The San Luis Pass Bridge

I've caught some very nice fish underneath this bridge. It's good to know I won't need to scrounge up spare change to go over it anymore.

The days of fishing in the console for stray quarters when crossing the San Luis Pass bridge are numbered. Galveston County commissioners voted Monday to phase out the required $2 toll over the bridge, the Galveston County Daily News reported.

The motion passed 5-0 after Commissioner Joe Giusti, who put it on the agenda, reportedly said the toll's purpose of paying for the bridge had been fulfilled years ago. He added that the county could absorb the roughly $500,000 collected yearly from the tolls, more than half of which goes toward staffing the booth.

I always knew that the bridge's construction cost had long been paid off; I somehow assumed that tolls were being collected for the bridge's ongoing maintenance. I had no idea that the majority of those proceeds went to the collection staff itself. That doesn't sound like a particularly efficient use of those revenues, but the cash-only bridge was never a model of efficiency. In fact, it was a bit of a pain.

Notwithstanding the Bolivar ferry—of little use when heading back to Houston or Austin—the San Luis Pass bridge is the only land route off the island besides the I-45 causeway. Linking Galveston Island and Brazoria County, it draws extra attention from time to time when construction around the causeway causes horrific backups, like the one in February that had fuming drivers reportedly waiting up to five hours to get back on the mainland.

It probably should be pointed out that this bridge connects Galveston Island to another island - Follett's Island - and it's still another fifteen miles from this bridge to the State Highway 332 bridge in Surfside that connects Follett's Island to the Brazoria County mainland. This is something to keep in mind when using this bridge for, say, hurricane evacuations. 

Built in the 1960s after Hurricane Carla destroyed the previous one, the bridge may not be long for this world either way, according to the Daily News. In 2023, the Texas Department of Transportation rated it in poor condition, noting its deteriorating beams and cracked concrete.

The county is in the embryonic stages of raising the money necessary for a new bridge. Commissioners in February authorized Galveston County Judge Mark Henry to apply for federal grants that would cover most of the cost, the Daily News reported.

Sounds good to me, as long as the new bridge isn't tolled, and I can still catch nice reds and sheepshead underneath it.

Downtown Kim Son to close

Not surprising, but nevertheless depressing:

Just over a year after shutting down its Stafford location, Kim Son’s ownership confirmed that its flagship in East Downtown, 2001 Jefferson, will close sometime next year because of the Interstate 45 expansion project.

“They haven’t given us a date, but we know it’s coming,” said Tao La, who is the chief operating officer of his family’s Vietnamese restaurant. “It’s just a matter of time.”

I knew that Kim Son's iconic downtown location would have to make way for the North Houston Highway Improvement Project several years ago, when I first saw the conceptual schematic drawings for the project. Essentially, everything between Chartres and St. Emanuel Streets is going to have to be cleared for the reconstruction of I-45 around downtown. That means that a lot of restaurants and bars other than Kim Son are in the path of demolition as well:

The confirmation of Kim Son's latest closing follows a steady stream of announcements from restaurants affected by the I-45 project, a $10 billion-plus project that could span two decades of construction. 

In September, Agricole Hospitality blamed the upcoming work for closing two restaurants and a bar concept on St. Emanuel. Neil’s Bahr, 2006 Walker, expects to relocate and possibly reopen this winter at 3409 McKinney. Popular downtown cafe Tout Suite projected it will move to an East End-mixed use project next summer.

Kim Son has been in business in the area bordered by I-45 long before any of those restaurants, bars and cafes. 

When Kim Son opened in 1982, "EaDo" was referred to as Houston’s Chinatown. The family’s Vietnamese restaurant originally opened on St. Emanuel before moving to a small space on Pease Street, La said. 

The flagship restaurant on Jefferson opened in February 1993. The pagoda-like building was a sprawling 20,000 square feet with seating for 350 in the downstairs dining room and banquet rooms upstairs for up to 650 customers. The entry included a water feature with a 16-foot limestone fish pond teeming with goldfish.

Kim Son hosted countless weddings and banquets for decades. 

My family and I ate at Kim Son's small-yet-busy Pease location for as long as we can remember, and I remember how impressed we were with the palatial new space when it opened. We have frequented it many times since - bringing out-of-town guests, celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, or just enjoying a relaxed meal - so much so that we almost have the menu memorized.

As of right now a closing date for the restaurant has not been set, so diners will likely have several more months to eat at this location before TxDOT's wrecking balls arrive. Once the Jefferson location closes, Kim Son's lone remaining location will be on Bellaire Boulevard. However:

Depending on the construction work, Tao La said they may open a smaller Kim Son on land they own in the same area where their flagship restaurant has been open for over three decades.

“We have to move on to the next chapter, but we still want a presence,” Tao La said. “We can’t let that legacy go.”

I hope so, because I'm otherwise really going to miss those spring rolls. 

Americans don't trust self-driving cars

I've always felt that one of the biggest obstacles to the viability of autonomous vehicles would be public acceptance. To that point, this recent survey finding that 93% of Americans have concerns "about some aspect of self-driving cars" is illuminating:

Safety is the number one consumer fear when it comes to vehicles that drive themselves, with 36% of Americans indicating they do not trust the technology to keep motorists and pedestrians safe on the road.

Technology malfunctions come in a close second, with just over a quarter of consumers indicating they are most worried that autopilot technology will malfunction on the roads.

Reliability, cost, hacking, vehicle lifespan and privacy are also among the worries Americans share, although these issues are not nearly as pressing as fears about how autonomous vehicles will impact road safety.

These safety concerns reflect reality. Although autonomous vehicles are purported to be safer than human-driven vehicles (they don't get drunk, drowsy or distracted, after all), on a per-miles-driven basis they are actually more prone to accidents:

In fact, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reports that self-driving vehicles are more than twice as likely as traditional vehicles to become involved in auto accidents. According to NHTSA data:

There are 9.1 crashes in driverless vehicles per million vehicle miles driven

There are 4.2 crashes in conventional vehicles per million miles driven

High accident rates have rightly contributed to consumer concerns—and recent recalls of Tesla vehicles have only served to heighten fears.

Tesla—often considered a leader in autonomous driving with nearly two million cars across the U.S.—recently recalled nearly all of its autonomous vehicles.

Tesla’s recall comes after an NHTSA probe revealed nearly 1,000 accidents occurred when autopilot was engaged. It has prompted significant consumer concerns, with 62% of survey respondents indicating they are not confident in Tesla’s technology following the recalls.

It's worth pointing out that the Tesla "autopilot" feature that was the subject of the recall is not intended to be fully self-driving and requires the driver to be attentive and ready to take control of the vehicle at all times. But a lot of Tesla owners were obviously not using it correctly, and a safety advocacy group recently spent money on Super Bowl ads denouncing Tesla and calling for a boycott.

Problems with autonomous vehicles being able to operate safely and effectively are partly why Cruise pulled their self-driving cars off Texas streets last fall, after they caused traffic jams in Austin's West Campus and Houston's Montrose neighborhoods. The antipathy towards the disruption they sometimes cause is probably why a self-driving car in San Francisco was recently set ablaze as well.

Other findings of the survey, which was conducted on 2,000 Americans in January 2024, include:

• More than half (51%) of consumers are somewhat or very unlikely to own or use a self-driving vehicle in the next five years
• 61% of Americans wouldn’t trust a self-driving car with their loved ones or children
• Only 29% of consumers would be willing to pay a premium for a self-driving vehicle

In fact, according to the survey, only 30% of Americans actually are excited about self-driving vehicles in the future. The publishers of the survey conclude that "A widespread shift in public perception will be important if these vehicles are to become a dominant force in the U.S. auto market in the near future."

That's the way I see it, too. A decade ago, proponents of autonomous vehicles told us that the technology would be ubiquitous by now. Today, however, a future of self-driving cars looks further away than ever.

Robotaxi gridlock!

Coming to a city near you:

Over the weekend, photos and videos of yet another Cruise-induced robotaxi traffic jam spread across X (formerly Twitter). However, unlike the past incidents that have occurred largely in San Francisco, this one wasn't in California. Instead, it was in another of the country's tech hubs and in Tesla's backyard: Austin, Texas.

About 20 Cruise-operated Chevrolet Bolts were seen stuck up and down San Gabriel Street late Saturday night. Some had shifted into the oncoming side of the two-lane street, even forcing a pair of Cruise cars to face one another in some sort of autonomous stand-off, blocking traffic even further.

The actual cause of the jam remains unknown, though it's not uncommon for Cruise vehicles to become stuck and require human intervention—also known as a Vehicle Recovery Event. The individual who posted the photos and videos said they observed the Cruise workers trying to operate the cars via remote control to remediate the situation. A spokesperson hinted that the problem may have been related to pedestrian traffic, though the footage circulating social media does not show an abundance of people nearby during the gridlock.

The self-driving cars are currently in their testing phase in Austin, but it seems like the patience of local residents is also being tested:

The cars have also gotten stuck in crosswalks, at green lights, in intersections, and even played chicken with other Cruise vehicles. In fact, just have a look at the r/Austin subreddit and you'll quickly see how the self-driving experiment has tested the patience of locals.

"There's no city or county anything that is regulating them or overseeing what they are doing," said Travis County Judge Andy Brown, who once hailed a robotaxi and noted in that earlier KXAN report that his car pulled over and stopped in the street midway through the journey. "And the fact that it's in a testing phase but there's not the safeguard of a human in the front concerns me."

City council members are powerless, and the Austin Transportation and Public Works Department can't really do anything to stop Cruise from operating on its streets. Earlier this month, the department issued a memo noting that "Texas cities cannot regulate autonomous vehicles" as their authority is preempted by state law.

But that hasn't stopped residents from complaining about blocked intersections and interference with emergency services. The department has since reached out to equivalent bodies in Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington D.C. for advice.

We may be in for similar experiences here in Houston. Cruise has begun operating autonomous vehicles out of a large lot at the corner of West Alabama and Stanford, and I've seen the vehicles circulating on the streets of Midtown.

I've been following along as autonomous vehicles are being deployed and tested in real-world environments, and while I'm not aware of any more fatalities caused by their testing, the intermittent problems places like San Francisco and Austin are experiencing while these cars are being tested indicates that these cars are only as safe and as functional as their programming allows. So-called "Level 5" autonomy - which allows self-driving cars to operate in any environment and under any condition - is truly a very difficult thing to achieve and there's debate as to whether it's even possible at all. 

Which is why this technology is only now coming to Houston, and why malfunctions like those being experienced in other cities are likely to occur here as well as the slow process of testing and reprogramming these vehicles continues.

Why is Houston's traffic congestion so bad?

The Chronicle asks the question (as if Houston's traffic was ever "good"):

Every day, Houstonians commute to and from the growing suburbs that surround downtown. It's no secret that traffic congestion will play a significant part in most if not all commutes.

But, as one Chronicle reporter who wrote about her first experiences with Houston traffic wrote, even though every city complains about its traffic, Houston's traffic seems worse.

So why is Houston's traffic so bad?

Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) Senior Research Scientist David Schrank explains that motorist perceptions of traffic are relative: "(w)hat we don't know as motorists is that we are actually going six, seven miles an hour faster than we were a few years ago," he says. 

Schrank identifies three main reasons for Houston's traffic gridlock: construction projects that cause unexpected disruption to motorists' commutes, rapid growth that strains the region's roadway network with new people as well as the goods and services needed to support them, and changes to traffic patterns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and recovery:

Now, as commuters continue to switch to hybrid work environments, not only does traffic congestion increase but the variability of what days commuters go to work causes even more congestion, Schrank said.

"For example, Monday traffic is not nearly as bad as what Monday traffic used to be," Schrank said. "A lot of workers use Mondays as their work-from-home days, and what we're seeing is Tuesday through Thursday have taken more of the brunt of traffic."

Hybrid work also creates a situation where some people work from home in the morning and go into the office later in the day, or are summoned into the office for face-to-face meetings on days when they would normally work from home.

This creates what Schrank called "trip volatility" and it ultimately adds more time to commutes.

On top of that, the pandemic has created a bigger culture of food and package delivery that also creates traffic congestion, Schrank said.

The data on how much pandemic restrictions being lifted has affected traffic is still being built.

To Schrank's three reasons for congestion I'd also add a fourth: the city's legions of poor and/or reckless drivers that cause accidents that routinely snarl the city's freeways; unlike other causes of congestion, accidents have the potential to cause travel to come to a full and complete stop. A recent study has identified Texas as having the worst drivers in the nation, and the number of fatal traffic crashes in Houston has increased since the beginning of the pandemic.

Unfortunately, traffic congestion is simply a part of Houston life. If you can avoid it, by changing the times or routes you drive, teleworking, walking or bicycling, or using public transportation, great. But for most people in this sprawling, automobile-oriented city, that's simply not an option. 

The standard advice to commuters applies: give yourself plenty of time to get there, put on some relaxing music or an interesting podcast to listen to while you drive, and be courteous to your fellow drivers. After all, they're trying to get to work in one piece, just like you.

Houston's bad driving habits

Jay Jordan wants Houston drivers to stop sucking:

Everyone in Houston is guilty of a little bad driving now and then. Especially now that we’re out of practice, it’s easy to slip up once in a while and perform a traffic faux pas. But these bad driving habits show up day after day, week after week. They’re Houston’s unwritten surly rules of the road, and they need to come to an end. Please, make it stop.

Local driving practices that draw Jordan's ire are: crossing multiple lanes to exit a freeway, chasing down other drivers in fits of rage, not merging when one is supposed to, and driving slowly on the freeways:

The slow poke 

What’s just as bad as speeding 90 mph on the freeway? Driving under the speed limit.

I get that it’s completely legal to drive slower than the speed limit. That’s great and all, but is it right? No. The freeway is meant to facilitate high volumes of traffic efficiently, and puttering along at 45 mph isn’t helping anyone, even you.

Car isn’t fast enough? Don’t feel safe at highway speeds? Towing something? That’s great. Take the feeder roads and spare the rest of us.

This is especially true for people who drive slow in the left lane and is a supreme peeve of mine. If you're driving under the speed limit, or otherwise significantly below the flow of traffic, on a freeway, you are creating a safety hazard that is just as dangerous as somebody who is driving at excessive speed.

Houston motorists have other bad driving habits that Jordan could have mentioned as well, for example people who don't let you into their lane when you want to move over (it's like they see your turn signal and take it as a challenge), people who are too busy texting on their phones at traffic signals to notice that the light has turned green, or assholes who litter. When it comes to driving in this city, there's no shortage of bad behavior.

So why do Houston drivers tend to engage in such dangerous and sociopathic practices? I think a lot has to do with selfishness. People think that their trip is the most important one being undertaken on the city's roads; screw anybody who gets in their way! I'm not sure what can be done about it, either, short of massive law enforcement crackdowns that aren't going to happen because local police have more important things to do than pull over every slow driver or lane cutter.

Which means that we're just going to have to continue to put up with these shitty driving habits on our city's streets and highways. 

Be courteous and drive safely. Please.

Is rush hour over?

This NBC News segment from last week is notable for two reasons: first, it features Craig Raborn, the Houston-Galveston Area Council's* new Director of Transportation. Craig takes over as the Director of the local Metropolitan Planning Organization from Alan Clark, who retired last fall after serving as Director for 37 years.

Second, this segment alludes to one "great unknown" of life after the COVID-19 pandemic. Coronavirus has had an obvious effect on traffic, especially during rush hour commutes; but as it ends, and as people resume "normal" activities, will "rush hour" return? Or will people continue to work remotely, rendering rush hour as we know it obsolete?

  

If the pandemic has proven anything, it is that mass telework is possible, and businesses may choose to continue doing it even after the pandemic is over. That would suggest that there may be less rush hour traffic in the future.

On the other hand: after 13 months of working remotely, people might also be ready to get back into the office, to meet with their co-workers face-to-face, to not endure endless awkward Zoom and Teams meetings. If that's the case, then rush hour in late 2021 could be just as bad as it was in 2019. In fact, it could even be worse, if people decide that - even after the pandemic is over - they're not comfortable using carpools, vanpools, public transportation (or any other conveyance where they're in close proximity to other people) to get to work.

Nobody knows for sure what commuting patterns will look like once the pandemic ends. Hopefully we'll know the answer sooner rather than later. 

In the meantime, please get your vaccine once it becomes available to you.

*full disclosure: I am an employee of H-GAC and Craig is my boss's boss's boss.

Pandemic Link Dump

Passing along a handful of random articles and topics I've come across over the last month or so...

Urban freeways are a product of racial injustice, and its effects are still being felt here in Houston.  I've touched on this before, and in the wake of the protests for racial justice sparked by the murder of George Floyd, it's become a topic once again. Urban freeways were largely built through minority neighborhoods, dividing and displacing their inhabitants. Decades later, those scars remain:

Thousands of peaceful protesters in the Twin Cities occupied Interstate 94 over the weekend as they marched from the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul to Minneapolis. 

For the region’s African-American community, which has been leading the ongoing protests over the fatal arrest of George Floyd and the use of police force on black Americans, the concrete they were standing on bears significant meaning. 

It was this highway that, in the 1950s and ‘60s, tore apart the once-thriving neighborhood of Rondo — the heart of St. Paul’s largest African-American community — and helped spur decades of racial segregation in the region. 

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz acknowledged as much during a Saturday press conference. "It wasn’t just physical — it ripped a culture, it ripped who we were. It was an indiscriminate act that said this community doesn’t matter, it’s invisible,” he said. “This convenient place to put a highway so we can cross over this place and go from the city out to the suburbs.”

The once and future effects of these freeways remain a topic of controversy today, even here in Houston as TxDOT continues forward in it plan to reconstruct IH-45 north:

Members of the Houston-Galveston Area Council’s transportation advisory committee this week voted to keep portions of the I-45 project in the area’s short-term transportation plan, but with a host of caveats. Chief among those conditions is that the Texas Department of Transportation respond in detail to a set of requests from Houston planners outlining exactly what they can and cannot do to stay within the freeway’s existing boundary and agree in writing to protect displaced residents and businesses. 

The lack of clear commitments worries skeptics, who fear neighborhoods affected by the massive redesign from downtown north to Beltway 8, such as Northside, Independence Heights and Fifth Ward, will continue to bear the brunt of TxDOT and Houston’s highway expansion. For decades, neighborhoods along I-45, I-69 and I-10 north and east of downtown have felt the effects of living within shouting distance of the freeways, as mostly white officials routed the thoroughfares through black and Hispanic communities. 

“A vote on this project that continues those very systems of oppression, disparity and racial inequities without addressing the real problems is only supporting and continuing that system of racism,” said Oni Blair, a member of the transportation advisory committee and executive director of LINK Houston, an advocacy group that has organized opposition to the I-45 plan.

The IH-45 north rebuild provides an opportunity to improve the freeway while at the same time address the impacts that the freeway has historically had on adjacent communities. TxDOT needs to listen carefully, and not repeat the mistakes of the past:

“To leave I-45 as it is currently configured would be a mistake,” said Carol Lewis, director of Texas Southern University’s Center of Transportation Training and Research. 

Ignoring the issue of social justice would be, too, she said. TxDOT has gone to historic lengths to solicit comment but must now reconcile those concerns with its plans and the engineering analysis of how the new freeway and changes to it will affect how people and freight move. 

What is clear, Lewis said, is that TxDOT cannot brush aside how the freeways got where they are now. 

“I think historically TxDOT has been 100 percent guilty of being 100 percent insensitive,” Lewis said, noting what is now I-69 along the east side of downtown gutted Fifth Ward.

How do we get people back on the bus? I wrote a couple of months ago about the essential role of public transportation during the Coronavirus crisis. Now, as local economies reopen, transit agencies need to convince "non-essential" commuters that it is safe to start using transit again:

Masks are mandatory on subways and buses in Washington. San Francisco is betting longer trains will help riders social distance. Crews disinfect New York’s trains daily -- stations twice a day -- and are testing ultraviolet light devices to see if they kill Covid-19 on surfaces. 

As states gradually reopen, transit agencies are taking steps to coax back passengers who’ve been told for months to avoid just such tight quarters with strangers -- an effort that will ultimately influence the economic recovery. 

“For certain businesses teleworking isn’t really an option, so we still need to figure out ways to get those people to work,” said Ed Mortimer, vice president of transportation and infrastructure at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. 

Especially in urban areas, where many people don’t own cars, mass transit will be crucial to reviving economies. But enticing passengers back on board may require adding trains and buses so people can space themselves further apart -- adding stress to agencies already reeling from declining ridership and rising cleaning costs.

Public transportation might not be the disease vector it's feared to be, but it's understandable that people are going to be wary of crowding on board buses and trains with other strangers. Transit agencies are poised for a slow and difficult recovery, especially since people are likely to commute differently in a post-COVID world, and they probably need to re-think the way they provide service and define success both during and after the pandemic. That being said, our cities will not experience full economic recovery unless their transit networks also recover.

Could Houston become a climate policy leader? Maybe:

April was supposed to be a big month for Houston city planning. America’s largest unzoned city was poised to host the American Planning Association’s national convention for the first time, bringing thousands of attendees to town. Walking tours were arranged; awkward cocktail mixers were scheduled. 

Of course, with a global outbreak of the coronavirus, it wasn’t meant to be.

I cannot begin to express how much I was looking forward to the APA's National Planning Conference being here in Houston, as I had never attended this event before. Likewise, I cannot begin to express how bummed I was when it was canceled in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic. I hope the APA makes plans to return to Houston with this is all over.

Undeterred, Houston quietly adopted the Bayou City’s first citywide climate action plan on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. If city leaders can pull it off, America’s sprawling oil capital could end up teaching a lot to more traditionally green urban strongholds.

The city's climate action plan is intended to be a blueprint to Houston reducing its impact on the environment. Given the city's characteristics - the refineries, the sprawl - that's going to be a challenge, so the plan includes both standard and innovative elements.

The plan includes plenty of mainstay climate-policy prescriptions, including calls to electrify the city’s fleet of vehicles, switch to renewable sources of energy, and improve energy efficiency in buildings. But then things become rather unique. The city’s first bicycle master plan, adopted in 2017, gets a lot of play, as does the MetroNEXT Moving Forward plan, a widely lauded $3.5 billion push to overhaul mass transit in the notoriously auto-oriented city. The emphasis on mobility makes sense, since nearly one-third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation, and Houston maintains one of the highest rates of automobile use in the country. 

Toward this same end, one of the plan’s more innovative proposals calls on policymakers to eliminate minimum parking requirements by 2030. While Houston famously lacks zoning — meaning that it doesn’t segregate uses or restrict densities — it still enforces some conventional land-use regulations. These include minimum parking requirements, which mandate that developers build off-street parking for each project, regardless of actual demand. In Houston, this can mean up to two parking spaces for every apartment or four spaces for every thousand square feet of office space.

Houston's lack of zoning, furthermore, might make it easier for the city to redevelop in a sustainable manner, featuring more walkable, mixed-use, higher-density development, than other cities that are incumbered by an onerous development process that is subject to NIMBY interference.

The city has a long way to go before it becomes anyone’s idea of an environmental exemplar. But if all goes according to plan, Houston could soon rank among those cities that have scrapped out-of-date parking requirements — a group that conspicuously doesn’t include progressive stalwarts like Portland and New York City. In a city otherwise famous for its supposed lack of planning, easing up on the right rules might just turn Houston green.

Stay tuned.

"The right thing - just at the wrong time." Take a few minutes to read this excellent XFL postmortem by ESPN's Kevin Seifert. The article takes a look at why the well-funded league suddenly folded (it might not have been completely due to Coronavirus), it's prospects for revival, and the potential for spring football generally:

"We still don't know that spring football works in this country," said Andrew Kline, founder of the investment bank Park Lane, which specializes in sports investments. "Football season is so intense, and it's just associated with the fall season. You wonder if part of the cycle is that people need to come down from it for a while."

I'm obviously a fan of spring football, but its track record is dismal, and as even as the XFL winds its way through bankruptcy proceedings, I'm skeptical that we'll ever see another Houston Roughnecks game again. At any rate, it appears that we could have to go for awhile without any football at all. Which will make my fall miserable, to say the least.

The removal of Confederate statues and monuments should not be a "liberal" endeavor. I can't believe I'm actually linking to Rich Lowry in the National Review, but in this case he's right:

Conservatives […] reflexively oppose politically correct campaigns to destroy anything giving offense. 

They fear where the slippery slope of woke iconoclasm will lead — first it’s Jefferson Davis, ultimately George Washington. 

They value tradition and worry we are trashing part of our history.This impulse, though, is a mistake. Confederate statues and symbols deserve to be reevaluated, and often mothballed. 

The statues are an unnecessary affront to black citizens, who shouldn’t have to see defenders of chattel slavery put on a pedestal, literally. 

It is impossible to evaluate these monuments without considering the context of why they were created. Many of them were erected as part of the push to enshrine a dishonest, prettied-up version of the Confederacy.

Lowry ends by noting that "secession was a traitorous act that threatened to destroy the American nation, to create a rump republic built on slavery, and to make impossible the subsequent rise of the United States to a world power." Liberals and conservatives alike should understand the fact that the Confederate States of America was, quite simply, a racist and treasonous enterprise that was defeated over a century and a half ago.

I occasionally come across the argument that the removal of Confederate statues and monuments is somehow "erasing history." This is bullshit. There are no monuments to Hitler or Rommel or Göring in Germany, but we still know that county's history - a history the German people of today most certainly do not want commemorate.

These statues and monuments belong in museums, battlefields, and military cemeteries. They do not belong in our parks, our squares or our capitol grounds.

Last but not least, congratulations to Liverpool.

Road work ramps up as a city shuts down

There could be a (small) silver lining to Houston's Coronavirus-related economic hiatus:

A lighter load on Houston-area freeways and COVID-19 concerns have not slowed the heavy machinery making way for more lanes or new ramps along many of the routes seeing unprecedented drops in traffic.

Some crews will even ramp up work as traffic takes a coronavirus-induced holiday.

“Lighter traffic on our roadways potentially presents some opportunities to advance some of our work, and that is being assessed on a case-by-case basis,” said Raquelle Lewis, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Transportation in Houston. 

All TxDOT projects remain active, Lewis said.

Houston Public Works and contractors on city jobs also remain out tying steel, pouring concrete and smoothing asphalt, Public Works spokeswoman Erin Jones said this week.

Of course, this is only for projects already in progress. Given how Coronavirus is affecting the business environment, it will be more difficult to prepare construction documents and bids, gather materials and manpower, and complete other tasks needed in order to undertake new projects.

(I should know. I tried to have an online meeting with TxDOT staff earlier today about a future planning study. It was a comedy of errors of lagging computers, reverbing microphones, and malfunctioning "virtual" computer displays. We continue to have actual, in-person meetings in this day and age precisely because they do not "malfunction." I don't think technology will ever replace the primacy and legibility of actual, physical interpersonal interaction.)

There’s also the question as to how work crews will be able to stay healthy and practice "social distancing" while still getting construction tasks completed.

All in all, however, it's generally a good thing that projects intended to improve mobility can be accelerated (and hopefully be closer to completion) by the time the city's traffic returns. It's also good that, even as so many businesses are shuttered and workers sidelined during this crisis, the region's construction workers will still be receiving a paycheck.

I also thought this tidbit was interesting:

Automobile traffic may be down, but bike use in Houston appears to be surging. Trips on Houston B-Cycle — each time one of the bicycles was checked out from a kiosk — were 51 percent higher from Feb. 23 to Tuesday, compared with last year, bike share officials said.

“It’s often more than one factor,” B-Cycle spokesman Henry Morris said. “Personally, I think the combination of good weather, spring break, school and work closures, and the need for solo or small group transportation/recreation options because of social distancing rules are all contributing to the rise in trips.”

Gyms also are closed, leading many to venture out in the pleasant weather.

This is good news. Between the reduction in automobile traffic as well as the nice spring weather, now’s probably a perfect time for a bike ride. As long as bicyclists sanitize the bikes before or after each use and stay six feet apart from each other, of course…

Autonomous vehicles will only be as safe as their software

About a year and a half ago, an autonomous vehicle being tested in Arizona struck and killed a pedestrian. It was the first-ever fatality involving a self-driving car. Now, we may know why this incident occurred: the vehicle's software didn't know that humans could jaywalk:

The software inside the Uber self-driving SUV that killed an Arizona woman last year was not designed to detect pedestrians outside of a crosswalk, according to new documents released as part of a federal investigation into the incident. That’s the most damning revelation in a trove of new documents related to the crash, but other details indicate that, in a variety of ways, Uber’s self-driving tech failed to consider how humans actually operate.

As it turned out, the vehicle's software did detect the victim, 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, with more than enough time to stop, but did not do so because it did not recognize that Herzberg was, in fact, a human. (The car did have a human back-up driver, Rafaela Vasquez, but she didn't see Herzberg until it was too late.)

It never guessed Herzberg was on foot for a simple, galling reason: Uber didn’t tell its car to look for pedestrians outside of crosswalks. “The system design did not include a consideration for jaywalking pedestrians,” the NTSB’s Vehicle Automation Report reads. Every time it tried a new guess, it restarted the process of predicting where the mysterious object—Herzberg—was headed. It wasn’t until 1.2 seconds before the impact that the system recognized that the SUV was going to hit Herzberg, that it couldn’t steer around her, and that it needed to slam on the brakes.

That triggered what Uber called “action suppression,” in which the system held off braking for one second while it verified “the nature of the detected hazard”—a second during which the safety operator, Uber’s most important and last line of defense, could have taken control of the car and hit the brakes herself. But Vasquez wasn’t looking at the road during that second. So with 0.2 seconds left before impact, the car sounded an audio alarm, and Vasquez took the steering wheel, disengaging the autonomous system. Nearly a full second after striking Herzberg, Vasquez hit the brakes.

Self-driving vehicles will only be as safe as the design of the systems, sensors and software upon which they operate. The software design flaw that occurred in this case - an inability to recognize a human outside of a marked crosswalk - is so obvious as to beggar belief, and makes me wonder how many less-obvious but nevertheless lethal programming errors might still be imbedded in Uber's self-driving software. This is one of many reasons why we still have a long way to go before self-driving cars become commonplace on streets and highways.

Uber settled a lawsuit with Herzberg's family shortly after her death, and has made changes to its safety program for automated vehicle testing.

There's also this tidbit:

Another factor in the crash was the Tempe road structure itself. Herzberg, wheeling a bicycle, crossed the street near a pathway that appeared purpose-built for walkers, but was 360 feet from the nearest crosswalk.

Yikes! Along with the safety of autonomous vehicles themselves, we cannot ignore the design of the environment in which they - and the pedestrians and bicyclists they are supposed to detect - travel. The safe deployment of self-driving cars could require significant and expensive modifications to streets, sidewalks, pathway and bikeways.

A lot of work remains to be done.

The legal supremacy of the automobile

In the United States, people are compelled to use the private automobile to fully participate in our society. Those that, for whatever reason, cannot or do not operate their own vehicle are essentially second-class citizens. University of Iowa law professor Gregory Shill aregues that this is by legal design:

It’s no secret that American public policy throughout the 20th century endorsed the car—for instance, by building a massive network of urban and interstate highways at public expense. Less well understood is how the legal framework governing American life enforces dependency on the automobile. To begin with, mundane road regulations embed automobile supremacy into federal, state, and local law. But inequities in traffic regulation are only the beginning. Land-use law, criminal law, torts, insurance, vehicle safety regulations, even the tax code—all these sources of law provide rewards to cooperate with what has become the dominant transport mode, and punishment for those who defy it. 

Let’s begin at the state and local levels. A key player in the story of automobile supremacy is single-family-only zoning, a shadow segregation regime that is now justifiably on the defensive for outlawing duplexes and apartments in huge swaths of the country. Through these and other land-use restrictions—laws that separate residential and commercial areas or require needlessly large yards—zoning rules scatter Americans across distances and highway-like roads that are impractical or dangerous to traverse on foot. The resulting densities are also too low to sustain high-frequency public transit.

Further entrenching automobile supremacy are laws that require landowners who build housing and office space to build housing for cars as well. In large part because of parking quotas, parking lots now cover more than a third of the land area of some U.S. cities; Houston is estimated to have 30 parking spaces for every resident. [More on this in a moment.] As the UCLA urban-planning professor Donald Shoup has written, this mismatch flows from legal mandates rather than market demand. Every employee who brings a car to the office essentially doubles the amount of space he takes up at work, and in urban areas his employer may be required by law to build him a $50,000 garage parking space.

Working in the transportation planning profession, I frequently hear the claim that private automobile use is the dominant form of transportation because "people love their cars," and that attempts to plan and promote alternative forms of transportation, such as pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure or more public transportation, are at best frivolous and at worst wasteful because "nobody chooses to use" them. As Shill points out, however, the automobile's dominance in our society isn't so much a "choice" but rather a "necessity" promogulated by almost a century's worth of policies that have favored its use over all other forms of transportation.

In addition to the factors he described above, Shill goes on to list policies such as tax deductions for mortgages and parking, design standards for vehicles, insurance requirements, and criminal law as examples that have prioritized the automobile. He continues:

Since the dawn of the automobile, governments have been slow to address its downsides. “We have gloated too much over the usefulness of the motor car,” said The New York World in a 1913 editorial. “We put it into reckless hands. We make no effective laws against its misuse.”

In the years since, American government at all levels crossed a line. Instead of merely accommodating some people’s desire to drive, our laws essentially force driving on all of us—by subsidizing it, by punishing people who don’t do it, by building a physical landscape that requires it, and by insulating reckless drivers from the consequences of their actions. To page through the law books today is to stumble again and again upon evidence of automobile supremacy. The range and depth of legal supports for driving is bewildering. But these laws, which are everywhere we look, are also opportunities.

Shill argues that all of these policies and laws encouraging and enforcing automobile supremacy could be reversed by the legislative bodies that enacted them to begin with, whether at the local, state or federal level. At the local level, zoning ordinances are one such example; city leaders could relax and reform these rules if they had the will to do so.* Other local ordinances that favor automobile use pertain to minimum parking regulations; in fact, and in regards to Houston and its parking-space-per-resident ratio that Shill mentioned earlier, City Council took a (small) step towards addressing that issue last week when it voted to exempt Midtown and the East End from the minimum parking regulations that the city imposes on development:

Market-based parking exempts areas from the citywide parking minimums, allowing property owners to provide the number of off-street parking spaces "they believe are necessary to service their customers," according to the planning department. "This change gives property owners more flexibility in the use o their property and removes a bureaucratically-imposed minimum that is based on one-size-fits-all analysis." The area, notes the planning department, has "sufficient multimodal transportation system, high transit ridership, and the existence of significant surface and parking garage spaces."

The expansion was supported by the East Downtown Management District and the Midtown Management District.

Even so, the "we need parking minimums because nobody chooses to walk" argument still made an appearance, courtesy of one councilmember who doesn't even represent any of the areas being exempted:

Councilmember Greg Travis, the only council member to vote against the amendment, insisted parking spaces were necessary because people wouldn't walk to destinations. "Today? Walk for two blocks, it's not going to happen."

In response, Mayor Sylvester Turner was quick to point out that the majority of businesses in the affected areas were supportive. The Kinder Houston Area Survey, meanwhile, has tracked the increasing desire for walkable urbanism among Houston-area residents.

Look: no realistic person is going to argue that private automobiles don't provide tremendous advantages when it comes to personal convenience, comfort and mobility. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't question the countless hours of our lives wasted by the congestion they cause, the 40,000 people killed every year by their use, the way they dictate our physical environment, or the way they essentially relegate those who don't own or operate them to second-class citizenship. It's well past time we as a society re-examined the laws and policies enacted at all levels of government that mandate automobile supremacy.

* I'd like to see more cities abandon conventional land-use zoning ordinances not only because they necessitate driving but also because they have become horribly misused. What started out as a way to protect residences from nuisance uses (e.g. factories, junkyards, slaughterhouses) has evolved into a tool to enforce socioeconomic exclusion. I witnessed this when I worked as a zoning officer in Denton and I am glad Houston does not have it (even though the lack of zoning obviously did not prevent Houston from becoming an automobile-dominated metropolis).

Is Uber in trouble?

Uber has become ubiquitous, as people have come to rely on the app-based transportation networking company to provide a ride to the airport, or from the bar, or as an easy and convenient form of mobility in general. But it is also hemorrhaging money: it posted a $1 billion loss last quarter, after losing $4.5 billion in all of 2017. Uber presents itself as a "techy" business concept, but is its fundamental practice sustainable over the long haul?

Uber has never presented a case as to why it will ever be profitable, let alone earn an adequate return on capital. Investors are pinning their hopes on a successful IPO, which means finding greater fools in sufficient numbers.

Uber is a taxi company with an app attached. It bears almost no resemblance to internet superstars it claims to emulate. The app is not technically daunting and and does not create a competitive barrier, as witnessed by the fact that many other players have copied it. Apps have been introduced for airlines, pizza delivery, and hundreds of other consumer services but have never generated market-share gains, much less tens of billions in corporate value. They do not create network effects. Unlike Facebook or eBay, having more Uber users does not improve the service.

Nor, after a certain point, does adding more drivers. Uber does regularly claim that its app creates economies of scale for drivers — but for that to be the case, adding more drivers would have to benefit drivers. It doesn’t. More drivers means more competition for available jobs, which means less utilization per driver. There is a trade-off between capacity and utilization in a transportation system, which you do not see in digital networks. The classic use of “network effects” referred to the design of an integrated transport network — an airline hub and spoke network which create utility for passengers (or packages) by having more opportunities to connect to more destinations versus linear point-to-point routes. Uber is obviously not a fixed network with integrated routes — taxi passengers do not connect between different vehicles.

Nor does being bigger make Uber a better business. As Hubert Horan explained in his series on Naked Capitalism, Uber has no competitive advantage compared to traditional taxi operators. Unlike digital businesses, the cab industry does not have significant scale economies; that’s why there have never been city-level cab monopolies, consolidation plays, or even significant regional operators. Size does not improve the economics of delivery of the taxi service, 85 percent of which are driver, vehicle, and fuel costs; the remaining 15 percent is typically overheads and profit. And Uber’s own results are proof. Uber has kept bulking up, yet it has failed to show the rapid margin improvements you’d see if costs fell as operations grew.

The article, which is worth reading in its entirety, explains that Uber has undercut traditional taxi companies not because it is a better product, but because the $20 billion in investor funding that it has raised over time has allowed it to subsidize its customer base, giving it a competitive advantage over taxi companies that must recover all their costs. Compared to taxi companies, however, Uber is actually at a disadvantage in the long term: it has higher overhead costs, and it cannot manage schedules or capacity to optimize efficiency. The considerable data Uber collects about the rides it provides, moreover, does not appear to have made much difference in terms of its profitability.

Uber’s struggle to turn a profit has also had a negative impact on its drivers:

While Uber has reduced its negative gross margin over time, those improvements have come mainly from squeezing driver compensation, so that they now net less per hour on average than taxi operators. Through 2015, 80 percent of fares went to drivers. In its early years, Uber gave drivers high payouts to attract good drivers and also offered drivers incentives to buy cars. Uber cut that to as low as 68 percent, then partially reversed it as driver turnover became acute to its current, roughly 70 percent level. In 2017, Uber’s margin as reported using GAAP was a negative 57 percent. It would have stayed at the negative triple-digit level absent the driver pay-throttling.

The pay cuts have led to more driver turnover, which leads to higher managerial costs. And it is degrading service quality.

But what if Uber were to get rid of their drivers entirely? Autonomous vehicles would surely allow the company to begin turning a profit, right?

But what about driverless cars? Let’s put aside that some enthusiasts like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak now believe that fully autonomous cars are “not going to happen.” Fully autonomous cars would mean Uber would have to own the cars. The capital costs would be staggering and would burst the illusion that Uber is a technology company rather that a taxi company that buys and operates someone else’s robot cars.

The article doesn’t mention that there’s evidence that TNCs such as Uber may contribute to congestion and may negatively impact public transportation. Granted, those are probably not things investors care about when they put money into Uber: they're simply looking for a return on that investment. Unfortunately, Uber has failed miserably in that regard:

Uber has succeeded in getting the business press to treat its popularity as the same as commercial success. A few tech reporters, like Eric Newcomer of Bloomberg, have politely pointed out that Uber’s results fall well short of other tech illuminati prior to going public. The pitch that dominance would produce profits is demonstrably false and Uber seems unable to come up with a new story. There’s every reason to think that investors, not local cab companies, will wind up being Uber’s biggest roadkill.

I wonder how many of Uber's users and drivers even understand how unsustainable Uber's business model is. I'd hate for all of them to have to find out the hard way.

Revisiting the Claiborne

Following up on a post from several years ago where I discussed the future of the Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans, including the possibility of it being torn down and replaced by an urban boulevard: it turns out that the Claiborne probably won't be coming down anytime soon; instead, the neighborhoods through which the freeway runs are claiming and repurposing the space underneath:

For nearly a half-century, people have mourned how this raised section of federal highway sliced through more than two miles of the city’s historically black neighborhoods, dooming Claiborne Avenue’s thriving business corridor. (Tulane’s School of Architecture has an image gallery that juxtaposes before/after pictures of the Corridor.) 

Today, the outermost pillars along this stretch of Claiborne Avenue are painted to look like trees, while about 40 of the inner pillars are the canvas for original paintings by some of the city’s finest artists. They were created as part of a project called “Restore the Oaks,” spearheaded by painter and teacher Richard Thomas through the city’s New Orleans African American Museum of Art and Culture. 

The result is an open-air art gallery that reflects the live oaks, people and culture of Claiborne Avenue, Tremé, the 7th Ward and New Orleans as a whole. Those strolling under the elevated highway on ground-level asphalt can walk past both Charlie Johnson’s and Charlie Vaughn’s images of Big Chief Allison “Tootie” Montana, the famed Black Masking Indian who lived a few blocks away. They can view a detailed image of a typical jazz funeral, painted in by Nat Williams, who works as a barber nearby. 

“We were given sour lemons and what happened? We kept our culture. We evolved,” says Mona Lisa Saloy, a highly celebrated poet and English professor who is active in the neighborhood. 

The pillars are just one of the ways that the neighborhood has sought to make the best of what was forced upon them. Whenever social aid and pleasure clubs pass underneath the highway, during funerals or Sunday-afternoon second lines, horns point upward and play a triumphant call-and-response flourish. Inadvertently, highway crews fashioning this concrete box created a makeshift urban cathedral that broadens a brass band’s sound and sends it across the neighborhood. Saloy describes the effect as “joy multiplied.”

The space "under the bridge" is set to get even more upgrades by way of the Claiborne Corridor Cultural Innovation District, which bills itself as "a 25-Block transformation of the elevated I-10 expressway along Claiborne Avenue from Canal Street to Elysian Fields Avenue."

Informed by a series of 11 design charrettes held with residents and architects from May 2017 to February 2018, the master plan sets out to beautify the corridor while increasing jobs and economic stability through innovations such as a marketplace built with green infrastructure, which will run within a 25-block segment of the corridor.

Cosmetic work on the corridor has already begun, as part of a demonstration phase made possible thanks to an $820,000 construction grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration, matched with operational support from Ford Foundation, Chase Global Philanthropy, Surdna Foundation, Kresge Foundation and Greater New Orleans Foundation. Through a contract with the city, fiscal sponsor Foundation For Louisiana has raised money and helped to form a separate entity, Ujamaa Economic Development Corporation, that runs the daily operations of the Claiborne Innovation Corridor. Construction on the public market is slated to begin early in 2019 and wrap up by that fall.

It turns out that the Claiborne has not been taken down because the surrounding communities could not reach consensus on its demolition. A variety of concerns came into play:

When Saloy looked at the data assembled for Claiborne Corridor planning meetings, she wasn’t pleased with the level of traffic projected to travel along Claiborne at ground level if the freeway were demolished. With a grimace, she envisioned, the projected 10,000 cars jamming city streets, complete with 18-wheelers and rumbling dump trucks. Economic data was even more alarming, she says, noting that other cities had seen exponential increases in housing costs after freeways came down and were replaced by greenways, markets and new developments. 

An instructive example would come later, from a few miles away, after St. Roch Market, damaged and shuttered after Katrina, reopened as an upscale food market in 2014. Taxes on nearby properties taxes tripled and even quadrupled, according to DeVan Ecclesiastes. 

The results of those discussions were captured in the “Livable Claiborne Communities Study,” a report published after the workshops and meetings supported by the 2010 planning grant. That report contained multiple scenarios, some in which the I-10 overpass stayed and some in which it came down. 

In the end, after the Livable Claiborne process was complete, it became clear, through surveys, focus groups and public discussions, that there was no consensus to demolish the bridge. Instead, neighbors opted to keep speculators and displacement at bay by holding on to their hulking overhead neighbor. “You take the monster away and it will be total gentrification. People will build things and they will not build them for us,” Saloy says. 

It was a tough decision. For some, the deciding factor was the estimated $300-million demolition price tag, which was required to demolish the bridge structure and re-design the city streets that would carry re-routed traffic. People decided that they’d rather see that money spent to stabilize the existing neighborhood with jobs, transportation and flood protection.

The surrounding community's failure to reach consensus regarding removal of the Claiborne, as well as the creation of a master plan to actually enhance the spaces underneath and around it, should be taken into consideration by the freeway removal movement: it is one thing to draw attention to the damage and division that urban freeways forced upon our nation's urban neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s and look for ways to mitigate those harms; it is something else to casually insist to those same neighborhoods that removal of that freeway is the only recourse. For all the ugly faults of the urban freeway, the "space underneath" might actually be a community asset, and the unknowns that come with its removal could be worse.

I'll continue to follow the story of the Claiborne Expressway with interest.

Why there isn't an Interstate between Houston and Austin, and why there won't be one anytime soon

In spite of its size and its extensive highway network, Texas is one of only eight states in the union that does not have an Interstate highway directly linking its largest city to its capital city* (that is, in states where those two cities are not one in the same, e.g. Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, etc.). The Austin American Statesman's Ben Wear explains why:

Plans for a national grid of superhighways had been kicking around for at least 20 years before Congress in 1956 managed to pass a landmark bill, signed by President Dwight Eisenhower, that funded the final engineering and construction of such a system. President Franklin Roosevelt, according to “The Big Roads,” a history of the interstate system published a few years ago, in the late 1930s sketched out his version of an interstate system from his Oval Office desk.

And the plain fact is that when this routing work was going on, Austin didn’t have the people or the prominence it does now. San Antonio in 1955 had almost 500,000 people, while Austin had 160,000 and virtually no industry to produce the sort of truck traffic that was to be a major user of this cross-country highway system.

San Antonio did.

“That’s where the traffic wanted to go,” said Richard Ridings, a senior vice president with the venerable engineering firm HNTB Corp. The company was deeply involved in the original design of the interstates, said Ridings, who has been working in civil engineering for 55 years. And anyone looking at the big picture back then would have started with the port of Houston and its cargo headed inland.

“They wanted to get that stuff north, and they wanted to get it west and east,” Ridings said. “At the time, Austin was almost an afterthought.”

Since that time, of course, things have changed: San Antonio now has 2.5 million people, but Austin has grown into a considerable metropolis of its own, with 2.1 million inhabitants - larger than the municipalities of San Francisco, Boston, Denver or Washington, DC - and a thriving, tech-focused economy. 

So maybe it's time for TxDOT to consider finally making that Interstate connection between Houston and Austin. The easiest way to do that would be to upgrade either US 290 or State Highway 71 - both of which are already mostly divided highways - into an Interstate, right? After all, there are already a few stretches of Highway 71 - the bypass around La Grange being an example - that appear to have been built to Interstate standards. 

Well, it's actually a lot harder than it sounds:

The U.S. interstate system was essentially built out by 1990, although there have been some additions in the years since. But turning Texas 71 into an interstate between Austin and Columbus, a distance of about 90 miles, would be tremendously expensive and disruptive. 

Interstates have certain standards of curvature and slope that could require some rerouting, but, most of all, interstates are what is known as controlled-access highways. Meaning, no driveways. If you want to get on or off an interstate, you have to take a ramp. 

That means that either no businesses, homes, farms or ranches can connect directly to the highway for miles at a time or, as is the case on Interstate 35 through the heart of the state, there are frontage roads. 

Texas 71, other than in Austin and through Bastrop’s commercial district, has no frontage roads. And it has scads of roads and private drives entering it throughout the other, more rural sections. So to turn it into interstate now would require TxDOT not only to acquire a lot of right of way for what would be a wider highway in many places, but also to pay some property owners for lost access to the road. 

Or, more likely, to build many, many miles of frontage roads. Either way, the cost would be enormous. This isn’t a project that’s going to happen in the foreseeable future.

There's also, of course, the issue of what an Interstate between Houston and Austin would be numbered, because Interstate 12 already exists and Interstate 14 has recently been taken. 

TxDOT's near-term plan, instead, is to upgrade SH 71 at major intersections by creating grade separations, thereby eliminating congestion and delay caused by traffic lights.

Right now, there are just five traffic signals left on Texas 71 between Interstate 35 in South Austin and I-10 in Columbus, all of them between Austin and Bastrop. And TxDOT has engineering plans and money set aside to eliminate four of those lights by adding overpasses over the next four years. The fifth one — at FM 1209 just west of Bastrop — is in the cross hairs as well, but the timing of its removal is less certain, TxDOT Austin district engineer Terry McCoy told me.

Speaking as somebody who traveled between Houston and Austin on a regular basis when I was a graduate student in the late '90s, I'm glad that TxDOT finally replaced the interminable gauntlet of traffic lights west of Bastrop with an actual freeway section. More recently, TxDOT has been working on Highway 71 on the east side of Austin, creating overpasses (albeit tolled ones) in the vicinity of Bergstrom Airport that allow motorists to avoid traffic lights. 

TxDOT has set aside $48 million to build overpasses at Ross and Kellam — work set to begin as soon as fall 2019 and be done by summer 2021 — and $52.6 million for overpasses at Tucker Hill and Pope Bend. That second set of projects, TxDOT hopes, will start in fall 2020 and be done by summer 2022. All of this, TxDOT officials caution, could be delayed somewhat by environmental clearance work and acquisition of right of way.

The FM 1209 overpass, TxDOT estimates, would cost an additional $35 million. That money has not been nailed down.

McCoy, by the way, said he would like to make similar progress on U.S. 290, the northern route to Houston, but it has far more traffic signals standing in the way.
So, something like five years from now, a driver might be able to get to and from Houston on Texas 71 without hitting a red light.

That’s assuming, of course, that yet another traffic signal or three aren’t added in the meantime.

Upgrading State Highway 71 (and US 290, for that matter) to an Interstate-standard highway will be a long, slow, piecemeal process, kind of like we're currently seeing with Interstate 69. It may happen one day, but it won't be anytime soon.

* Alaska (no Interstates to begin with, and Juneau is geographically isolated), Florida (requires two Interstates to travel between Tallahassee and Miami), Missouri (Jefferson City is not connected to an Interstate), Montana (requires two Interstates to travel between Helena and Billings), Nevada (Carson City has a relatively new Interstate connection to Reno, but not Las Vegas), North Carolina (requires two Interstates to travel between Raleigh and Charlotte), South Dakota (Pierre is not connected to an Interstate), and, of course, Texas. 

On autonomous vehicles

Last Sunday, a self-driving car being tested by Uber in Tempe, Arizona struck and killed a pedestrian. In the wake of the fatality - the first-ever fatality involving a autonomous vehicle - Uber (as well as Waymo, Toyota, and other companies) has suspended all road testing of their self-driving vehicles while they investigate the particulars of this incident (including why the self-driving car did not detect - nor its human backup driver see - the pedestrian).

In the long run, this incident won't prevent the eventuality of fully-autonomous vehicles on our streets and highways. However, it is a reminder that these vehicles have a long road ahead, literally and figuratively, before they become a part of our everyday lives. Furthermore, it reinforces the point that, for all their touted benefits, self-driving cars are unlikely to be a perfect solution to all of our traffic-related ills.

SAE International defines six levels of automation for vehicles. Level 0 is no automation; a human driver controls all aspects of steering, accelerating, and braking. Level 1 automation provides "driver assistance" technologies such as adaptive cruise control or parallel parking assist, while more sophisticated driver assistance systems currently available on some vehicles, such as Audi's Traffic Jam Assist or Cadillac's Super Cruise, fall under Level 2.

Level 5 is full automation, wherein a self-driving car controls all aspects of driving, on any road and in any condition, with no human involvement outside of entering a destination (there would be no need for a steering wheel or brake pedal in Level 5 cars). Level 5 automation is the ultimate goal of autonomous vehicle development; Uber, Waymo and other automobile companies are currently testing cars, such as the one involved in last weekend's fatality, with Level 5 autonomy in mind. Level 5 autonomy is also what most people have in mind when they think of "self-driving cars."

Putting aside for a moment any legal, regulatory or public acceptance obstacles to driverless vehicles, the technology itself is still years away from something that can safely operate on any road, in any condition, with no human assistance whatsoever. Testing is currently occurring in designated areas within a handful of cities - such as Tempe - with backup drivers on hand. But this technology is still in its infancy; a tremendous amount of further testing, coding, mapping and validating is required before driverless cars can be deployed nationwide and worldwide. Last weekend's fatality will only slow that process while the cause of the collision is investigated and solutions developed, e.g. improved sensors or rewritten software. It also calls into question the wisdom of using public streets to "beta test" driverless technologies:

To [Arizona State Professor David] King, whose research focuses on the urban impacts of new transportation technologies, the location of the crash—and how it happened—raises red flags about Uber’s approach to road safety. Since Uber arrived in Tempe in March 2017, he’s often seen Uber vehicles testing in that exact spot, charting details of the roadways to perfect the company’s internal maps. This seemed like familiar territory for them. Based on what is known about Uber’s technology, King said, a pedestrian or other foreign object should have been readily detected by the AV. 

“If there is any real-world scenario where it would be seemingly safe to operate in an automated mode, this should have been it,” he said. “Something went seriously wrong.”
Precisely what went wrong may be unlocked by federal and local investigations now underway. Already, though, law enforcement interpreting video footage from the Uber vehicle’s external cameras seem to have placed the blame squarely on the victim: On a multi-lane corridor with scant crosswalks, Herzberg was crossing outside of a crosswalk. 

“The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them,” Sylvia Moir, the chief of Tempe Police Department, told the San Francisco Chronicle. Viewing the videos, “it’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway,” she said. 

That video footage has not been made public yet, however, and other observers say it’s too soon to draw conclusions about a situation with no precedent. The fundamental safety promise of autonomous vehicles, after all, is their ability to automatically detect and brake for people, objects, and other vehicles using laser-based LIDAR systems: In darkness and light, they’re supposed to be programmed to drive far more safely than humans. King believes that releasing those videos, as well as the onboard vehicle data, would be a step towards transparency by Uber and law enforcement—as well as a signal to the public that safety is a priority, whether the blame rests on Uber’s software, its employee, or its victim. (Note: since this article has been published, some video has been made available.)

To be fair, in order to ensure they can operate on public streets, it seems necessary to test these vehicles on those same public streets. But it's also fair to note that Uber, which is hemorrhaging money and therefore eager to eliminate human labor costs by getting driverless cars on the road as soon as possible, might not be prioritizing safety in their testing regime.

Sunday's incident aside, it's worth reminding ourselves that a key promise of self-driving cars is that they figure to be much safer than their human-driven counterparts: they won't get drunk, drowsy or distracted, they'll obey traffic regulations, they'll even be able to communicate with each other to avoid collisions. But the technology is not completely safe yet, as last weekend's death sadly showed, and it will only be as safe as we want it to be:

I’m enthusiastic about the potential for autonomous vehicles. Their great promise is that they could be safer than fallible human drivers, who kill 37,000 Americans a year. And I do believe AVs will be safer. They will not drive drunk or distracted, and they will not get overwhelmed by more information to process.

How much safer they are, though, will depend on the humans who design them and make the rules. Their driving style, whether aggressive or timid, is something that will be baked into their programming, based on real-world traffic environments and how traffic laws are enforced. The question is the same as always: Are we programming for a world that’s built for humans, or a world that’s built for cars?

The killing of a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, on Sunday by a self-driving Uber is showing how autonomous vehicle safety might slide from promise to nightmare.

We gain nothing if we merely replace pedestrian (and cyclist) deaths caused by human-driven cars with deaths caused by computer-driven cars. Furthermore, in order for autonomous vehicles to truly achieve their promise, our roads need to be ready for them:

The rise in cyclists and pedestrians in and along our roads has also led to a rise in pedestrian deaths. While total traffic-related fatalities fell 18 percent from 2006 to 2015, pedestrian fatalities rose by 12 percent during that same period. Thanks to air bags and safe car designs, drivers and passengers are better protected in the case of a collision, but pedestrians involved in accidents don’t reap that benefit. And now that they’re sharing our roads in greater numbers, they’re more often involved. Many American roadways are ill-equipped to handle the influx of walkers and bikers trying to share our towns.

If we don’t have roads that prevent human drivers from killing cyclists, how can we hope autonomous vehicles will do a better job? Some propose that a bicycle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-everything sensor network could fix this issue. Everyone and everything, outfitted with sensors, would be detectable (and thus avoidable) by driverless vehicles. But the logistics of distributing and enforcing such a network are staggering. Unfortunately, so are the alternatives—like the idea that we need to rethink the way humans and vehicles interact on our roadways. But that may be necessary before autonomous vehicles can take to the road en masse.

Without a human behind the wheel, we may need to rethink the logistics of our cities, streets, and highways. In a world where driverless cars communicate with one another, there’s no need for streetlights or stop signs—vehicles can maneuver seamlessly around one another in algorithm-fueled choreography. And while we impatiently wait at stops and crosswalks for pedestrians, in an autonomous world, passengers’ attention will be on their mobile devices, their work, or their conversations with other passengers. Such irritating delays for a driver may not be so irritating when the driver becomes the passenger. We could, for example, transform some streets into self-driving minihighways and dedicate others purely to foot and bicycle traffic. With humans out of the equation, the entire design of our transportation grid could be reimagined.

As it stands, bike lanes and pedestrian-friendly intersections are an afterthought—and everyone on the road treats them as such, resulting in avoidable accidents and needless deaths. We need to begin to plan for a world in which our transportation priorities have shifted and safety and efficiency are the primary motivators. Autonomous vehicles can’t be seriously implemented until bike lanes and pedestrian routes in our cities are rethought, but like self-driving-car development itself, it’s going to take time.

The effect that automated vehicles will have on the overall transportation network, furthermore, is still unclear and likely will not be fully understood until well after they are implemented en masse. On one hand, driverless cars could reduce congestion by operating more efficiently and avoiding accidents caused by human error. On the other hand, they could make congestion worse. Fleets of self-driving cars deployed by Uber or Lyft could clog city streets as they circulate, awaiting their next fare. Retail companies could send out hundreds of automated vehicles to serve as “mobile showrooms” that constantly travel around city streets waiting to be dispatched to potential customers. Personal automated vehicles could continually loop around city blocks while they wait for their owners to get coffee or pick up dry-cleaning. Commutes could grow longer as people replace the stress of driving to work with the pleasure of napping to work.

Autonomous vehicle technology, furthermore, will not alter basic roadway geometry; while it might use that roadway more efficiently than human-driven cars, there will still be limits as to the number of cars that can fit on any given lane-mile of roadway. Streets and highways that are clogged today with human-driven vehicles are just as likely to be clogged with computer-driven vehicles tomorrow; driverless cars will not "solve" traffic congestion as long as the same trips are being made. (This is why I am highly skeptical of the argument that autonomous vehicles will make public transit obsolete because everybody rides a bus today will simply summon an on-demand driverless car to take them to their destination in the future. Along densely-traveled corridors or within dense activity centers, there will always be space constraints that will make mass transit, at least during certain times of the day, more efficient in its ability to move people than individual automobiles, whether they be driverless or not.)

The fact is, for all their promise, autonomous vehicles still present a lot of unanswered questions. How do you keep autonomous vehicle systems - be it the computer in the car itself or the communications network that ties all the cars together - from being hacked? What happens if the self-driving software crashes or the communications network goes down while the vehicle is speeding down the road? What do you do about the millions of people - truck drivers, bus drivers, taxi drivers, chauffeurs - who will become unemployed as their jobs are eventually replaced by automated vehicles? How will land uses change in the era of autonomous vehicles? Will we even need parking lots and garages anymore? What other unanticipated consequences of driverless technology might we be missing?

Citing the many problems that autonomous vehicles still face, Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute urges tempered expectations, patience and planning:

I am not suggesting that autonomous vehicles are impossible or worthless, or that planners should ignore their impacts, but there are good reasons to be cautious and skeptical, and to implement public policies that maximize their benefits and minimize their costs.

If my analysis is correct, autonomous vehicles may become commercially available in the 2020s, but will initially be costly and constrained, adding a few thousand dollars in annualized costs, and able to self-drive only on designated highways in good weather, and so will mainly be purchased by affluent, longer-distance motorists. Like most automated systems, autonomous vehicles will often be frustrating. Like automated vehicle navigation systems, they will sometimes choose sub-optimal routes. Like computers, they will sometimes stop unexpectedly, requiring a reboot or expert intervention. Like automated telephone systems and bank machines, they will often be confusing and require extra time and effort to use.

It will probably be the 2030s or 2040s before autonomous vehicles are sufficiently affordable and reliable that most new vehicle buyers will purchase vehicles with self-driving ability, and the 2050s before most vehicle travel is autonomous. This technology will probably contribute to numerous crashes, resulting in modest net safety benefits. For safety sake, they will often travel slower than human-driven cars, leading to traffic delays. Self-driving taxies may become affordable and common in urban centers, but in suburban and rural areas most households will continue to own personal rather than shared vehicles. Autonomous vehicles will not displace the need for walking, cycling, and public transit; on the contrary, efficiency and equity require public policies, such as efficient road pricing and High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes, to favor sharing and prevent autonomous driving from increasing total vehicle travel, traffic congestion, and energy consumption.

My main conclusion: autonomous vehicles will not reduce the importance of good planning.

Fortunately, we have plenty of time to plan and prepare for driverless technology. Fully-autonomous vehicles are not imminent, as even some of its most enthusiastic proponents realize. Even after these vehicles become sufficiently functional and can be proven to safely to operate in any environment, it will take time for them to work their way into the nation's fleet mix and replace human-driven cars to the point that they become ubiquitous. Perhaps they will revolutionize our lives. And perhaps, when all is said and done, we'll discover that self-driving cars weren't such a big deal after all.

One thing is absolutely certain, however: driverless cars need to be able to realize their promise in regards to safety, whether it be the safety of the passengers in them or the pedestrians and cyclists around them. If it turns out we can't make them safe, then there's no point in having them. Last Sunday's death unfortunately shows that there's a lot of work remaining to be done.