 Trevor Burrus Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus. Tom Clockety Joining us today is Randall O'Toole, senior fellow at the Cato Institute specializing in urban growth, public land and transportation issues. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Randall. Randall Hey, I'm glad to be here. Tom Clockety So the first question is the big one, as we often do on Free Thoughts. How is transportation important to human freedom and flourishing? Randall Well, mobility is really important because mobility gives people access to more economic resources, more social resources, more recreation opportunities. Mobility of course was 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. And although during the 19th century… Trevor Burrus I've just lived to tell about it, it's like people who fell out of hot air balloons had exceeded that. Tom Clockety So they had a quick moment of, yeah, okay. Randall So by 1900, we had developed steam trains and bicycles and street cars 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 street cars 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 street cars or bicycles. Even Americans in urban areas, only middle class people could afford street cars. Pretty much working class people had to walk to work. It was only when Henry Ford developed the moving assembly line that allowed him to both double work or 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 speeds accelerated from an average of three miles an hour to an average of 30 miles an hour or more. And 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 are like you, you didn't have to live right next door to them. You could get in 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 and now it's the millions. You certainly have no Disneyland without people being able to drive to it. Oh, you don't have Disneyland, but you don't have Costco, you don't have supermarkets, you don't have wallmarks, you don't have a lot of things that we take for granted today, shopping malls, a lot of things. So the automobility transformed lives for many people. For example, the only way blacks were able to boycott buses in Montgomery, Alabama after Rosa Lee Parks refused to 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 played 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. And by releasing that land, we ended up gaining 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. 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 the 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 cities should look like, it seems to be kind of anti-car in some basic level. 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 of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution can be amended if you have an urban plan, 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's written an urban plan for your city. This is like Kilo pursuant to a development plan, yes. 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. And 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 us. So if we want to shape society, we have to design our cities in a way to shape the way people live. Well, it's 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 virtually all of the problems with automobiles can be solved by treating the problem, not by treating the automobile. For example... Like congestion, you mean? Well, congestion, air pollution, greenhouse gases, energy, traffic accidents, whatever. In 1970, people drove about 40% as much as they do today, and we had 55,000 people killed per year. So today we're driving 150% more, and we only had 33,000 people killed last year. So fatalities are going down because we made both automobiles and highways safer. This is only going to increase. In 1970, many of our cities were so 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 was so bad. 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%. Total pollution has decreased by more than 90% from what it was in 1970, and 105% of that decline is due to the pollution control we put on cars. Negative 105. 105. More than 100%. 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 increased traffic congestion, and cars pollute more in congested traffic than they do in free-flowing traffic, and 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. And 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, and you also have a solution that virtually every economist is going to agree on, and that's congestion pricing. And you also have, on top of that, a widespread perception that it's politically impossible, that it'll never happen, so therefore we have to go into a lot of these other things which, as you pointed out, may not be effective. Do you see any future for congestion pricing? Could you maybe elaborate on that principle a little bit? Well, there's 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'll 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, and pretty soon you'll be able to 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 2,000 vehicles an hour at speed. With self-driving cars, we'll be able to increase that to 6,000 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 or burning less and less gas all the time, and a lot of cars are not burning gasoline, and that means that gas taxes which have paid for our roads, and have really paid for 80% of all the roads we've built and 100% 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 their intention is to phase this in over time, so that if you buy an electric car, you'll have to get a mileage-based user fee device. If you buy a gasoline-powered car, you'll be encouraged to do it, and over time, we'll transition from all gas taxes to all mileage-based user fees. Well, with mileage-based user fees, it'll be real, real easy to make a congestion fee, to make it a variable fee. And presumably, the device you plug into your car, when you say, I want to go to work, you'll tell your car, take me 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'll have to pay this fee, and it'll take you five minutes longer. If you go this way, you'll have to pay a lower fee. It'll take you 10 minutes longer or whatever, and you'll have a choice of which route, which fee you pay, and you'll make that choice, and that will encourage people to avoid congested routes and eventually solve that $200 billion congestion problem. 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 of – we're talking about urban planners and who these people are and were – and just 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 they probably didn't. The real question is, are any urban planners in 2016 thinking about self-driving cars? Yes. That's a better question. I saw at the Colorado History Museum – and I know you at one point were in Denver for the light rail fight – at the Colorado History Museum, they have a Denver urban plan from 1955 or something like that. It's a 50-year urban plan. This is what the Denver will look like in 2005, which is just ludicrous. Absolutely ludicrous. They didn't get it right? Exactly. They missed a little bit. 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 for you. There was, 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. 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. Or is it going to be a service? Is it going to be like a bark car and you just put them in there and it drives in the vet? Yeah. Or is it going to lead to less driving because everybody's going to be not owning a car but ubering their car? The thing about that is 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 of 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. 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. 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. Their solution is to ignore the problem, to ignore the issue, design for the past because they know the past. They design for street cars. 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 street car 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 street cars. Of course, there were still a lot of people who got around on foot because they couldn't afford the street cars. 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 impose huge costs on the people in those cities. But they're doing it anyway because that's the urban planning fad. So they're thinking of sort of high-density urban development with a lot of public transportation like street cars and light rail and things like this, which is odd. But it kind of makes me wonder if the entire concept of urban planning is just kind of silly. Are you kind of saying that? 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 anti-planner and I have a blog called the anti-planner. Look up anti-planner and I'm the first thing on the list and 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. Has it gotten better though? Because as I went to Tom being British, a town called Milton Keynes in, or Keynes I think is how they say it. Milton Keynes. It's a must see. 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? 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? Are they just as planning as ever? Absolutely not. They have not become less hubristic. A lot of places, a lot of private developers have built what are called master planned 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 that's like they want to live in. They figured 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 convince a 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. And 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 plan for, even though nationwide only about 2% of travel is by mass, well, 1% of travel and about 2% 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. 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? 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. And 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 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. About 80% 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 had lower incomes and they said, okay, these are slums, we have to get them out of here and 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. And 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% more miles, all of which were in the inter cities and came back to Congress in 56 in Congress, passed it with the endorsement of the urban mayors because the mayors wanted to use the interstate highways as a vehicle for slum clearance. They would 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 a famous 1952 case here in Washington D.C. 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 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. And 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 phones and dancing wildly and gesticulating and eating weird food. Showing their ankles. And doing all kinds of things that were horrible and it was very class-oriented and their prescription and this 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 ll pin all those people up in high-rises in the cities. And in 1947, the parliament passed the Town and Country Planning Act that put green belts around the cities for bidding development and then put high-rises in the cities that people lived in for a few years but it was really only acceptable because a lot of housing had been bombed 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 and so they revolted but There s a huge this racial class part of the story seems to be I mean you cannot separate it from the whole history of urban planning. It s about class and race in a hue. 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 at a given time trying to impose their view upon their fellow citizens and what the kind of city that they d like to live in which may not include you and your kind at least in my neighborhood. 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 he goes to these hearings and people are saying we want to keep those people out and he says well those people are me 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 and 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 pickups. They drink soda. Yeah they drink soda which you hate. They smoke cigarettes. They smoke cigarettes. They drink beer not wine. But wise are not crafted. 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 attitudes is one of seething contempt. And really zoning has always been about keeping working class people out of middle class neighborhoods and the whole planning today is about okay 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 downstairs and go shopping so they don t have to shop in the same stores that we drive to and it sounds very idyllic if you can afford it. 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. So let s talk about some of these public transportation issues because I have this great classic onion article because this is tied in with all these ideas that public transportation is something that well the headline is report 98% of U.S. commuters favor public transportation for others. And we ve had a spate of light rail and we ve had street cars and all these things that come up which it seems like the people who make them are not really expected they re not using them I expect that they re probably not using them they think other people should be using that seems to be a big story of public transportation. Well there s a recent story that unfortunately 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 D.C. 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 in the end of World War II and what we re seeing is people plowing more and more money into it and productivity is going down. Per 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 $1 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 and crying at the same time. There s 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 if you take over transit we ll pay for your new buses. We ll pay for your capital cost and you just have to pay the operating costs. So the 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 and that ll absorb all the cost of the freeway even though it s only going to carry about a tenth as many people as that freeway it ll absorb all that cost and it won t cost that much more to operate than a bus so we ll be able to use that federal 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 transform the transportation construction industry. Almost everybody in the industry who was building roads could easily transform into building light rail and 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 and people talked about the highway lobby today the rail construction lobby in Washington D.C. is ten times richer than the highway lobby in Washington. And do any of these light rails pay for themselves? No none of these 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 that because they re entirely private they don t get any subsidies. One is the Atlantic City Jitney. One is the New York Waterway a safari system in New York City between New Jersey and Manhattan. One is the Publikos a Jitney system in San Juan, Puerto Rico that actually carries more people in the public transit system that s heavily subsidized and carries more passenger miles. And 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 have made it illegal to compete against the public transit agency so they can just raise their costs with impunity and charge it to taxpayers. Transit it costs some transit on average four times as much to move a person one mile as it does to drive a car that mile. And rail transit is far far more expensive than bus transit. Is it just a kick? I mean so we have 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 that you have to wonder why this has even happened. I mean I m home in Denver. I see the light rail cruise by and it looks like there s about seven people on it and I wonder how much it costs to just take these seven people, you know this length of this. So why are they doing it? I mean it s just crazy it sounds like. As I said there are several forces that work. One is that we have created a lobby for it. Another is 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 less than $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 and that s a rather perverse incentive. So we ve got streetcars. The first streetcar projects, streetcars are supposed to be as 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 is 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 Prius and it would have been better for the environment to do that as well. When does public transportation make sense then? Public transportation I think can make sense in Manhattan because it s so dense it has 2 million jobs in seven square miles which is far denser than anywhere else. The average density of jobs in most downtowns is a tiny fraction of that. Even driverless cars could not bring 2 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 cost and none of its capital or maintenance costs. 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, the New York subway system into a for-profit operation as it used to be many years ago. It was originally built privately of course. Outside of Manhattan I don t think transit has a future because self-driving cars are going to replace people who can t drive today or don t want to drive. We ll 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 and 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 ll see a diaspora of jobs from downtown. It used to be most jobs were downtown. Now about 7.5% 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 find finance areas that do the same kinds of financial work as Manhattan and they re in low-density areas, low-rise development. They don t need high-rises. Randall, 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 ll have self-driving cars. This is going to deal with a lot of our problems. We ll 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 is 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 roadblocks to driverless cars and can they be easily overcome or could we be sitting here in 10 years time kind of having the same conversation? The only potential roadblock to driverless cars is government. The 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 ll sell it to the manufacturer of your automobile or the software maker so when you buy the software for your driverless car that ll 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 ll be able to quickly figure out who s at fault. If it s our fault we ll fix it. We ll pay the liability and we ll 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 s 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. With everything on board the car you don t need to change the infrastructure at all. It can all use today s streets. It 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 infrastructure so that instead of seeing a red light the traffic signal will 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 Tom Tom 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 they have the infrastructure keep track of where there 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 as 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 it s 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 if the danger is that not only will government spend a few billion dollars putting this infrastructure on a few streets then they ll 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 ll take forever for all of the 4 million miles of roads in America to get that infrastructure. 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 is 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 and that would be another problem. 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. And that s one contract that you give away. Yeah there are the ones who are lobbying in Washington to see that that infrastructure type is mandated. To see at the very least what Obama wants to do is to mandate that your new car be capable of communicating with that infrastructure not just use it but that it be capable of using it. Whoever gets that contract is going to get a massive game. It s be like a defense contractor with a huge amount of money. 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 is developed as driverless car that learns from other auto drivers. It s an artificially intelligent car so he doesn t have to write millions of lines of code to say okay 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 2,000 lines of code. And from then on the car just learns. And that s a different school of technology. He thinks he ll 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 braking and stuff like that into a driverless car for less than $1,000. So once this technology is introduced, provided government doesn t get in the way, you ll see rapid retrofitting of old cars whether it s $1,000 or $2,000 or $500. You ll still see a rapid retrofitting so you ll see a rapid introduction of this technology to a large number of vehicles. And as I say 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. And second, that the uniform technology which must communicate will be susceptible to hacks. Whereas if your car is 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 s very difficult to hack the GPS satellites. It seems like we re on the cusp of a possibly profound change in human life that could be on the order of the car which we started in the sense of it. On the order of the mass produced car. The initial car did nothing. I mean in 1913, 2% of American families or less had a car. By 1925, over half of American families had a car thanks to the mass produced car. But this change with driverless cars that we could be, this is like a moment in time where we can sort of try to learn the lessons that we ve talked about today that we can have the government come in and try and plan it out and try and make sure all this works. And what we re going to get is probably expensive, not very useful and possibly 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 because the possibilities seem pretty endless of what driverless cars, how they can change our lives and make us better environmentally and a bunch of things. They can change a lot of things in our lives. Absolutely. And 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 forward 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. And 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 street cars 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 4 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, sex works best with transportation. And stop having these plans imposed upon us from people who think we should be living our lives in a different way. People who wish that they lived in 1920 in Paris, you know, want to create all of our cities to look like 1920 Paris or 1950 Greenwich Village is really the model for urban planners today. Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel To learn more, find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org