new federal infrastructure spending often prefer to ignore realities. Streetsblog’s Tanya Snyder, with whom I often completely disagree but who is generally a thoughtful Smart Growth advocate, highlights some of the ASCE report’s limitations. After all, these civil engineers constantly complain about not spending enough, but rarely do they focus on maximizing return on investment.

Now, Snyder and the rest of the anti-car, forced density gang don’t really care about return on investment (at least not in real measures of network efficiency) — but they do care a lot about where the money is going, specifically to ideologically preferred low-value projects like streetcars and bike trails. So, while I think this group of advocates is completely lost in the clouds, at least there’s a logical path you can follow to reach their incorrect conclusions.

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Will Regulators Fail To Learn From The Past Mistakes Of U.S. Railroad Regulation?

by Marc Scribner on March 12, 2013 · 2 comments

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Features, Mobility, Regulation

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The history of U.S. railroads provides an interesting case study on federal regulation. They were the first sector of the economy to come under heavy regulatory control and nearly went extinct because of it. Following enactment of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887 — which created the Interstate Commerce Commission — Progressive movement technocrats, populist farmers, and shipping interests demanded more and more regulation, often with the support of large segments of the railroad industry. Several decades took their toll, and by World War I, excessive regulation of railroads caused massive inefficiencies and soon led President Woodrow Wilson to nationalize the entire industry for the remainder of the war.

But industry conditions following de-nationalization were not much better. Time and time again, the only perceived solution to problems caused by failed regulation was more, not less, regulatory intervention. It is this dynamic I examine in my new study on railroad regulation, “Slow Train Coming? Misguided Economic Regulation of U.S. Railroads, Then and Now.”

Eventually, conditions got so bad in the railroad industry that it looked like it could not be saved. Following the 1970 bankruptcy of the Penn Central Railroad, the largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history until it was eclipsed by Enron in 2001, fears of outright and permanent nationalization of the railroads began to grow. It was only then that policy makers began to seriously advocate for deregulatory policies. This culminated in the Staggers Rail Act of 1980, which largely deregulated the industry. Today, more than 30 years later, the railroads are booming. Shippers and consumers have enjoyed a 45-percent decline in average inflation-adjusted freight rates while the railroads have seen a more than 400-percent increase in rail employee productivity. This renewed prosperity has allowed railroads to invest heavily back into their own networks, to the tune of $500 billion since 1980.

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