Tag: automobiles

Helping People Reach Jobs

What is the best way to help low-income people – a group that disproportionately includes blacks and Latinos – get access to jobs? That question is certainly not answered by a report from left-wing think tank Demos. The report is aptly titled To Move Is to Thrive, but its subtitle, “Public Transit and Economic Opportunity for People of Color,” gives away its real agenda: more subsidies to the transit industry.

Written by Algernon Austin, the author of America Is Not Post-Racial, the report observes that “people of color” are less likely to own cars and more likely to be transit-dependent than white people. But Austin ignores the obvious and best solution, which is to give low-income people (regardless of color) access to cars. Instead, his report promotes “transit-focused infrastructure projects” in minority neighborhoods.

Since 1970, this nation has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on transit infrastructure projects. These projects have been disproportionately directed towards middle-class neighborhoods because middle-class people are the ones who pay for them through their taxes and the ones whose political support is needed to build them.

At the same time, the high cost of these projects has often forced transit agencies to cut bus service to low-income neighborhoods. This has happened in Atlanta, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and numerous other places, often resulting in overall declines in transit ridership.

Protect Your Privacy and Save Money by Telling NHTSA No to the Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications Mandate

Comments on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s proposed vehicle-to-vehicle communications mandate are due next on Wednesday, April 12. This is one of the rules that was published just before President Trump was inaugurated. If approved, it will be one of the most expensive vehicle safety rules ever, adding around $300 dollars to the price of every car, or (at recent car sales rates) well over $5 billion per year. 

Despite the high cost, the NHTSA predicts the rule will save no more than 31 lives in 2025, mainly because it will do little good until most cars have it. Yet even by 2060, after consumers have spent well over $200 billion so that virtually all cars would have it, NHTSA predicts it will save no more than 1,365 lives per year. 

The danger is not that it will cost too much per life saved but that mandating one technology will inhibit the development and use of better technologies that could save even more lives at a lower cost. The technology the NHTSA wants to mandate is known as dedicated short-range communications (DSRC), a form of radio. Yet advancements in cell phones, wifi, and other technologies could do the same thing better for less money and probably without a mandate.

For example, your smartphone already has all the hardware needed for vehicle-to-vehicle communications. Since more than three-fourths of Americans already have smartphones, mandating similar technology in new cars is redundant. Since that mandate will take more than a decade to have a significant impact on highway safety, NHTSA could see faster implementation using smartphones instead. It could do so by developing an app that could communicate with cars and provide extra features on the app that would encourage people to download and use it.  

All of the benefits claimed for the DSRC mandate assume that no other technology improvements take place. In fact, self-driving cars (which will work just as well with or without vehicle-to-vehicle systems) will greatly reduce auto fatalities, rendering the projected savings from vehicle-to-vehicle communications moot.

A mandate that one technology be used in all cars also opens the transportation system to potential hackers. The communications would necessarily be tied to automobile controls, which means that anyone who understands it could take control of every car in a city at once. If individual manufacturers were allowed to develop their own technologies, the use of multiple systems would make an attack both more difficult and less attractive.

There is also a privacy issue: vehicle-to-vehicle also means infrastructure-to-vehicle communications, raising the possibility that the government could monitor and even turn off your car if you were doing something it didn’t like, such as drive “too many” miles per year. That’s a very real concern because the Washington legislature has mandated a 50 percent reduction in per capita driving by 2050. Oregon and possibly other states have passed similar rules.

Comments on the proposed rule can be submitted on line or mailed to:

Docket Management Facility, M–30
U.S. Department of Transportation
West Building, Ground Floor, Rm. W12–140
1200 New Jersey Avenue SE.
Washington, DC 20590.

The Feds Want to Track Your Car

Last week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Commission (NHTSC) formally proposed to mandate that all new cars be equipped with “vehicle-to-vehicle” (V2V) communications, also known as connected-vehicle technology. This would allow vehicles stuck in traffic to let other vehicles know to take alternate routes. It would also allow the governments—or hackers—to take control of your car anytime they want.

The good news is that the Trump Administration will take office before NHTSC has a chance to put this rule into effect, and may be willing to kill it. The bad news is that this rule will feed the paranoia some people have over self-driving cars.

This article, for example, considers self-driving cars to be a part of the “war on the automobile” because they offer an “easy way to track the movements of individuals in society.” In fact, the writer of the article is confusing self-driving cars with connected vehicles. As I’ve previously noted, none of the at least 20 companies working on self-driving cars or software appear to be making V2V an integral part of their systems. This is mainly because they don’t trust the government to install or maintain the infrastructure needed to make it work but also because self-driving cars don’t need that technology.

There are good reasons to be paranoid about connected-vehicle mandates. First, they will give government the ability to control your car, and some governments in the United States have shown that they are willing to use that control to reduce your mobility. The state of Washington, for example, has mandated a 50 percent reduction in per capita driving by 2050. This is a state that has forbidden people to build homes on their own land if they live outside of an urban-growth boundary. If they can’t reduce per capita driving through moral suasion, it is not too much of a stretch to imagine that they will just turn peoples’ cars off after they have driven so many miles each month.

Second, if every car uses exactly the same vehicle-to-vehicle software, they will be incredibly vulnerable to hackers. Remember that hackers figured out how to remotely control a Jeep that Chrysler had wired to the cell phone network. Chrysler responded by recalling 1.4 million cars to install a firewall between the network and the car’s operating system. But now the government wants to mandate that all cars connect their operating systems to the cell phone or other wireless network, with no firewalls allowed.

While the risks of mandatory V2V systems are significant, the benefits are tiny. Marc Scribner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute notes that, “As NHTSA readily admits, hypothetical safety benefits of the mandate will be trivial for the next 15 years, at which point far superior automated vehicle technology may be deployed to consumers,” especially if manufacturers aren’t locked into technologies prescribed by the government.

People should not be paranoid about self-driving cars because none of the technologies required for self-driving cars would allow someone to remotely control your car. But people should be paranoid about V2V communications, especially those mandated by the government. Some auto makers are already offering various connected technologies with their cars, such as OnStar, which leaves it up to consumers whether they want to buy those kinds of systems and gives manufacturers incentives to keep their systems hack-proof. But government mandates for connected vehicles are both dangerous and pointless.

Is Mobility a Right or a Privilege?

Michael Lind, a co-founder of left-leaning New America, is urging the federal government to create universal mobility accounts that would give everyone an income tax credit, or, if they owe no taxes, a direct subsidy to cover the costs of driving. He argues that social mobility depends on personal mobility, and personal mobility depends on access to a car, so therefore everyone should have one.

This is an interesting departure from the usual progressive argument that cars are evil and we should help the poor by spending more on transit. Lind responds to this view saying that transit and transit-oriented developments “can help only at the margins.” He applauds programs that help low-income people acquire inexpensive, used automobiles, but–again–thinks they are not enough.

Lind is virtually arguing that automobile ownership is a human right that should be denied to no one because of poverty. While I agree that auto ownership can do a lot more to help people out of poverty than more transit subsidies, claiming that cars are a human right goes a little to far.

Pessimism in Historical Perspective

Pessimism about potentially life-enhancing technologies is not new. The Twitter account Pessimist’s Archive (a favorite of the internet guru Marc Andreessen) chronicles the unending stream of pessimism with old newspaper excerpts. 

Pessimistic reactions range from merely doubtful (such as this response to the idea of gas lighting in 1809, or this one to the concept of anesthesia in 1839) to outright alarmist (such as this 1999 warning that e-commerce “threatens to destroy more than it could ever create”). 

In some cases, the pessimists insist that an older technology is superior to a new one. Some, for example, have claimed that an abacus is superior to a computer and a pocket calculator, while others claimed that horses are longer-lasting than the dangerous “automobile terror.” 

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