Rob Fisher

The third and final article in Ars Technica’s series on self-driving cars is about how they will be regulated.  It discusses whether government subsidy or limited liability will be needed to give car manufacturer’s an incentive to introduce the technology.  Subsidy is probably unnecessary as something is either profitable or it is not, but apparently:

At one point, “all of the general aviation manufacturers stopped making planes because they couldn’t handle the liability. They were being found slightly liable in every plane crash, and it started to cost them more than the cost of manufacturing the plane.” Airplane manufacturers eventually convinced Congress to place limits on their liability.

The article goes on to look at who will have control over the software used.  Arguments in favour of open source software are presented, but I don’t think the situation is much different from software used in aviation, so the outcome is likely to be similar.  However, there is concern that the government would like nothing more than to take control of your car.  It seems inevitable that the police will be able to remotely disable it and politicians will control its speed.

Brian Micklethwait

Yes!  As already reported at my personal blog, I can now post not just stuff but pictures, when out and about.  And that’s what I am now doing.  I’m in Maria’s Vietnamese cafe in Lower Marsh, and very nice it is too.  I have not once been home since taking this snap:

So, I can now transport blog while being transported.  And, my transport experience will be transformed for the better.  That’s if my dongle will work in buses, trains, etc.  We shall see.

That’s a picture of a bookshop that is also transport related, although they also stock books about war and various transport and war related toys and kits.  Sort of Old Nerd Heaven, you might say.  This shop is also in Lower Marsh, which is where I also get my second hand classical CDs.

I should report, however, that as of now it takes me about a quarter of an hour to post a photo, because it takes me ten minutes to load a picture up to Web Resizer dot com so that it can be resized.  My mini-laptop can’t seem to resize photos on its own.  Why not?  Search me.

Rob Fisher

Next Big Future are reporting on a supersonic business jet being developed by a company called Aerion.

Rob Fisher

A House of Commons Transport Committee report has been published.  Cue outraged calls for Something To Be Done about road safety.

The Liberal Democrats say the government should be ashamed of itself for not reducing drink driving casualties.  To their credit, they seem to be calling for enforcement of existing laws rather than new ones.

Here is the BBC story.  Road deaths are being presented as “the major public health problem of our age”, which is probably accurate.  That people are, when not being hectored by politicians, prepared to accept this level of risk says something about just how overblown reports of other risks are.  Why worry about eating the wrong type of food when you’re perfectly prepared to cross the road every day?

This morning, the vague and impossible to link to Radio 1 Newsbeat was reporting that “MPs” were “calling for” laws to prevent young drivers from carrying young passengers at night.  It looks like the Transport Committee likes this idea, but another report from the Department of Transport called Learning to Drive rejects it in favour of extra hoops to jump through to get a full license.

I suspect the report will quickly be forgotten and we won’t see any big changes to road laws for a while as it’s unlikely to be an election issue.

Rob Fisher

Ars Technica is running a series of articles on the automation of road transport.  The second article looks at the benefits of cars that drive themselves.  Safety advantages are obvious.  More interesting are the economic advantages.  In cities, taxis are more efficient than privately owned cars.  But:

So if taxis are so great, why aren’t they popular everywhere? The problem is that when you rent a taxi, you’re not only renting a car, but you’re hiring a driver as well. And human labor is expensive. So taxis only make sense financially in places where parking is so expensive or hard to find that driving your own car isn’t worth the trouble. Everywhere else, the cost of the driver is high enough that driving and parking your own car is a better deal.

Self-driving cars offer all the benefits of taxis for the cost of a traditional car. A self-driving vehicle will be able to show up on demand, transport passengers to a destination, and then drive off to pick up more passengers, refuel, or find a parking space. When self-driving taxis are readily available, many people—even far from dense urban areas—will find renting both cheaper and more convenient than owning a vehicle.

It’s easy to imagine being able to hire a taxi to your exact location from your GPS smartphone, have it turn up in minutes thanks to automated routing and demand prediction, and be able to choose from a selection of vehicles so you can get a pickup-truck to take you home from the furniture shop with your new sofa.

The article goes on to discuss the changes in parking and vehicle design that self-driving cars will enable, as well as the retail, freight and courier industries.

I have one concern: I enjoy driving and motorcycling, and it’s only a matter of time before human drivers are made illegal for health and safety reasons.  There will be other reasons, too.  Some kinds of automated congestion management may not work with a mixture of human- and computer-controlled cars.  For example, long convoys with only inches between each vehicle, or intersections where conflicting flows of cars are tightly interleaved.  Driving for pleasure may one day be confined to the track.

Rob Fisher

On the one hand, we try to reduce the cost of transportation between England and America, or Canada and the United States, by developing faster and more efficient planes and ships, better roads and bridges, better locomotives and motor trucks.  On the other hand, we offset this investment in efficient transportation by a tariff that makes it commercially even more difficult to transport goods than it was before.  We make it a dollar cheaper to ship the sweaters, and then increase the tariff by two dollars to prevent the sweaters from being shipped.  By reducing the freight that can be profitably carried, we reduce the value of the investment in transport efficiency.

Henry Hazlitt in Economics in One Lesson.

Rob Fisher

Poor old Qantas.  First the hole of horror, now the plunge of, er, horror.

On the bright side, the safe landing of these flights should provide some comfort to those experiencing future in-flight anomalies.

Update:  ATSB has released information on the preliminary investigation.  It looks like a navigation computer fed erroneous data to the flight control computer.  Pertinent questions have been raised on the Risks Digest mailing list: the primary flight computer is supposed to compare information from multiple navigation computers, so why didn’t it notice something was amiss?

Patrick Crozier

This was on BBC4 the other night.  I thought it was garbage.  In fact it was such utter garbage that there was no chance of me ever getting round to writing it all down.  So, I recorded a podcast instead.

Patrick Crozier

I love this sort of thing: maps where area is proportionate to something other than territory.  Hey, I even designed one of my own way back.  This is the one for rail travel.

I think this is for passenger rail travel or else the US would be a lot bigger.  Look at China and India.  What does this say I wonder?

Rob Fisher

In the first episode of his documentary Big Ideas, James May from Top Gear is in search of a personal flying car.  It’s rather less dumbed down than programmes like this tend to be.  James didn’t shy away from discussing gyroscopic precession in helicopters, for example.  And there are some inventions I hadn’t heard of before, like a nifty helicopter from Japan.  Of course, he covered the Moller Sky Car, too.  Now he’s discussing automated control systems which would make getting ordinary people into the sky feasibly safe.  He’s in a car that’s driving itself so well that it can cope with American 4-way stops.

James finished up with a rant about the reasons he thinks these products aren’t viable already: health and safety and bureaucracy.

The show is repeated next Thursday.  The graphic below should be relevant to your current location and time.

Rob Fisher

I am excited because I am booked onto an Emirates flight to Bangkok via Dubai on an A380.  Ok, so I can’t afford a private suite, and none of the exit aisle seats were available (and I found out what a bassinet seat was and so avoided booking one of those), but Emirates is supposed to be one of the better airlines* so I have high expectations.  I should at least be well entertained.  The external camera views sound interesting.

My flight is not until March and the A380 starts on 1st December, so hopefully there won’t be any hiccups.  Will I be the first transport blogger to fly on an A380?

* Not everyone would agree.

Rob Fisher

Remember the Boeing 777 that crashed back in January?  Investigators are saying it was probably caused by ice crystals that formed in the fuel.

Investigators said three unique factors came together in flight BA038 that had not been found in 13,000 other flights: the length of time that fuel temperatures stayed below 0C; low fuel flow demands in cruising flight, and high fuel flow demands during landing. They added that the amount of water in the fuel supply - around five litres - was not abnormal.

No matter how carefully aircraft systems are designed, once in a while a combination of events will occur that you hadn’t tested for.  But at least it won’t happen again, and air travel will be just that little bit safer from now on:

Boeing said last night that it had devised “a number of operational changes” to prevent ice building up in 777 fuel systems that used the type of Rolls Royce engine involved in the crash.

Hat tip: The Google News Alert I set up, knowing that the follow-ups to this story probably wouldn’t make the front pages.

Update: Incidentally, in this story there’s a lot of insight into how air crash investigations are done.  13,000 normal flights were compared with this one.  That suggests that black box recordings from many flights are archived, and that statistical and data mining techniques can be used to find out what’s unusual about a given flight.  I wonder if enough computing power and clever enough software could be installed in the cockpit, comparing current data with all previous flights and warning the pilot of anything unusual.

Rob Fisher

I travelled to Rome on BA, and got to try out Heathrow Terminal 5.  Would my luggage travel with me?  Well, that story has long disappeared from the news so I could only assume so.

These modern steel and glass buildings look so much nicer than 60s and 70s concrete.

Arriving at T5

The large halls can handle large numbers of people without seeming crowded and stressful.  The check-in experience was pleasant and there was no queueing.

Checking in

Security seemed as good as you could expect security to be: there are seats for putting your shoes and belt back on and putting all your gadgets and documents back in their correct pockets.  The departures area has plenty of shops, even a PC World to buy the gadgets you forgot to pack.  You can have coffee at Starbucks while watching the planes out of the window.  The walk to the gate is short.

Departures area and gates

Returning to the UK, you get to ride a little train.  Baggage carousels are nice and long, although there still seems to be no way of stopping people from crowding around the place where bags first appear.  For all the talk of the amazing luggage handling system, luggage takes about the same time to appear as at any other airport.

But it’s a pleasant place to arrive into.  It looks how a modern airport should look.  Visitors to London are likely to be impressed.

Patrick Crozier

I’ve only just heard that Geoffrey Perkins, inventor of Mornington Crescent¹ and the man responsible for comedy productions ranging from The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to Have I Got News for You has died.

Far, far, far too young I might add.

Who will we look to for our transport-related parlour games now?

Notes
1.  See here for the infamous Transport Blog game from Christmas 2003.

Patrick Crozier

For six years now I’ve been a member of the great unautomobiled masses.  It hasn’t been so bad but living on the outskirts of London (as I do) there have always been minor inconveniences: having to plan late nights in London, having to think twice about what to buy in Tescos because I might not be able to carry it home etc.

And then I got a new job.

Which was fine.  It was further away but I could commute.  The trains in my corner of south-west London are a joy being both punctual and clean.

But as Alan Clark pointed out trains never start from where you want to start and never take you where you want to go.

(Actually, in my case that’s not quite true - at one end of the journey the station is nearer than where I can park but that’s another story.)

The real problem was time.  Even with the trains running perfectly my commute would take an hour and a bit.  The equivalent car journey would normally take 40 minutes and sometimes as little as 20.

Worse still, there was no train or bus at all that could get me to work on time on a Sunday.  I quickly tired of taking taxis.

So, I did some sums and drew up a budget.  And then threw it away.  Sure it would end up a bit more expensive but (apart from the time-saving) it would give me something else.  Call it freedom, call it responsibility - but it would be that whole adventure (even the boring and expensive bits) of owning a car: buying insurance, getting it serviced, deciding for myself when to go, seeing what repairs/modifications I could do myself, going for a drive, getting lost…

So, a car it was.

Rob Fisher

I recently took the DFDS ferry from Newcastle to Stavanger.  It takes over 20 hours, and is quite expensive.  Even the bars on board charge Norwegian instead of British beer prices.  But it’s good fun, the accomodation is pleasant, and there is even a cheesy live band.

But the route is closing at the end of August.  According to one of the crew, it’s because of Rising Fuel Prices.  Another factor is that the ship has Norwegian and British crew, who are more expensive than Polish crew.  There is a vague hope that another company will buy the ship and continue the service, otherwise there will be no ferry from the UK to Norway (except possibly from the north of Scotland).  Car drivers could fly and rent, but Norway is a great place to explore in your motor home or on your motor bike.  You’ll have to go via Denmark instead.

Rob Fisher

I went to the Farnborough air show last weekend and took this video of the A380 taking off, flying around a bit, and landing.  The pilot made it climb and turn much quicker than I think it would on a normal passenger flight.  It was very big and very impressive.  Apologies for the shaky camera.

A380 at Farnborough from Rob Fisher on Vimeo.

Patrick Crozier

I’ve been listening to this podcast in which Russ Roberts of Café Hayek talks to Mike Munger about mass transit in Santiago, Chile.  It seems that they had a perfectly good¹ private system which got nationalised.  Result: huge losses, longer commutes, higher car use, oh, and the odd riot.

But do they want to go back to the old system, you know the one that worked?  Hell no.

As Munger observes:

A public mass transportation system is the fiction that each of us can ride at the expense of all of us.

By the way, in case you think the guy is making it all up here is a report from the International Herald Tribune and here is what a Santiagan commenter had to say:

I am from Santiago, and it is very hard to understate the mess caused by the change in the public transportation system.

Santiago is a city where most of its population use public transportation (including myself) and the significant decrease in its quality caused inmense suffering. People who were used to wait for 10 minutes or less for a bus that would take them accross town in 45 minutes need to wait for over 30 minutes now, having to switch buses (sometimes more than once and at stops that could be several blocks away) and doubling or tripling their travel time. This causes havoc with family and “down” time.

Many areas of the city are not not served (or underserved) by the new buses and the ministry of transport has had to draw new routes with astonishing frequency.

And a system that was self-financed and produced profits for the operators, has caused the government to give huge subsidies and cause losses to the new bus companies. This is a terrible loss of wealth, in financial terms and withr espect to the time lost by passengers, in a country that already had a pretty good system.

This is all due to planners belief that thier intelligence was better than the wisdom of hundreds of bus companies.

At least, this has discredited central planning in Chile for the foreseeable time.

Notes
1.  Well, there was a slight problem with buses racing one another and mowing down pedestrians.

Rob Fisher

The Reg has an article on Ruth Kelly’s plans for motorways.  I like the idea of toll lanes.  I don’t like the idea of more M40-style speed management, mainly because it makes driving more tedious than traffic jams do.  I’m really not sure how concerned I should be about electronic tagging of vehicles.

Rob Fisher

Some Swindon councillors want to stop funding speed cameras.  Conservative councillor Peter Greenhalgh thinks they’re just to raise revenue.  This revenue goes to the treasury.  The council contributes £400,000 per year to pay for the cameras.  Greenhalgh thinks that’s not the best way to spend the road safety budget.

The Labour MP for Swindon says that all this is “playing politics with lives”, after all, the Swindon Safety Camera Partnership’s statistics show that accidents at camera sites is falling.  Not everyone agrees.  The obvious question is, what about accident rates at non-camera sites?  Even if cameras do improve safety, there is a certain level of risk people find acceptable.  We could reduce road deaths to zero quite easily but it would be too inconvenient.

It will be interesting to see if this move succeeds and more councils follow suit.  Either way, it is certainly annoying anti-car types.

Rob Fisher

The new motorcycle test starts on 29th September.  It’s a result of EU regulations.  Many test centres will close because parts of the test need to be done in a special off-road area.  This is mainly because the emergency stop now has to be done at 50km/h.  That’s thirty-two miles per hour.  Oh dear.

The DSA was on the radio quoting scary statistics and saying that the new test will make riding safer.  I am not convinced that a 2mph faster emergency stop and riding around some cones makes it safer.  I think motorcycle safety is largely about attitude.  Reading chapter 1 of Roadcraft, which is all about mental attitude, would do considerably more to improve safety.

An even better idea would be to let insurance companies administer tests.  They have to pay the costs of accidents, so they have the best incentive to stop them.  A range of tests could be offered, each yielding a different insurance premium.

Rob Fisher

Drivers of fuel tankers start a four day strike today.  Motorists are being warned not to “panic buy”.  Panic buying is perfectly rational behaviour:  a given individual is more likely to get fuel if they join in than if they abstain.

This strike is about pay rather than tax and only affects Shell.  Will people understand this or will they stock up on fuel regardless?

Rob Fisher

A new low-cost airline charges by weight—including passenger and luggage.

Well, not really.  But it seems like quite a good idea.  I always get charged for an extra kilo or two of baggage when I fly on Ryanair—it’s just impossible to pack everything in 18kg.  Why should people get to carry extra fat for free?

Upgrade: Travel Better.

Rob Fisher

Via Slashdot comes the story that the TSA (the people in charge of security in American airports) will refuse to let you on the plane if you refuse to show your ID.

But ID is not a requirement for travel:  if you say you lost or forgot your ID, they’ll let you on the plane, subject to extra searches.  Chris Soghoian writes:

The change of rules seems to be a pretty obvious case of security theater. Real terrorists do not refuse to show ID. They claim to have lost their ID, or they use a fake.

To me this doesn’t seem like security theatre at all.  It’s simply that officials don’t like those who refuse to respect their authority.  They respond by behaving like bullies.  It’s no different to me being told off for holding a camcorder at a security checkpoint, or some bloke being told to change his T-shirt.

Brian Micklethwait

I spent the night before election day and the night of election day watching Boris Johnson get elected Mayor of London.  And I think it must have been in the rather testy TV interview he did for the BBC, after his official acceptance speech, that he said he favours moving Heathrow to the Thames Estuary.  I do as well, if only because it will make for such great aerial photos while it is being built, to say nothing of when it is finished.

I have mentioned this notion here before, although the only serious commenter on that thought the scheme nonsensical.  What I didn’t mention was that Boris is in favour of it.  So it may not go away just yet. 

Whether Kit Malthouse, the writer of the piece I originally linked to, is anything directly to do with Boris I do not know.  Ah.  At the bottom of that piece it says that “Kit Malthouse is a businessman and former Tory councillor and is standing for the London Assembly in 2008”, so I’m guessing: yes.  And I’m guessing he got in, if only because the Tories in general did so well.

Vote Conservative for better ways to waste public money!

Patrick Crozier

Tim Blair has a post up about fuel efficiency.  Seems that it is about the same now as it was forty years ago.  Blair points out that modern cars are quite different, they have all sorts of systems eg air conditioning that use engine power to run them.  They also have far better acceleration.

The funny thing is that I am pretty sure that this phenomenon of efficiency not changing much can be traced back much further.  I seem to remember coming across an article in Autocar from about 1910.  The MPG figures given were remarkably similar to those of today.

Ah, here are some figures for the 1908 Model T and yes, it’s the same.

Of course, the big thing being missed here is engine efficiency as opposed to overall car efficiency.  I suspect engines have made huge gains over the years.

The point is that consumers when given a choice between saving money and greater safety or comfort will choose safety and comfort.

Update

Actually, it would appear that those Ford figures might be a bit dodgy.  But the article confirms (talking about the Lupo) that for consumers fuel economy is far from the only thing.

Patrick Crozier

This is a complete rewrite of version 1 which didn’t really cut the mustard.  Ah well.

I can’t say I am exactly thrilled at the prospect.  For two reasons.  First of all, there’s a rather nasty whiff of nationalism here.  I can’t help but notice that things were awfully quiet until a bunch of foreigners bought up BAA.  Secondly, forcibly breaking things up involves, well, force and I am against force³.

I am, of course, all in favour of things being voluntarily broken up, if that is what owners want to do.  Indeed, that is precisely what BAA itself did in the case of Prestwick a few years ago.  They reckoned they couldn’t make a go of it, sold it off to some people who thought they could and, hey Prestwick! (so to speak) within a few years the airport was booming⁴.

The fact that BAA’s owners (and, for that matter, its owners before that) don’t think the same experiment should be tried with its London airports tends to suggest that they think the airports will make more money if owned by just the one operator.  This argument cuts a lot of ice with me because I think profits are a good thing⁵.

However, it’s impossible to avoid the complaints.  Personally, I rather like airports, Heathrow included.  But lots of people don’t.  Terminal 5’s teething difficulties⁶ aside people complain about the queues, the lost luggage and the general state of repair of the buildings.  Airlines have their own range of complaints but I have never been quite able to pin down just what they are.

But let’s assume for argument that BAA is not doing as good as job as it could or is reasonable to expect.  Why’s that?  Because free market theory tends to run along the lines: “Well, if companies attempt to abuse their monopoly position all that will happen is that competitors will enter the market.” And there are examples of this⁷.  So, if BAA really is doing a crap job it is either because the theory is wrong or something else is going on.

My guess is that it is more or less impossible to enter the market.  Try getting planning permission for a new airport in the South East.  With the current planning laws you can forget it⁸.  Well, you can but BAA might just be able to what with all its experience and contacts.  And buying up enough contiguous land might also pose difficulties⁹ even if I think they can be overcome. 

But maybe it’s not.  Maybe, it would indeed be impossible to build another airport in South East England.  But then the appropriate level of competition is not airports but regions.  Maybe a better airport somewhere else would draw in the investment and the people to compete with London (and in the process take BAA down a peg or two).  Of course, to do this developers would need to be able to build the buildings and infrastructure needed which again is impossible under current conditions.  But this just re-iterates the point: as far as we know it is government force that is causing the problem.

Just as an aside one argument that gets dragged up in this debate is the one about how BAA was privatised in the first place.  The argument goes that all our woes are down to the fact that it was privatised in one go.  If only the airports had been sold off one by one… Maybe, maybe, but if it had there would have been nothing (in a free market) to stop one of those airports gobbling up all the others and creating what we see today.  The point is that markets are discovery mechanisms.  Amongst the things they discover is how many companies should exist in a given market.  My guess is that BAA is the size it is because that is the optimum size in the prevailing conditions.  If it wasn’t it would have been broken up by now.

Notes

1.  Hey, even the libertarians at Samizdata don’t have much time for it.  Or, even Jeff Randall at the Telegraph.

2.  See Gatwick and Stansted are targets as BAA break-up looms, Telegraph, 23 April 2008

3.  See What I believe, InstaPatrick.

4.  See David Farrar’s article, Freedom and Whisky, 29 May 2003.

5.  See Profits in a Market Economy, Art Carden, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 18 January 2008, in which the author makes the point that profits are good and losses bad.

6.  At least, I hope they’re teething.

7.  See Against competition regulation, InstaPatrick.  Another short one

8.  Another reason to be against planning.  For some more, see Against Planning, InstaPatrick.

9.  I am, of course, against compulsory purchase.  See Against compulsory purchase, InstaPatrick.

Patrick Crozier

Earlier this week I heard (or did I read, or both?) that some commission or other (the Monopolies commission, perhaps?) had written a report saying that Britain’s biggest airport operator, BAA which owns Heathrow, Gatwick and Stanstead should be broken up.  It’s stifling competition or something, apparently.

This has met with almost universal approval¹.  But, I don’t care, I’m still against it².

Notes

1.  See Situation Normal, All F**ked Up by Johnathan Pearce on Samizdata.
2.  See:

Should BAA be broken up? in which I argue that, no, it shouldn’t.

The ASI was wrong in which I argue that monopolies aren’t a problem so long as you have free markets.

Against competition regulation.  This is an InstaPatrick article and is woefully short but it makes many of the same points.

What do you mean by a monopoly? in which I argue that everything has some competition.

Rob Fisher

It’s threatening to go beyond nods and winks.  “One of Stormont’s youngest politicians” has made some proposals:

• Total alcohol ban for newly qualified drivers;
• a curfew that would stop young motorists from driving at night;
• a ban on them carrying teenage passengers.

This is just the usual ill-thought-out posturing that’s difficult to argue against because everyone can agree that one teenage road death is one too many, so any measures to reduce deaths are justified.  It’s not true because if you think about it, some risk is acceptable, or else we wouldn’t drive at all or we’d have universal 5mph speed limits.

And if you think about it, there are some obvious problems with this scheme:  A total alcohol ban doesn’t make any more sense with young drivers than it does with older ones, it just punishes innocent people who have drunk a harmless amount.  What happens when a young motorist is stranded in a remote location past the curfew?  How are young motorists to get experience of night driving?  And the passenger ban has been tried elsewhere.  It just results in more cars on the road with teenage drivers.

But proposals like these are about the politics of beeing seen do be doing something to protect the children.  They don’t have to make any sense.

Rob Fisher

The new UK Libertarian Party has a transport section in their manifesto.  It’s something of a living document and may change over time, but there are some interesting ideas.  This one could be controversial, it’s a bit like what the Australians are trying but perhaps the truckers will be placated by the abolition of income tax:

We will end the indirect subsidy of road freight. This may require retention of a form of distance-based road pricing for HGVs, which in 38-tonne form, do 10,000 times more damage to roads than a 1 tonne car.

I like this bit best:

Motorists and riders should have the right to make their own choices on their use of safety equipment; insurance companies should have the right to charge additional premiums (or decline cover) to those who do.

These parts sound like a good opportunity to properly privatise rail, although I don’t fully understand the current situation (does anybody?)

Disband the cartel of the rolling stock leasing arrangements.  Resolve geographic monopoly that is the rail tendering mechanism.