Tag Archives: transportation

September 2024 in Review

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I was sitting down to do my “October in Review” post and realized I never got around to September. So better late than never. I’m writing this on November 9, 2024 after the U.S. election but I’ll try to give U.S. politics a rest in this post (update: I almost succeeded although I couldn’t resist an interesting point about the U.S. Constitution).

Most frightening and/or depressing story: There is nothing on Earth more frightening than nuclear weapons. China has scrapped its “minimal deterrent” nuclear doctrine in favor of massively scaling up their arsenal to compete with the also ramping up U.S. and Russian arsenals. They do still have an official “no first strike” policy. The U.S. by contrast has an arrogant foreign policy.

Most hopeful story: AI should be able to improve traffic management in cities, although early ideas on this front are not very creative.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Countries around the world update their constitutions about every 20 years on average. They have organized, legal processes for doing this spelled out in the constitutions themselves. The U.S. constitution is considered the world’s most difficult constitution to update and modernize.

AI-controlled stop lights

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Boston and other cities have piloted tested AI-controlled stop lights and found that they can reduce “stop and go traffic”. This seems encouraging to me, but not very imaginative and I hope this is not the end of the story. Stop lights are such an old technology, and it seems to me that with modern LED lights and screens we should be able to do much better. Each traffic lane, including lanes dedicated to light and un-motorized vehicles, need their own signals. Let’s get rid of the colored circles and make every single traffic light a series of arrows, so that we can control who is allowed to go forward entirely separately from who is allowed to make a turn from each lane. Pedestrians also need their own signals, and the heavy/highway vehicles, light/unmotorized vehicles, and pedestrians must never, ever have signals that put them in the same space at the same time. I won’t buy the idea that this would be “too expensive” – I happen to be traveling in a middle income country at the moment and I see a lot more arrows and countdown timers on traffic lights compared to what we have in the U.S. (although the jurisdiction I am in is no traffic safety utopia for sure.) If this sounds like it would be too inefficient with today’s system, this is where AI should come in and make it efficient and safe, at each individual intersection and for the system as a whole.

Another level of science fiction would dispense with the lights and screens, and embed them in our vehicle windshields, augmented reality glasses, headphones, etc. Vehicles that are entirely computer controlled, of course, can just get their signals from cellular or wireless networks. We are not there yet at least when it comes to widespread access/adoption of these technologies, but the technologies themselves either exist or are on the horizon.

August 2024

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Obviously, there were plenty of goings-on in the U.S. presidential election campaign in August. I’ve talked about that elsewhere, and everybody else is talking about it, so I’ll give it a rest here.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Human extinction, and our dysfunctional political system’s seeming lack of concern and even active ramping up the risk. We have forgotten how horrible it was last time (and the only time) nuclear weapons were used on cities. Is there any story that could be more frightening and/or depressing to a human?

Most hopeful story: Drugs targeting “GLP-1 receptors” (one brand name is Ozempic) were developed to treat diabetes and obesity, but they may be effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction. They may even be miracle anti-aging drugs. But really, it seems like the simple story is that most of us in the modern world are just eating too much and moving our bodies too little, and these drugs might let us get some of the benefits of healthier lifestyles without actually making the effort. Making the effort, or making the effort while turbo-charging the benefits with drugs, might be the better option. Nonetheless, saving lives is saving lives.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I did some musing about electric vehicles in August. The hype bubble seems to have burst a bit, as they did not explode onto the international commercial scene as some were hoping/predicting. This is partly because public infrastructure has not kept pace with the private sector due to sheer inertia, but I always detect a whiff of the evil oil/car industry propaganda and political capture behind the scenes. Nonetheless, just as I see happening with computer-driven vehicles, the technology and market will continue to develop after the hype bubble bursts. In a way, this almost starts the clock (5-10-20 years?) for when we can expect the actual commercial transition to occur. It will happen gradually, and one day we will just shrug, accept it, assume we knew it was coming all along, and eventually forget it was any other way. And since I seem to have transportation on the brain, here is a bonus link to my article on high speed trains.

problems with electric buses

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Electric cars might have arrived, technologically speaking, but electric buses are having some problems. The Austin metro area recently committed to going to an all-electric bus fleet, but the early results are that the buses are breaking down and just generally not as reliable as the proven diesel technology. Suppliers are limited, having supply chain issues, and financial problems.

This just sounds like a technology having growing pains in the early implementation stage. Implementation of an emerging technology is a chicken-and-egg problem, where issues need to be solved through “learning by doing”, but if nobody is willing to take the risk to work through those issues the technology never gets scaled up. If you really want it to happen, the federal government might need to share some of the risk in the early stages. Or here’s an idea: pilot the technology with school buses?

what’s new with flying taxis

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These things are basically just helicopters. What makes them new and different is (1) they are electric, (2) at least some are intended to be autonomous (no pilot), and (3) at least some models (like the “Wisk” from Boeing) are planned for release in the next few years.

Yes, they will crash at some point and a few people will die and it will be a huge deal, and thousands of children will probably be killed on that same day by cars, trucks, and motorcycles, and it will barely be mentioned.

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2022/october/03/wisk-unveils-autonomous-air-taxi

Los Angeles to Las Vegas high speed rail by 2028

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High speed rail is actually inching forward in the United States, with a private company planning to connect the two urban areas starting in 2028. Here are some factoids from this article:

  • The route will be built primarily along an interstate highway median. This makes huge sense to me since the U.S. interstate highway system is secretly one of the world’s great feats of infrastructure financing and construction. It might be because we spent so much money and effort on it that we haven’t been able to pull off anything else comparable in the last half century. It might be hard to imagine as the autonomous vehicle hype bubble seems to have burst, but autonomous vehicles are eventually going to increase the capacity and reduce the congestion of U.S. highways. When that happens, we might be able to give over some of the real estate freed up to bullet trains, a true smart grid, solar panels, or whatever else we need to connect the country.
  • The Los Angeles end will be at a suburban commuter rail station. I guess this makes sense since most people don’t live in downtown Los Angeles and will need to get to dispersed locations in the metro area. And let’s just face it, people are going to drive to the train station and there is already going to be parking there. It does mean the real trip from downtown LA to downtown Las Vegas will be a lot more than the advertised two hours, for anyone actually doing that trip.
  • It got a mix of federal grants and tax-exempt loans. This makes sense too since the highways and airports in the country are heavily subsidized, whether we like to admit it or not. The total is about $6 billion – this seems very low but I guess this is a straight shot through the desert. Estimates for a comparable project linking dense urban areas like LA and San Francisco top $100 billion, and are still going nowhere.
  • It will “reach speeds” of 186 mph, comparable to Japanese bullet trains. This sounds good – I would like to know the average speed compared to the Japanese trains (which they poured money into right around the time the U.S. decided to build its highway system.) Again, this is a straight shot on new infrastructure through the desert. Amtrak’s Acela can “reach” pretty high speeds (150 mph according to this article) but it is limited by the condition of tracks and the fact that it has to share the tracks. (I use a suburban Philadelphia commuter rail station that Amtrak blows through several times a day. There is absolutely no physical separation between people on the platform and the train, which is a bit frightening.)
  • It is supposed to cut a 4-hour car trip to 2 hours.
  • It is supposed to be significantly cheaper than flying (but people don’t think this way – they typically compare the cost of mass transit to the cost of fueling their vehicles only, thinking of everything else as a sunk cost. So hopefully ridership projections will bear out.

All in all, sounds like a great project for the U.S.

what’s new with super-sonic flight

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NASA and Lockheed Martin claim to have a prototype supersonic jet whose sonic boom sounds “like a car door slamming heard from inside”. This could open the door to commercial supersonic flight over populated areas. Well, we don’t even have commercial super-sonic flight over the oceans at the moment, which would be helpful to long-haul travelers. The article doesn’t say when this might happen, but it doesn’t sounds soon. The article does mention that there is at least one other company working on a supersonic passenger jet which “it hopes” could be “in the air” (for testing presumably?) “later this year”.

automatic speed regulators

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Automatic speed regulators on private vehicles – YES PLEASE. This is an idea that will save lives, and its time has come. Won’t somebody please think of the children?

The article suggests limiting speeds to 100 mph, but come on! Why not limit them to the local posted limit? Or if saving lives that way is too interventionist for “‘Merica”, then install the technology and let insurance companies massively penalize people who choose to turn it off. This could be a middle ground between self-driving cars and people who insist on the preventable mass murder of letting human beings continue operating deadly highway vehicles on city streets, once it is no longer necessary.

September 2023 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: “the accumulation of physical and knowledge capital to substitute natural resources cannot guarantee green growth“. Green growth, in my own words, is the state where technological innovation allows increased human activity without a corresponding increase in environmental impact. In other words, this article concludes that technological innovation may not be able to save us. This would be bad, because this is a happy story where our civilization has a “soft landing” rather than a major course correction or a major disaster. There are some signs that human population growth may turn the corner (i.e., go from slowing down to actually decreasing in absolute numbers) relatively soon. Based on this, I speculated that “by focusing on per-capital wealth and income as a metric, rather than total national wealth and income, we can try to come up with ways to improve the quality of human lives rather than just increasing total money spent, activity, and environmental impact ceaselessly. What would this mean for “markets”? I’m not sure, but if we can accelerate productivity growth, and spread the gains fairly among the shrinking pool of humans, I don’t see why it has to be so bad.”

Most hopeful story: Autonomous vehicles kill and maim far, far fewer human beings than vehicles driven by humans. I consider this a happy story no matter how matter how much the media hypes each accident autonomous vehicles are involved in while ignoring the tens of thousands of Americans and millions of human beings snuffed out each year by human drivers. I think at some point, insurance companies will start to agree with me an hike premiums on human drivers through the roof. Autonomous parking also has a huge potential to free up space in our urban areas.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Venice has completed a major storm surge barrier project.