Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts from
Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I’m Trevor Burrus. Tom Clougherty: And I’m Tom Clougherty. Trevor Burrus: Joining us today is Randal
O'Toole, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, specializing in urban growth, public land
and transportation issues. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Randal. Randal O’Toole: Hey, I’m glad to be here. Trevor Burrus: So the first question is the
big one as we often do on Free Thoughts. How is transportation important to human freedom
and flourishing? Randal O’Toole: Well mobility is really
important because mobility gives people access to more economic resources, more social resources,
more recreation opportunities. Mobility of course has completely transformed
in the 20th century. Before 1800, hardly anybody in the world had
ever traveled faster than a horse could run and lived to tell about it. Although during the … Trevor Burrus: Lived to tell about it, it’s
like people who fell out of hot air balloons and … Randal O’Toole: Or off a cliff. Trevor Burrus: So they got a quick moment
of – OK. Randal O’Toole: Yeah. So by 1900, we had developed steam trains
and bicycles and streetcars and cable cars and those things accelerated the pace of life
for many people and yet by 1910, most Americans were no more mobile than they had been in
1800 because frankly streetcars and steam trains and things like that were more expensive
than the average American could afford.
Most Americans still lived in rural areas
and they didn’t have access to those, to streetcars or bicycles. Even Americans in urban areas, only middle
class people could afford streetcars. Pretty much working class people had to walk
to work. It was only when Henry Ford developed a moving
assembly line that allowed him to both double worker pay and cut the cost of his cars in
half, which made automobiles affordable to the working class that suddenly mobility was
democratized and suddenly travel speed is accelerated from an average of 3 miles an
hour to an average of 30 miles an hour or more. That gave people access to far more jobs. If you were producing something, it gave you
access to a far bigger consumer market. If you wanted to socialize with people who
were like you, you didn’t have to live right next door to them.
You could get into your car and be near them. You have access to recreation opportunities. Things like national parks became popular
only after the car became popular. Before cars – the number of people visiting
Yellowstone and people like – places like that were numbered in the hundreds or low
thousands each year. Now it’s the millions. Trevor Burrus: Now you certainly have no Disneyland
without people being able to drive to it and … [Crosstalk] Randal O’Toole: You don’t have Costco. You don’t have supermarkets. You don’t have Wal-marts. You don’t have a lot of things that we take
for granted today. Shopping malls, a lot of things. So the auto mobility transform lives for many
people. For example, the only way blacks were able
to boycott buses in Montgomery, Alabama after Rosa Louise Parks refused to get – walk
to the back of the bus was because they had enough cars that they could transport each
other to work.
So cars were called by Blacks freedom vehicles. Cars play a huge role in women’s liberation. It was only when families became two-car families
and both the husband and the wife could own it, could have a car and become wage or salary
earners that women’s liberation became truly an important change in our lives. So cars have transformed everybody’s lives. Cars have transformed farming for example. Before cars, at least a quarter, perhaps a
third of all of our farmland was dedicated to pasture for the horses and other livestock
needed to power the farms. By releasing that land, we ended up getting
100 million acres of forest lands, 100 million acres of crop lands. We have far more lands available for growing
crops than we had before because of the internal combustion engine, powering tractors and trucks
and other farm vehicles. Trevor Burrus: Well, if you talk to people
now though, it’s kind of – I mean it is this mind-blowing thing when you start thinking
about the effect that the car had on American life.
But now a lot of people want to say that cars
are bad for a variety of reasons, not seeming to understand the effect on this and a lot
of the kind of urban planning and ideas of what a city should look like, it seems to
be kind of anti-car in some basic level. Randal O’Toole: That’s absolutely right. There’s a huge anti-automobile mentality
out there, especially among urban planners and curiously, every city in the country has
urban planners on their staff because they think they’re the experts.
But it’s actually because the Supreme Court
has made decisions that have said that the property rights clause or the Fifth Amendment
of the constitution can be amended if you have an urban – can be ignored if you have
an urban planner on your staff. Basically, you don’t have to worry about
that if you have an urban planner who has written an urban plan for your city. Trevor Burrus: This is like Kelo pursuant
… [Crosstalk] Randal O’Toole: Every single Supreme Court
decision that has taken away people’s property rights has mentioned in that decision that
the city or other entity that wanted to take away people’s property rights had written
an urban plan. So if you have an urban planner on your staff,
you can ignore property rights. You can take land by eminent domain. You can regulate land without compensation
if you have an urban planner on your staff. So they all have urban planners and urban
planners all go to the same schools and most of these schools are architecture schools
where they learn that we shape our buildings and our buildings shape up.
So if we want to shape society, we have to
design our cities in a way to shape the way people live. Well, it has been proven over and over again
that it doesn’t work. It doesn’t get people out of their cars,
to force people to live in high densities. San Francisco for example, the San Francisco
Bay area increases population density by two-thirds between 1980 and 2010 and per capita driving
increased. Per capita transit ridership declined by a
third. It didn’t change anything at all except
for it made a lot more congestion.
So there’s an anti-automobile mentality
and the reality is most of the – virtually all of the problems with automobiles can be
solved by treating the problem, not by treating the automobile. Trevor Burrus: Like congestion you mean. Randal O’Toole: Well, congestion, air pollution,
greenhouse gases, energy, traffic accidents, whatever. In 1970, people drove about 40 percent as
much as they do today and we had 55,000 people killed per year. So today we’re driving 150 percent more
and we only had 33,000 people killed last year.
So fatalities are going down because they
made both automobiles and highways safer. That’s only going to increase. In 1970, many of our cities were polluted. You had a mile of visibility or less. In Portland, you couldn’t see Mount Hood. In Seattle, you couldn’t see Mount Rainier
because the pollution is so bad. So we created the Environmental Protection
Agency to solve the problem and they said let’s do two things. Let’s put pollution control requirements
on new cars but let’s also encourage cities to discourage driving by spending more on
transit and increasing densities to encourage people to live closer to work. Well, they did both things and today, pollution
has gone down by more than 90 percent. Total pollution has decreased by more than
90 percent from what it was in 1970 and 105 percent of that decline is due to the pollution
controls they put on cars. Negative 105 because … Trevor Burrus: More than 100 percent. Randal O’Toole: Right, because the other
thing they did that – investing in transit and increasing densities to get people out
of their cars failed.
Instead what that did is it increased traffic
congestion and cars pollute more in congested traffic than they do in free flowing traffic. So we ended up having more pollution thanks
to the policy of trying to get people out of their cars. It failed miserably and yet we’re still
pursuing that policy in many places supposedly to reduce greenhouse gases, to save energy
and so on. It won’t work but we’re doing it anyway.
Tom Clougherty: So I think one of the interesting,
maybe disturbing things about transportation policy is that you have an obvious problem
in congestion, a problem which is very costly. You also have a solution that virtually every
economist is going to agree on and that’s congestion pricing. You also have on top of that a widespread
perception that it’s politically impossible, that it will never happen. So therefore we have to go into a lot of these
other things, which as you’ve pointed out may not be effective. Do you see any future for congestion pricing? Could you maybe elaborate on that principle
a little bit? Randal O’Toole: Well, there are two things
that are going to happen in the next 10 years. First of all, a lot of cars are going to become
self-driving cars and that’s going to be a very rapid transformation because starting
in about 2020, you will be able to buy a car that will be able to drive itself on the vast
majority of American streets and roads without your input at all. Pretty soon you will be able to drive a car
– buy a car that will drive itself everywhere and they won’t even have steering wheels.
Well, a lot of congestion happens because
of slow human reflexes and as soon as we get self-driving cars which have much faster reflexes,
the capacity of roads is going to increase tremendously. It’s typical that an urban freeway lane
can move about 2000 vehicles an hour at speed. With self-driving cars, we will be able to
increase that to 6000 or more vehicles an hour. So that’s going to take care a lot of the
congestion problem right there. The other parallel development is that we’re
moving away from gas guzzlers. Cars that burn gas are burning less and less
gas all the time and a lot of cars are not burning gasoline. That means that gas taxes which have paid
for our roads have really paid for 80 percent of all the roads we’ve built and 100 percent
of all the state highways that have been built in the country and interstate roads.
Those gas taxes aren’t going to be around
anymore. So we’re going to have to find a new way
of paying for roads. My home state of Oregon was the first state
to have a gas tax to pay for roads in 1919 and today my home state of Oregon is experimenting
with mileage-based user fees. It’s the first state to experiment with
them and what they’ve done is they’ve asked people to volunteer to pay a mileage-based
user fee rather than a gas tax and I was one of the first people to volunteer. They opened up volunteers at midnight on July
1st and at 12:01, I sent in my application and they sent me a little device that I plug
into my car and now it keeps track of how many miles I drive and if I leave the state,
I don’t pay anything. In the state I pay a penny and a half per
mile and they refund me all my gas taxes that I pay when I buy gas.
So the intention is to phase this in over
time. So if you buy an electric car, you will have
to get a mileage-based user fee device. If you buy a gasoline-powered car, you will
be encouraged to do it and over time, we will transition from all gasoline or all gas taxes
to all mileage-based user fees. Well, with mileage-based user fees, it will
be real, real easy to make a congestion fee, to make it a variable fee. Presumably the device you plug into your car
when you say I want to go to work, you will tell your car take me on this – to this
address. The car will say, well, here are three different
routes. If you go this way, you’re going to have
to pay this fee. If you go this way, you will have to pay this
fee and it will take you five minutes longer. If you go this way, you will have to pay a
lower fee and it will take you 10 minutes longer or whatever. You will have a choice of which route, which
fee you pay and you will make that choice and that will encourage people to avoid congested
routes and eventually solve that $200 billion congestion problem.
Trevor Burrus: This is interesting because
you see all these technologies which weren’t even thought about a few years ago, whether
it’s the device to measure how much your car is driving or a driverless car. It kind of reminds me – we’re talking
about urban planners and who these people are and were and to sort of – whether or
not any urban planners in 1980 thought about driverless cars or the possibility of having
something to measure how much you’re driving and that – and they probably did and so
… Randal O’Toole: Well, the real question
is are any urban planners in 2016 thinking about … Trevor Burrus: Yeah, so that’s a better
– at the Car History Museum, I know you at one point were in Denver for the light
rail fight.
In the car museum, they have a Denver urban
plan from 1955 or something like that. It’s a 50-year urban plan. So this was what Denver looked like in 2005,
which is just ludicrous. I mean it seems absolutely ludicrous. Tom Clougherty: You mean they didn’t get
it right? [Crosstalk] Randal O’Toole: In 1950, nobody had ever
taken a commercial jet airline flight. Nobody had ever direct dialed a long distance
phone call. To make a long distance call, you had to call
the operator and have them dial it for you. Of course almost nobody had ever programmed
a computer. There was certainly no internet. Nobody could predict in 1950 what was going
to happen in 2000. Well today we can see driverless cars on the
horizon but nobody can predict what is going to happen.
Is everybody going to use an Uber-like car
or are we going to own our own cars? Is it going to make people drive more because
more people are going to be driving? Because you can be nine years old and drive
a driverless car. I can put my dogs in the car and send them
to the vet. I don’t need to go with them. Trevor Burrus: That’s going to be a service.
It could be like Bark Car and they just put
them in there and it drives them to the vet, yeah. Randal O’Toole: Or is it going to lead to
less driving because everybody is going to be not owning a car but Uber-ing their car? The thing about that is when – if you own
a car, when you say I’m going to go to the store now, you figure I’m going to pay the
marginal cost to driving, the cost of gasoline. But if you’re renting a car, you have to
pay the average cost which is a much higher per mile cost. So that’s going to change the calculus. Those people who decide not to own a car will
probably travel less themselves than they would have traveled if they had owned a car
because of that.
So is it going to lead to more or less driving? Nobody knows the answers to these questions. Urban planners, they know they don’t know
the answers to these questions. So their solution is to ignore the problem,
to ignore the issue, design for the past because they know the past. So they design for streetcars. They design for light rail because those are
the past forms of travel. They know how people lived when those were
the forms of travel that people used. So they designed cities to be streetcar cities. That’s really the urban planning fad today
is to design cities to be like they were in the 1920s when the people who got around not
on foot took streetcars. Of course there were still a lot of people
who got around on foot because they couldn’t afford the streetcars and that of course is
going to be a complete failure. It’s not going to work. It’s going to impose huge costs on those
cities because they’re going to be designing for the wrong thing. It’s going to put a huge cost on the people
in those cities but they’re doing it anyway because that’s the urban planning fad.
Trevor Burrus: So they’re thinking of sort
of high density urban development with a lot of public transportation like streetcars and
light rail and things like this, which is odd but it kind of makes you wonder if the
entire concept of urban planning is just kind of silly. Are you kind of saying that? Randal O’Toole: It doesn’t make me wonder
that. It’s not kind of saying. Urban planning is a profession that doesn’t
deserve to exist. That’s why I call myself the antiplanner
and I have a blog called The Antiplanner. Look up “antiplanner” and I’m the first
thing on the list. I write about this every day. Urban planning always fails. They can’t predict the future. So instead of predicting it, they try to envision
it and they envision a past that they understand. Then they try to impose that on the future
by passing all kinds of regulations and all kinds of laws. Trevor Burrus: As I went to – Tom being
British, a town called Milton Keynes in – or Keynes I think is how they say it.
Tom Clougherty: Milton Keynes. It’s a must-see. Trevor Burrus: In England, which is one of
these post-war, fully-planned towns. I mean down to – especially in England. They were really big on this. Have urban planners become less hubristic? I mean in England, they were just planning
entire towns, entire blocks, trying to figure out everything that people wanted. Have they become less hubristic and a little
bit more respectful of human freedom or are they just as planning as ever? Randal O’Toole: Absolutely not. They have not become less hubristic and a
lot of places – a lot of private developers have built what are called “master plan
communities”. The private developers did the planning and
they were planning for the market. They were trying to figure out what do people
want to live in and will build them a community like they want to live in. They figure out, well, they want to be somewhat
close to stores. So they have to have as many – enough people
in their community to convince a supermarket to open up a store, to come into Costco or
something like that, to open up a store.
They like to be near some nice restaurants. But they also like to have a yard. They also like to have wide streets to drive
on. So they plan for what people want. The urban planners that I’m talking about
are government planners and they plan for what they think people should have. They plan for what they think people should
want, not what they do want.
They think people should want to live in higher
densities, that they should want to get around on transit, rather than driving, and so that’s
what they planned for even though nationwide only about two percent of travel is by – well,
one percent of travel and about two percent of commuting is by mass transit. It’s insignificant outside of New York City,
Washington and about four other urban areas. Transit is irrelevant really. Tom Clougherty: Yeah. I mean it’s interesting that you’re talking
a lot about how contemporary urban planning is certainly anti-car, anti-automobility and
yet I wonder whether the darkest era of urban planning was excessively pro-car.
If you think of a lot of post-war development,
the interstate highway system often driving major roads through established neighborhoods. Really trying to change people’s lives and
the whole way they lived in the opposite direction of what they’re trying to do now. Is what we have now in urban planning almost
a reaction to some of the mistakes of the past? Randal O’Toole: No. I think what you have to – what’s consistent
about urban planning is that it’s pro-middle class and anti-working class, anti-low income
people. They call working class neighborhoods slums. This has been the trend for 125 years. Working class neighborhoods are slums. So we have to clear out those slums as if
– if we move the people out so that we don’t have to look at them, they don’t exist anymore.
Urban renewal in the 1950s was called by some
“negro removal” because a million people were displaced by the urban renewal movement
and most of them were Blacks, so 80 percent of them were Blacks. They had to move from places that they could
afford to places that were less affordable because they weren’t slums anymore. So the problem that urban – that cities
had in the 1940s and 50s that they saw they had is that the middle class people had moved
to the suburbs and the people who were left were – had lower incomes and they said,
OK, these are slums. We have to get them out of here. You get the middle class people back into
the cities and they looked at the interstates as a way of doing it.
The original interstate highway system as
planned by the transportation engineers was going to bypass all the cities, was not going
to enter the cities. They brought this proposal before congress
and the cities went to congress and said, “No, we want our share of the interstate
money.” So they rewrote the system. They added 10 percent more miles all of which
were in the inner cities and came back to congress in ’56 and congress passed it with
the endorsement of the urban mayors because the mayors wanted to use interstate highways
as a vehicle for slum clearance.
They were to clear out the slums that the
highways were built on. They would clear out the neighborhoods around
those highways with eminent domain. That was all approved by the Supreme Court
in the famous 1952 case here in Washington DC. Yeah. And forced the people out and then build nice
middle class neighborhoods. Today it’s the same thing. The whole complaint about urban sprawl is
not a complaint about wealthy people moving in suburbs. Wealthy people started moving to the suburbs
in the 1830s and nobody complained about urban sprawl then. Middle class people started moving to the
suburbs in the 1890s and nobody complained about it then. We’ve had suburban sprawl for almost 200
years.
It was only when middle class people or simply
when working class people started moving to the suburbs in the 1920s because they were
able to buy Henry Ford’s affordable cars that people started complaining about urban
sprawl. The early complaints about urban sprawl were
very class-oriented. You have these inelegant people out there
in all stages of dress playing this ridiculous music on their Victor-Victrolaphones and dancing
wildly and gesticulating and eating weird food. Trevor Burrus: Showing their ankles. Randal O’Toole: Doing all kinds of things
that were horrible and it was very class-oriented and their prescription – I’m reading to
you from a book called the Town and Country Plan.
It was written by a British author and the
prescription was we will pen all those people up in high-rises in the cities and in 1947,
Britain passed – the parliament passed a Town and Country Planning Act that put greenbelts
around the cities for bidding development and then put high-rises in the cities that
people lived in for a few years but was really only acceptable because a lot of housing had
been palmed out. But as soon as people lived in it for more
than 10 years, they realized we don’t want to live like this. These are awful places to live in. So they revolted but … Trevor Burrus: This racial class part of the
story seems to be – I mean it’s – you cannot separate it from the whole history
of urban planning.
It’s about class and race and we have red
lining. We have zoning. We have all these different things and it’s
about the powerful who happen to be politically powerful in a given time trying to impose
their view upon their fellow citizens and what – the kind of city that they would
like to live in which may not include you and your kind at least in my neighborhood.
Randal O’Toole: Well, I have a friend in
California named Joseph Perkins who’s a black radio talk show host and he says that
he looks at urban planning smart growth as the new Jim Crow. He says the Sierra Club is the new KKK because
they’re promoting these ideas and he goes to some place like Marin County, California
which is just north of San Francisco and has very strict urban growth boundaries and low
density zoning and he says he goes there and they – he goes to these hearings and people
are saying, “We want to keep those people out.” He said, “Well those people are people like
me.” But it isn’t just people of color.
It’s a class thing. They want to keep the working class out. We don’t like to talk about class in this
country much but there definitely is a class structure. You look at the progressives. They say, “Well, we care about the working
class.” Well you might care about the working class
but you don’t like their values. They play country Western music which you
hate. They drive around in big pick-ups. Trevor Burrus: They drink soda. Randal O’Toole: Yeah, they drink soda. Trevor Burrus: They smoke cigarettes. Randal O’Toole: They smoke cigarettes. They drink beer, not wine. Trevor Burrus: Budweiser … Randal O’Toole: And they support Donald
Trump and they oppose abortion and they do all the things that – you say you care about
them and yet your actual attitude is one of seething contempt.
Really zoning has always been about keeping
working class people out of middle class neighborhoods and the whole planning today is about OK,
we’re going to design transportation systems for the working class that will take them
to work so that they can serve us and then take them home to places different from where
we live and they can live a nice lifestyle in their high density apartment and walk down
the stairs and go shopping so they don’t have to shop in the same stores that we drive
to.
It sounds very idyllic if you … Trevor Burrus: Can afford it. Randal O’Toole: No. If you can afford to not live that way, if
you’re a middle class person. But it’s not idyllic for the working class. Trevor Burrus: So let’s talk about some
of these public transportation issues because I have this great classic Onion article because
it’s tied in with all these ideas that public transportation is something that – well,
the headline is Report: 98 Percent Of US Commuters Favor Public Transportation for Others and
we’ve had a spate of light rail, we’ve had streetcars and all these things have come
up which it seems like the people who make them are not really – they’re not using
them.
I expected them to probably not use them. They think other people should be using them. That seems to be a big story of public transportation. Randal O’Toole: Well, there’s a recent
story that – unfortunately it wasn’t in the Onion but it was an authentic story in
the Los Angeles Times that said despite the fact that we’re spending billions of dollars
on transit, transit ridership is declining and that’s true here in Washington DC as
well.
Transit ridership seems to have peaked about
just before the financial crash and it’s not really recovering since the financial
crash. Really transit has been on a downhill since
1960 or 1950, the end of World War Two. What we’re seeing is people plowing more
and more money into it and productivity is going down. The number of transit riders carried per transit
worker is steadily declining. The amount of money we spend to get one person
out of their car has gone from a dollar in 1960 to $25 or more today just to get one
person out of their car for one trip.
We build transit lines that are so expensive
that it would have been cheaper to give every single daily round trip rider on that transit
line a new Toyota Prius every single year for the rest of their lives than to keep running
that … Trevor Burrus: I’m laughing and crying at
the same time. Randal O’Toole: And there are a lot of forces
at work here. It started out in the 1970s. Congress had given cities the incentive to
take over private transit.
In 1965, almost all transit in America was
private. By 1975, it was almost all public. Congress had said to cities you take over
transit. We will pay for your new buses. We will pay for your capital costs. You just have to pay the operating costs. So cities took them over and then in 1973,
congress said, “Oh by the way, if you have an interstate freeway that’s planned in
your city and you decide to cancel it, you can take the capital cost of that freeway
and use it for transit capital investments.” Well, cities thought that was great except
for buses are so cheap that they couldn’t afford to operate all the buses that you could
buy for the cost of an interstate freeway. So then the mayor of Portland came up with
an idea. Let’s build a light rail line. That’s really, really expensive. That will absorb all the costs of the freeway
even though it’s only going to carry about a tenth of as many people as that freeway.
It will absorb all that cost and it won’t
cost that much more to operate than a bus. So we will be able to use that money and I
won’t be accused of costing the region jobs because we’re not building that freeway
because we’re building the light rail instead. Well, what happened was that created – that
transformed the transportation and construction industry. Almost everybody in the industry who was building
roads could easily transform into building light rail. So they didn’t care whether they were building
roads or rail or what.
They just wanted to build something and if
people wanted to build rail, that was fine with them and they became a lobby for rail. People have talked about the highway lobby. Today the rail construction lobby in Washington
DC is ten times richer than the highway lobby in Washington. Trevor Burrus: Do any of these light rails
pay for themselves? Randal O’Toole: No. First of all, no transit – public transit
pays for itself simply because it doesn’t have to because they’re all drawing on government
money. There are a few transit systems in this country
that do pay for themselves because they’re entirely private. They don’t get any subsidies. One is the Atlantic City Jitney. One is the New York Waterway. It’s a ferry system in New York City between
New Jersey and Manhattan. One is the publico, a jitney system in San
Juan, Puerto Rico. Actually carries more people than the public
transit system that was subsidized and encouraged more passenger miles.
There are private transit systems in some
cities that don’t regulate private transit operations that compete against public transit
and do so very effectively. Most cities however made it illegal to compete
against the public transit agency so they can just raise their costs with impunity and
charge at the taxpayers. Transit cost them – transit on average,
four times as much to move a person one mile as it does to drive a car that mile. Rail transit is far, far more expensive than
bus transit and … Trevor Burrus: I mean a bunch of politicians
choosing a bunch of options that are super expensive and bad at their job. I mean this wouldn’t be the first time this
has happened. But it’s so bad. You have to wonder like why this is even – I
mean light rail. When I’m home in Denver, I see the light
rail cruise by and let’s say there are about seven people on it and I wonder how much it
costs to just take these seven people, this length of – why are they doing that? I mean it’s just crazy ….
Randal O’Toole: Well, they say there are
several forces at work. One is that we’ve created a lobby for it
and others, thanks to that lobby, congress passed a law that created a $2 billion annual
fund to fund local rail projects. It’s called the New Starts Fund and there’s
no limit as to how much you can ask for from this. If you want highway money, you get an amount
that depends on the population of your state, the land area of your state, the road miles,
things that are beyond your control. But if you want money from this New Starts
Fund, the way to get more money is to build a more expensive project. So the average cost of light rail, the first
light rail line in America was built without federal funds in San Diego and it cost us
$10 million a mile after adjusting for inflation to today’s dollars. Today, the average light rail line is costing
$200 million a mile and there are cities that are planning and building light rail lines
that are costing over $600 million a mile.
So the race has been to come up with the most
expensive transit project you can get because that way you get the most federal dollars. That’s a rather perverse incentive. So we’ve got streetcars. The first streetcar project, streetcars are
supposed to be a cheap form of light rail. They started out at $20 million a mile which
is more expensive than the first light rail project but cheap compared to light rail today. Now Mayor de Blasio of New York has proposed
a streetcar and connecting Brooklyn and Queens. It’s going to cost over $150 million a mile. So we’ve got these enormously expensive
projects that aren’t going to carry very many people and as I say, it would have been
cheaper to just give the passengers Toyota Priuses and would have been better for the
environment to do that as well.
Trevor Burrus: When does public transportation
make sense then? Randal O’Toole: Public transportation I
think can make sense in Manhattan because it’s so dense. It has 2 million jobs in 7 square miles which
is far denser than anywhere else. The average density of jobs in most downtowns
is a tiny fraction of that. You could not – even driverless cars could
not bring two million people into Manhattan every morning and take them out every evening. So transit is an essential must there. Even there, transit today only pays half its
operating costs and none of it is capital or maintenance cost. I think if you privatized it and got rid of
a lot of the government bureaucracy and waste and requirements, that you could probably
turn the Manhattan New York Subway System into a for profit operation as it used to
be many years ago.
It was built privately of course. Outside of Manhattan, I don’t think transit
has a future because self-driving cars are going to replace people that can’t drive
today or don’t want to drive. We will be able to get a self-driving car. The next densest downtown area is Chicago. It has 500,000 jobs and today half of them
drive. The other half take transit but self-driving
cars will be able to double the capacity of the roads. So people will be able to get to those jobs
without any problem. Also if you stop subsidizing these downtowns
by building these and supporting these ridiculously expensive rail systems, you will see a diaspora
of jobs from downtown. It used to be most jobs are downtown. Now about 7.5 percent of all American jobs
are in downtown areas. We don’t need to have that kind of concentration
at all. Even Manhattan, if you go to the West Coast,
you will find finance areas that do the same kinds of financial work as Manhattan and they’re
in low density areas, low rise developments.
They don’t need high rises. Tom Clougherty: Randal, I want to press you
on something. In a sense, it’s your optimism about the
future in this regard because you’ve said in 10 years we will have self-driving cars. This is going to deal with a lot of our problems. We will have mileage-based user fees. This will deal with some more of our problems. But I’ve also heard driverless cars described
as the idea that’s always 10 years away and it’s always going to be. Of course I appreciate that technologically
speaking, we’re very close. In fact we might be just about there already. But do you see any big road blocks to driverless
cars? Can they be easily overcome or could we be
sitting here in 10 years’ time kind of having the same conversation? Randal O’Toole: The only potential road
block to driverless cars is government and insurance liability, people say that’s a
problem.
But it turns out it’s not a problem. The insurance companies have figured out how
to deal with that. They won’t sell insurance to you. They will sell it to the manufacturer of your
automobile or the software maker. So when you buy the software for your driverless
car, that will include insurance. Google has said, “We’re not worried about
liability problems because we have faith in our software.
Our software records everything all the time. So if we do have an accident, we will be able
to quickly figure out who’s at fault. If it’s our fault, we will fix it. We will pay the liability and we will fix
the software and make sure we never have an accident like that again.” Volvo has said much the same thing. So liability is not a problem. The only problem is government and here’s
a scenario that I’m afraid is going to happen. There are two modes of thought about driverless
vehicles, self-driving vehicles. One is that you put all the intelligence in
the car. You give the car excellent maps of everything
that it might encounter and you give the car sensors to sense motor vehicles, pedestrians
and other movable objects around.
So the car knows where it can go and knows
where it needs to avoid. You give the car a map of all potential parking
places so that you can tell the car to go park itself and so on and so forth. And with everything on board the car, you
don’t need to change the infrastructure at all. You can all use today’s streets. You can use today’s stop signs and traffic
signals and other signage and eventually a lot of those things will be able to fade away
as driverless cars take over. The other mode of thought is that driverless
cars will work best if they have infrastructure, if they have a system of communicating with
the infrastructures, so that instead of seeing a red light, the traffic signals send them
a radio signal saying to stop. Instead of looking at people’s cell phones
– when you have a cell phone and you’re looking at traffic patterns, you’re getting
information from other people’s cell phones. That’s a person to person communication
via Google or TomTom or whoever is the map maker.
They’re getting information from other people
who are using that technology and then sending it to you. Instead of having that happen, how the infrastructure
keep track of whether it’s congestion and then the infrastructure will tell you, “Oh,
there’s a traffic accident up ahead,” and tell your car to take a different route
or something like that. That’s called “vehicle to infrastructure
technology”. Now President Obama just announced that it’s
part of his budget for 2017. He wants to spend $3 billion on self-driving
cars and a lot of people cheered and said, “Yay, we’re going to have self-driving
cars quicker.” But no, he wants to spend it on the infrastructure
that is not necessary and will be obsolete very quickly because if you spend billions
of dollars putting in infrastructure, how easy is it going to be to change that infrastructure? Whereas if somebody buys a car and the technology
changes, it’s just a software upgrade to your car. So it’s easy to change it when it’s distributed. It’s hard to change when you’ve got this
infrastructure. So the danger is that not only will government
spend a few billion dollars putting this infrastructure on a few streets.
Then they will mandate that you can only run
a car in self-driving mode if the car is communicating with that infrastructure. That’s what I’m afraid of. That is what will be the obstacle to self-driving
cars because it will take forever for all the four million miles of roads in America
to get that infrastructure. Trevor Burrus: Well then it seems like you
also have the possibility of limiting the market for suppliers or producers of software
or driverless cars because it might be what will give the contract to one company who’s
going to interface with the infrastructure in the roads as opposed to letting people
produce cars that can do the same thing in many different ways. So that would be another problem. Randal O’Toole: Well, that’s really the
source of this problem is that there’s a lot of companies that like Google that are
investing in technologies that are putting all the intelligence in the car but then there’s
a lot of other companies that are investing in technologies that require the infrastructure. Trevor Burrus: And that’s the contract that
you give away.
Randal O’Toole: Yeah. There are other ones who are lobbying in Washington
to see that infrastructure type is mandated, to see at the very least what Obama wants
to do is a mandate that your new car be capable of communicating with that infrastructure. Not just use it but that it be capable of
using it. Trevor Burrus: Whoever gets that contract
is going to get a massive … Randal O’Toole: Right, right.
Trevor Burrus: It would be like a defense
contractor. It would be a huge amount of money. Randal O’Toole: And if we don’t mandate
that, then what we’re going to see is a lot of different schools of thought out there. We’ve got the Google car. We’ve got Volkswagen. We’ve got Volvo. We’ve got Ford. We’ve got a bunch of different cars trying
slightly different technologies. There’s a 26-year-old kid in California
who was the first person – when he was 17 years old, he was the first person to jailbreak
an iPhone worldwide and now he has developed his driverless car that learns from other
auto drivers. It’s a learning – it’s an artificially
intelligent car. So he doesn’t have to write millions of
lines of code to say OK, when you come to an intersection, you have to do such and such
before you turn.
When you see a bicycle, you have to do such
and such to avoid it. He just writes – he wrote 2000 lines of
code and from then on, the car just learns and that’s a different school of technology. He thinks he will be able to turn anybody’s
modern car, not an old car but a car that’s being made today with electronic steering
and electronic breaking and stuff like that into a driverless car for less than $1000. So once this technology is introduced provided
government doesn’t get in the way, you will see rapid retro fitting of old cars whether
it’s $1000 or $2000 or $500.
You will still see a rapid retro fitting. So you will see a rapid introduction of this
technology to a large number of vehicles. As I said, the danger is that government gets
in the way and tries to have a uniform technology that communicates with infrastructure that
will create two hazards. One is that we don’t install the infrastructure
and that whatever infrastructure we do install becomes obsolete. Second, that the uniform technology which
must communicate will be susceptible to hacks whereas if your car is … Trevor Burrus: Self-contained. Randal O’Toole: Self-contained, it doesn’t
have to communicate with anything.
It’s going to be very difficult to hack
because there’s nobody sending a signal to it except for the GPS and that it’s very
difficult to hack the GPS satellites. Trevor Burrus: It seems like we’re on the
cusp of a possibly profound change in human life that could be – well, the order of
the car which we … Randal O’Toole: On the order of the mass
produced car. Trevor Burrus: Yeah. Randal O’Toole: The initial car did nothing. I mean 1913, two percent of American families
or less had a car. By 1925, over half of American families had
a car thanks to the mass-produced … Trevor Burrus: Well, this changed with driverless
cars. We could be – this is like a moment in time
where we can start trying to learn the lessons that we’ve talked about today that we can
have the government come in, try and plan it out and try to make sure all this works
and what we’re going to get is probably expensive, not very useful, impossibly prone
to failure if we do this infrastructure thing or we can let human freedom do this and then
we can look back and say this is the – because the possibility seemed pretty endless of what
driverless cars – how they can change our lives and they make us better environmentally
and a bunch of things.
They can change a lot of things in our lives. Randal O’Toole: Absolutely. It will transform our lives. It will transform the calculus of travel. Most people have a travel budget that’s
not just a dollar budget but a time budget. We’re only willing to spend so many hours
a week traveling. Obviously you can’t travel 24 hours a day. But if – while you’re traveling, you can
work, if while you’re traveling you can entertain yourself, if you can play with your
kids, if you can teach your dog tricks while you’re traveling, well then suddenly we’re
going to travel a lot more.
It’s just going to be – half of Americans
say that what constrains them is time. What constrains their travel is time, not
money. Now what made the model T Ford successful
was that it could go anywhere there was a road or a street and we had a primitive but
widespread road structure and street structure at the time. Every city had lots of streets. They weren’t all paved. But they went everywhere in the city and then
there were a lot of interstate roads as well or intercity roads. The model T could use all of those and so
I say that to judge whether a new technology is going to work, the question is, “Is it
going to be able to use the existing infrastructure?” If it requires a lot new infrastructure, it’s
not going to work. That’s why high speed rail is not going
to work. It’s really expensive and it requires a
lot new infrastructure. That’s why streetcars and light rail and
vehicle-to-infrastructure communications aren’t going to work because they require a lot of
expensive infrastructure. It’s not only expensive to build.
It’s expensive to maintain. It’s expensive to keep it up-to-date whereas
if we can use the existing infrastructure, our four million miles of roads and streets
that we already have without any changes to them, self-driving cars can totally transform
how we use that, make it a lot more effective, faster, cheaper, safer and more convenient
than the transportation system we have today. I like to say transportation works best when
it’s “sexy”: speed, economy, convenience and safety, S-E-C-S, works best with transportation. Trevor Burrus: And stop having these plans
imposed upon us from people who think we should be living our lives in a different way. Randal O’Toole: People who wish that they
lived in 1920 in Paris and one that can create all of our cities to look like 1920 Paris
or 1950 Greenwich Village is really the model for urban planners today. Trevor Burrus: Free Thoughts is produced by
Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel.
To learn more, find us on the web at www.Libertarianism.org..