We have given a number of reasons that autonomous vehicles will reduce congestion.

“In particular, vehicle automation, once it gets critical mass, should greatly increase road capacity, both because of shorter following distances and because of narrower lanes. New, narrow vehicle forms designed for a single passenger (which is how most cars are used) will become more widespread with automation, as safety fears diminish, and will also increase person throughput.”

I have thought of one more reason autonomous vehicles will reduce traffic congestion. Currently most drivers do not take the shortest path (though we don’t really know why that is so, we have speculations). If we take humans out of the navigation decision, cars will be more likely to find the shortest path. This may not be system optimal, but will be a significant improvement over current routing decisions.

Not only should we not let people drive, we probably shouldn’t let them route themselves if we want an efficient system.

“Nice project [career, job] there son, shame if something happened to it” …

That is the implied message I got a bit a year ago from an intermediary passing along comments from a local appointed official serving other local appointed officials unhappy with comments I made in a newspaper article inspired by a post on this blog. (The local appointed official came out smelling like roses in this article, the local officials he worked for did not). Of course it wasn’t put in quite those words, and they don’t even fund me. (The lead appointed official this appointed official worked for was subsequently not renewed).

I have heard similar comments from others who blog and work in a relatively small network within a particular industry, and fears of the same from those who would like to blog but won’t. This is a problem. The people who know the field best, those who work on it day in and day out, are afraid to speak.

Dude, I am a professor. I have tenure. I have a salary. The only people you can hurt (unless you can actually get me fired for free speech, which I doubt – I imagine the University of Minnesota faculty would have something to say), are graduate students, who won’t get funding if you cut off that avenue.

My job, and the reason I have tenure, are to say things that might not be politically “savvy”. This is why I am hired by the University and why the University has a tenure system, and why it receives a modicum of funding from the People of Minnesota.

If I were to only say things that were “Rah, Minnesota” and pat ourselves on the back (1) No one would read this blog*, (2) No change would ever occur, (3) I would be derelict in my duties.

There are of course plenty of people paid to say things like “Rah, Minnesota”. We build whole stadiums (we build fleets of stadiums in fact, and we have the newest fleet of stadia of any City in North America) to pat ourselves on the back and feel the joy of the one-ness of life in the barren wilderness of the North, the provincial capital of the only region on planet Earth not getting warmer due to “Global Warming”.

If things were perfect, and I were just a curmudgeon who did not acknowledge the perfection of our society, perhaps I should be ignored. [Does a perfect society tolerate or contain a curmudgeon? ] I think evidence however is that we live in a less than perfect society, and while we may disagree on the nature of the imperfection or its solution, few argue the Panglossian case. The causes of the imperfection are not just the symptoms, but the underlying structures that produce the symptoms. This includes things like Governance. This is not simply a technology problem (in fact, much of it is not a technology problem – though there may be technologies that can route around the political problems).

Now the “savvy” professor who only says the right things to patrons may get more money, or more promotions into administration (which obviously many of us are capable of (and most of us think we could do a better job than those in those administrative positions – whether or not that’s true), but who really wants to deal with more bureaucratic processes than we already do). In a field which is sufficiently technical, this may be fine. In pure sciences like chemistry, one assumes that discovering a new element ruffles few political feathers (though undoubtedly there are all sorts of intra-chemistry politics). Yet even seemingly “technical” breakthroughs like fracking have many social consequences, just look at the price of fuel.

Transportation is a socio-technical system. A savvy professor who does not touch the “socio” aspects of the systems, will leave no mark upon the social systems of the world that govern the technology.  Tenured faculty have an obligation to  speak truth to power, even if it is outside their nominal domain.

• There are lots of boring institutional websites and blogs. I won’t name and shame.

Some people place property rights above human rights, and want the government to defend with force their right to discriminate (against group X) in their own business. The right to discriminate on the basis of race (or worse, the obligation to discriminate) with the protection of the state, which has a monopoly on the “legitimate” use of force was made illegal in the US some 50 years ago due to the success of the Civil Rights Movement.*

While property arrangements are generally accepted, they are not themselves the product of pure merit, and should not be treated as sacrosanct. How did any particular distribution of property come to be? Is that the most just distribution of property? And why is that right privileged above all else? There is a strong truism that, as Balzac said “The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.” More colloquially, due to Puzo, “Behind every great fortune is a great crime.” Certainly hard work coupled with great crime is more productive than crime alone. Similarly good luck, hard work, inherent ability, and great crime is best of all. As popular as she may be, who exactly elected the Queen?* Buckminster Fuller dubbed the class which established many great fortunes during the pre-Industrial seatrading era “the Great Pirates” in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

The government (with its monopoly of force earned by force) grants monopolies all the time, often for very practical reasons, ranging from natural monopoly to patents to encourage the useful arts, to ownership of property (which is a very localized spatial monopoly). But they are monopolies none the less, and thus move us away from an idealized atomistic perfectly competitive economy which is the basis for pure libertarian reasoning about rights to trade with whomever, whenever you want. So if the assumptions on which the logic are based are invalid, the conclusions do not necessarily apply.

From an efficiency perspective there is great value in stable property relations and encouraging hard work. If you thought your wealth would constantly be confiscated and redistributed, you would be very tempted not to produce anything. That after all is the libertarian argument against high tax rates, estate taxes, and so on, empirically corroborated from a reading of history in communist countries, though derivable from first principles about human behavior.

From a social perspective, while we perhaps cannot do much to control inherent ability, and we discourage great crime, we can create the conditions for good luck (tending towards equality of opportunity: a minimum level of food, health, knowledge, political access, and so on) and reward hard work. Yet there is a tension between the two. The resources necessary to ensure equality of opportunity somewhat diminish the reward for hard work. This is the nature of the system. The system however can raise more resources with less disincentive to work by how the tax code works. What is taxed: work or land, consumption or production?

Today, the initial distribution of property (and talents) people are born with is far from equal. And people with wealth are able to channel some of their wealth to persuade (via campaign contributions, revolving doors, and straight-out bribery) the state to preserve their wealth (through crony capitalism, special tax breaks, and other means), while using the commons (e.g. the air, the atmosphere, the ocean) as a dumping ground for their pollution, and exploiting the unregulated commons for private gain. This is all selfishly rational, homo economicus behavior. We are not surprised by it.

Some groups are further able to use police powers to control other groups. While this is far from rational in an economic sense, it is rational in a political sense, keeping the “in group” in power and keeping the “out group” down.

But just because we expect hypocrisy in the name of preserving wealth, doesn’t mean we should accept it. The rules of the game may be tolerable (not perfect, but good enough) if everyone starts at the same place, but are far from acceptable when some are kept down by the instruments of the state while others are promoted (at least in a relative sense, if only by not being kept down).

The American founders were wise enough establish a set of principles that, though they didn’t live up to them themselves, have steadily increased democracy. Instead of just propertied white men, almost everyone can vote (children, convicts and undocumented immigrants among the excluded classes). Instead of slavery, we now have defined rights more broadly.

We should seek a society where everyone can fairly trade with whomever they wish, without interference. That requires property rights. Such a system is inherently unfair though that is unpersuasive to those who care solely about efficiency. It is also politically unstable (and thus fails in the long-run) without an underlying fairness in the initial distribution. And the initial distribution will be inherently unfair each generation without some periodic corrections. (And likely get unfairer over time in absence of remedies.) Abilities are not randomly distributed; neither are wealth and opportunity when some can benefit from the work of their ancestors, and others cannot. If we ancestors are not permitted to provide benefits to our descendants, that greatly diminishes our incentives to create, produce, and save/invest.

Politics in a democratic republic is about balancing these interests. Factions will favor one over the other – pushing more toward efficiency or more toward equity. That is what we want if we believe there is a collective wisdom.  But if a faction or party tells you only one side of this see-saw matters (either growth at the expense of any redistribution, or redistribution at the expense of efficiency), they are rigid ideologues not to be trusted.

• Montgomery Bus Lines, the public transit firm serving Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956 was owned by National City Lines, a private firm at the time of the famous boycott. Martin Luther King and others were jailed for boycotting, conspiring to interfere with a business, which had a government-granted monopoly. Today even most Alabamans probably recognize the wrongness of the situation.
• Kings and Queens were once elected. E.g. Royal Elections in Poland. The current Queen of England obviously was not elected.

Likely future President Hillary Clinton released her infrastructure plan (PDF version) back in November, but I am just paying attention to it now. This is far more detailed than many Presidential plans and suggests someone who is in the field (though more likely an advocate or lobbyist rather than an academic) drafted it for her. Notably it is infrastructure, not just transportation, though it focuses on transport, it includes energy, water, and telecommunications. While transportation is a settled issue for the first few years given the recent passage of surface transportation reauthorization, this document still will set the agenda for the next re-up.

It is more or less the current agenda, but some key points:

• Increase federal infrastructure investment by $275B over 5 years, paid for with business tax reform, not user fees, because???? [Not that there should or should not be business tax reform, but why should that revenue go to transport rather than the general fund. Why should general fund revenue support transport when user fees are straightforward? One can always frame it as a wholesale tax on oil companies to avoid the “gas tax” moniker. I recognize it is still too soon for road pricing, but something about how electric vehicles would contribute would be nice. Also the plan is not clear on why this is a federal rather than state responsibility.]
• Reauthorize “Build America Bonds”, which are probably a better mechanism than municipal bonds.
• Create a national infrastructure bank which is almost a real bank. In principle this is good, though the devil as always is in the details. There is still a lot of vagueness in the proposal (like what’s in it for the bank with regards to loan guarantees, i.e. how does the bank recover its guarantees), but much of the language, like selecting projects based on merit, and no discussion about “grants” is important.

At any rate, I was pleased to see our Fix it First report referenced, even if not really adopted. Hopefully it moved the dial a little bit on discussions in Washington.

Recently Published:

• Mogush, Paul, Kevin J. Krizek, David M. Levinson (2016) The Value of Trail Access on Home Purchases.  Chapter 10 in Accessibility, Equity and Efficiency: Challenges for Transport and Public Services  (pp. 193-209) Editors: Karst Geurs; Tomaz Ponce Dentinho; Roberto Patuelli. Edward Elgar Publishers [ebook][doi]

Extract

Many cities, through public dialogues, community initiatives and other land use and transportation policies, are striving to enhance their ‘livability’. While ‘livability’ is a relatively ambiguous term, there is emerging consensus on the following: the ease by which residents can travel by foot or bicycle represents a critical component of this goal. Communities with well-developed non-motorized infrastructure, in the form of sidewalks, bicycle paths, or compact and mixed land uses, are hypothesized to be more ‘livable’ than those without. This argument is often relied upon by advocates of bicycle paths or sidewalks. If livability is cherished among residents, and one important component of livability includes bicycle paths, then it follows that living close to bicycle paths should be capitalized into home prices. Documenting this relationship would provide good news for advocates who often seek ways of monetizing the value of these public goods; bicycle facilities are non-market goods, making it difficult to attach an economic value to them.