Tag Archives: driving

Illinois gas tax receipts down $380 million between 2007 and 2014

Posted on by

Going green for transportation is good but it does hurt gas tax receipts:

In 2007, Illinois collected $1.59 billion in gas tax receipts, according to a Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning analysis of Illinois Department of Transportation data adjusted to 2014 dollars. In 2013, that had ticked down 24 percent, to $1.21 billion, adjusted to 2014 dollars.

One reason: People are driving less. Vehicle miles driven per capita on Illinois roads has fallen 6.5 percent since its peak in 2004, according to Federal Highway Administration and Census Bureau data. The recession was a factor, but studies suggest that the change in driving habits is likely to stick, particularly among younger people who socialize via technology rather than driving.

Those who do drive also are using less gasoline. So far, government analysts say that’s not a huge factor in driving down gas tax revenue. But with new government standards expected to boost average fuel efficiency of new vehicles from 29.7 miles per gallon to 49.6 miles per gallon in 2025, such improvements in fuel efficiencies are expected to increasingly tamp down gas tax revenue.

At the same time, more people are turning to vehicles fueled by electricity or natural gas or are opting for other forms of transportation. Nationwide, bike commuting grew 61 percent from 2000 to 2012.

Chicago more than doubled its rate of bicycle commuting from 2000 to 2012, according to the Census Bureau. Half a percent biked in 2000 versus 1.3 percent in 2012…

The changes in how people are traveling is not good news for Illinois’ crumbling infrastructure. Illinois received a C- rating on the 2014 infrastructure report card from the American Society of Civil Engineers. For roads, the state got a D+, with the society claiming that 42 percent of Illinois’ major roads are in “poor or mediocre condition.”

Taxing gasoline is not a “sin tax” in the same way as taxing cigarettes but the concept is the same: to ensure a steady flow of revenue, consumption has to stay the same (and even then inflation eats away at this) or increase.

I haven’t heard much lately about taxes based on miles-driven rather than gas consumption. But, the article notes that it appears Congress isn’t going to address the issue so we may end up with a bunch of different regulations as states and municipalities look for ways to replenish these funds.

Experts: cars in the near future won’t have mirrors, pedals, steering wheels…

Posted on by

A survey of over 200 experts suggests driverless cars of the next few decades will be missing some now-common features:

By 2030, most new cars will be made without rearview mirrors, horns, or emergency brakes. By 2035, they won’t have steering wheels or acceleration and brake pedals. They won’t need any of these things because they will be driving themselves…

The shift to cars without steering wheels and pedals will be revolutionary. It’s one thing to get a driver to let go of the wheel on long highway drives or a boring commute. It’s quite another to put him in a car that he can never drive, even if he wants to.

The change is inevitable, says Alberto Broggi, a professor of computing engineering at the University of Parma and an IEEE fellow. Cars that don’t need human drivers anymore will shed parts made for human control. “There’s nothing you can do about that.” The change will free auto design from the rules that have constrained it for a century. (Only Google has publicly addressed the idea, with a prototype it plans to start testing on public roads this fall.)

This all makes sense if the cars drive themselves but it could be quite a change. Will it really free up designers to create something different than what we have now or will the basic shape remain the same with an altered interior? There is a lot of potential here to create something that doesn’t look like a car as we know it.

Statistical anomalies show problems with Chicago’s red light cameras

Posted on by

There has been a lot of fallout from the Chicago Tribune‘s report on problems with Chicago’s red light cameras. And the smoking gun was the improbable spikes in tickets handed out on single days or in short stretches:

From April 29 to June 19, 2011, one of the two cameras at Wague’s West Pullman intersection tagged drivers for 1,717 red light violations. That was more violations in 52 days than the camera captured in the previous year and a half…

On the Near West Side, the corner of North Ashland Avenue and West Madison Street generated 949 tickets in a 17-day period beginning June 23, 2013. That is a rate of about 56 tickets per day. In the previous two years, that camera on Ashland averaged 1.3 tickets per day…

City officials insisted the city has not changed its enforcement practices. They also said they have no records indicating camera malfunctions or adjustments that would have affected the volume of tickets.

The lack of records is significant, because Redflex was required to document any time the operation of a camera was disrupted for more than a day, as well as work “that will affect incident volume” — in other words, adjustments or repairs that could increase or decrease the number of violations.

In other words, graphs showing the number of tickets over time show big spikes. Here is one such graph from the intersection of Halsted and 119th Street:

As the article notes, there are a number of these big outliers in the data, outliers that would be difficult to miss if anyone was examining the data like they were supposed to. Given the regularities in traffic, you would expect fairly similar patterns over time but graphs like this suggest something else at work. Outside of someone directly testifying to underhanded activities, it is difficult to imagine more damaging evidence than graphs like these.

Four transportation options in the new, denser suburbs

Posted on by

Leigh Gallagher, author of The End of the Suburbs, discusses some of the transportation options available for denser suburbs:

Many new experiments are in the works involving ride-sharing, and while none are likely to scale anytime soon, it’s a fix that draws heavily from the influence of Silicon Valley. As my colleague Michal Lev-Ram reports in the lead story in Fortune‘s New Metropolis issue about the end of driving, Google is partnering with GM on a pilot car-sharing service at its Mountain View headquarters that gives employees access to a fleet of 50 all-electric Chevrolet Spark EVs that are linked up to a mobile app that matches drivers and cars for morning and evening commutes. (This isn’t too dissimilar from Streetsblogger Mark Gorton’s idea for what he calls Smart Para-Transit, based on a fleet of vehicles with a central dispatch that matches riders and destinations.) In Palo Alto, Mercedes-Benz is testing a “Boost by Benz” program that shuttles kids around to piano lessons and soccer practice in brightly colored vans. Lev-Ram also notes that GM and Toyota recently said they would start giving discounts on new car purchases to Uber drivers…

Kannan of Washington Metro believes cities need to seriously rethink buses, which are much cheaper than rail, carry lots of people, and can go anywhere. “Today’s buses aren’t your father’s buses,” he says: they’re high tech, clean, energy efficient, sleek, and in some cases, highly amenitized. (As a longtime customer of New York’s Hampton Jitney, I can vouch for the quality of an “amenitized” bus ride.) There’s still a stigma against buses in this country, but it’s conceivable that this mindset could change. Consider the huge popularity of the controversial commuting buses in San Francisco operated not just by Google but by Facebook, eBay, Genentech, and others. And witness the rise of intercity carriers Bolt Bus and Megabus in recent years — especially among those transit-happy, texting Millennials as a dirt-cheap alternative to Amtrak travel up and down the Northeast seaboard (I’m no Jitney snob; I’ve taken these a lot, too). Something bigger may be going on…

There’s another solution here, too — the idea that the best way to build New Suburbia is off the back of Old Suburbia. Many developers are seizing opportunity to build updated, urbanized housing stock where transit already exists. In Libertyville, Illinois, a prewar suburb 35 miles north of Chicago, John McLinden has developed School Street, a row of 26 porch-adorned single-family homes with barely a few feet between them on narrow, Chicago-sized lots. The development runs right into Libertyville’s 178-year-old main street, Milwaukee Avenue, a vision in tightly packed boutiques, mom and pop retailers, restaurants and “2 a.m. bars,” as McLinden touts. Right behind it is where residents catch the North Line into Chicago. McLinden is now taking his model to nearby Skokie with a new development called Floral Avenue. Skokie sits on the Chicago Transit Authority’s yellow line, also known as the “Skokie Swift” — so named in 1964 as a two-year experimental service funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, CTA, and the Village of Skokie to show that mass transit could be adapted to service the new suburban market.

Gallagher suggests two options that are already popular – cars, which won’t be completely eliminated in suburbs or even in many American cities, and transit-oriented development – and two that may be harder sells. It could be particularly difficult to get suburbanites to buy into ride-sharing and buses. Ride-sharing requires coordinating schedules, potentially traveling with strangers in relatively tight quarters, and a loss of independence. Buses take advantage of existing road structures but have a reputation and again limit independence.

I wonder if ride-sharing and buses can only really attract suburbanites if density reaches certain levels. What is the critical point where the suburbanite decides it is easier to take the bus as opposed to driving? Is it the cost of gas, more route options, nicer accommodations and more middle- or upper-class appearances, the price of parking (some still argue parking is way too cheap and plentiful in the United States), or something else? All together, there could be delicate dance of putting together mass transit alongside denser suburban development.

Chicago to get its own “Carmageddon” on the Kennedy in June

Posted on by

Major repair work on the Kennedy in June is being dubbed Chicago’s own Carmageddon:

Chicago-area drivers are being urged to steer clear of the downtown stretch of the Kennedy Expressway during the last three weekends in June, officials said Thursday. That’s when bridge demolition on the Kennedy interchange at Ohio and Ontario streets will require shutting down expressway lanes, first in the inbound direction, then outbound and finally the Ohio and Ontario feeder ramps…

Officials hope the stern warning will help prevent hourslong snarls along the expressway that carries an average of 260,000 vehicles a day, avoiding what some traffic engineers have referred to a “carmageddon.”…

The work to tear down sections of the bridge, drop the concrete pieces onto the Kennedy and haul away the debris is scheduled for a series of tightly choreographed 55-hour periods on the weekends of June 13-15, June 20-22 and June 27-29, according to IDOT plans…

On an average project, IDOT tries to “scare away’’ 15 percent of the traffic to compensate for lane closures, officials said. During the Kennedy work, they hope to divert about 25 percent of traffic elsewhere.

There are echoes here of the Carmageddon in Los Angeles several years ago that ended up working out pretty well. While this location is a key part of the Chicago highway system, there are alternative routes either in the downtown area or different highways that can route people further around the city. At the same time, this does highlight the importance of fixing the Circle Interchange nearby to have better traffic flow.

It will be interesting to watch the PR for all of this. In fact, is two weeks enough time to start alerting people to Chicago’s own Carmageddon? Yet, I imagine local news outlets will eat this up.

Explosion in car ownership, oil consumption in China

Posted on by

Driving may have peaked in the United States but more Chinese own cars and are buying gas:

Over the past decade, the number of cars sold in China has jumped from 2 million a year to nearly 20 million. No surprise, then, that oil consumption soared from 250,000 barrels a day to 2.25 million barrels a day between 2003 and 2013, according to a new report from United States Energy Information Agency. As a result, since 2009, China has been forced to import half of its oil.

That hockey stick-like growth has, of course, exponentially worsened China’s catastrophic pollution and so the government’s latest 5-year plan calls for 500,000 electric and hybrid cars to be on the road by 2015, with 5 million by 2020. To hit those targets, China has invested billions of dollars to jump-start the country’s electric car industry. It’s also providing subsidies to get the motoring masses to go fossil-fuel free.

Buying a car isn’t just an isolated decision: it is linked to numerous areas in a society.

1. Gas consumption. This can help drive the oil industry, boost the import of gasoline, and affect the price.

2. Environmental effects. More cars means more smog.

3. An infrastructure of roads and other assorted services like gas stations and repair places.

4. Lifestyles that can be designed around the car. This includes more sprawl, fast food, and big box stores.

5. Perhaps a growing cultural emphasis on the independence and status related to owning a car.

All of this is quite a change.

New bill would allow states to turn interstates into toll roads

Posted on by

With funding for highway repairs harder to find, the new transportation bill from the White House would give states more room to add tolls to interstates:

With pressure mounting to avert a transportation funding crisis this summer, the Obama administration Tuesday opened the door for states to collect tolls on interstate highways to raise revenue for roadway repairs.

The proposal, contained in a four-year, $302 billion White House transportation bill, would reverse a long-standing federal prohibition on most interstate tolling…

“We believe that this is an area where the states have to make their own decisions,” said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. “We want to open the aperture, if you will, to allow more states to choose to make broader use of tolling, to have that option available.”…

Foxx said the highway trust fund would face a $63 billion shortfall over the next four years.

One expert suggests otherwise in this story but I imagine there are a lot of drivers who will not like this. Yet, roads are not free; they are a public service that have to be paid for. And the all-around costs of driving are not cheap: gas, insurance, car repairs, car purchases, road construction and maintenance, and then the host of other industries and business that exists on top of an automobile-driven culture.

While there will be a lot of debate over how roads can be funded (raising the gas tax which hasn’t changed since 1993, finding new revenue sources for roads like corporate taxes, or charging drivers per mile driven), this all hints at a larger issue: driving in America could change quite a bit in the coming decades. Some of the impetus is economic; who is going to pay for these roads which are expensive to maintain and repair? Some of the impetus is on the technology side: driverless cars may not be that far away since such vehicles could be much safer and more efficient on the road and other innovations could make cars and roads more efficient. Some of it may be cultural: Americans may be interested in driving less and living in sorts of places that require fewer individual trips by car. Some of it is environmental: improving the efficiency of cars and advocating for development that limits single-person car trips. This doesn’t mean the car will disappear from American life; it is an engrained part of American culture. Yet, how Americans view cars and driving might look different several decades from now.

How Google’s driverless car navigates city streets, construction, and urban traffic

Posted on by

Eric Jaffe provides some info on how driverless cars navigate more complex urban roads:

Boiled down, the Google car goes through six steps to make each decision on the road. The first is to locate itself — broadly in the world via GPS, and more precisely on the street via special maps embedded with detailed data on lane width, traffic light formation, crosswalks, lane curvature, and so on. Urmson says the value of maps is one of the key insights that emerged from the DARPA challenges. They give the car a baseline expectation of its environment; they’re the difference between the car opening its eyes in a completely new place and having some prior idea what’s going on around it.Next the car collects sensor data from its radar, lasers, and cameras. That helps track all the moving parts of a city no map can know about ahead of time. The third step is to classify this information as actual objects that might have an impact on the car’s route — other cars, pedestrians, cyclists, etc. — and to estimate their size, speed, and trajectory. That information then enters a probabilistic prediction model that considers what these objects have been doing and estimates what they will do next. For step five, the car weighs those predictions against its own speed and trajectory and plans its next move.

That leads to the sixth and final step: turning the wheel this much (if at all), and braking or accelerating this much (if at all). It’s the entirety of human progress distilled to two actions…

The Google car is programmed to be the prototype defensive driver on city streets. It won’t go above the speed limit and avoids driving in a blind spot if possible. It gives a wide berth to trucks and construction zones by shifting in its lane, a process called “nudging.” It’s extremely cautious crossing double yellows and won’t cross railroad tracks until the car ahead clears them. It hesitates for a moment after a light turns green, because studies have shown that red-light runners tend to strike just after the signal changes. It turns very slowly in general, accounting for everything in the area, and won’t turn right on red at all — at least for now. Many of the car’s capabilities remain locked in test mode before they’re brought out live.

Quite a process to account for all of the potential variables including other drivers, pedestrians and cyclists, weather conditions, and other objects on the road like construction or double-parked vehicles. I imagine this is some intense code that has to provide a lot of flexibility.

This also reminds me of some of my early experiences driving. It took some time to adapt to everything – watch your speed, check all those mirrors, what are the other cars doing, what is coming up ahead – and I remember wondering how people could even carry on conversations with others in the car while trying to drive. But, with practice and adaptation, driving today seems like second nature. And, I suspect from my own experience that drivers are not 100% vigilant (maybe 80% is more accurate?) while driving as they generally think they have things under control.

All that said, driving is a remarkable cognitive task and replicating this and improving on it in a 100% vigilant system requires lots of work.

Look for glow-in-the-dark roads

Posted on by

Lights along roads can cost quite a bit of money so why not use glow-in-the-dark road markings?

Light-absorbing glow-in-the-dark road markings have replaced streetlights on a 500m stretch of highway in the Netherlands…

One Netherlands news report said, “It looks like you are driving through a fairytale,” which pretty much sums up this extraordinary project. The design studio like to bring technology and design to the real world, with practical and beautiful results…

Part of that vision included weather markings — snowdrops, for instance, would appear when the temperature reached a certain level. For now though, the 500m stretch of the N329 highway in Oss features only the glow-in-the-dark road markings, created using a photo-luminescent powder integrated into the road paint, developed in conjunction with road construction company Heijmans.

Roosegaarde told Wired.co.uk Heijmans had managed to take its luminescence to the extreme — “it’s almost radioactive”, said Roosegaarde. You can get some sense of that in this embedded tweet, which appears to show three stripes of varying shades of radioactive green along both the highway’s edges.

Sounds pretty interesting, particularly if the markings can last long-term. I suggested something like this a few months ago to combat the issue of snow covering lines in parking lots.

Access to cars helps poorer residents achieve better life outcomes

Posted on by

Cars are expensive to own and operate yet a new study suggests they can help poorer residents:

Housing voucher recipients with cars tended to live and remain in higher-opportunity neighborhoods—places with lower poverty rates, higher social status, stronger housing markets, and lower health risks. Cars are also associated with improved neighborhood satisfaction and better employment outcomes. Among Moving to Opportunity families, those with cars were twice as likely to find a job and four times as likely to remain employed.

The importance of automobiles arises not due to the inherent superiority of driving, but because public transit systems in most metropolitan areas are slow, inconvenient, and lack sufficient metropolitan-wide coverage to rival the automobile.

More research is needed to determine if the relationship is causal or associative, that is, whether the car is the catalyst or if there is something deeper at work, of which the car is simply one manifestation. Cars are expensive to purchase and to maintain, even more so for families with severely limited resources. A low-income household that is somehow able, inclined, or afforded the opportunity to buy a car might also do many other things to get ahead. Motivation, opportunity, or both could be key.

Yet our current findings are enough to raise important questions.

For example, should government welfare programs facilitate automobile access or ownership? In some states, a car would push families over the asset limit for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, making those families ineligible for help.

In a society that often structures space around cars, this is not too surprising, particularly for poorer residents in suburbs and more sprawling areas. Yet, as this summary notes, providing cars is not necessarily easy (expensive) or desirable in the long run (perpetuating problems with cars like pollution and sprawl).

This could lead to some interesting consequences for poorer Americans. If they are increasingly in suburbs or are pushed out of walkable urban neighborhoods by gentrifiers, having to have a car is another barrier to moving up the economic ladder. In other words, walkable neighborhoods – think New Urbanism –  are the rage amongst urban millennials and others who want vibrant mixed-use neighborhoods. But, their quest for such spaces may not leave much room who would really benefit the most from cheaper transportation through walkability and mass transit.