NATIONAL NEWS:
Charlotte Observer: Foxx calls Charlotte’s progress a national model
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/12/03/4517081/foxx-calls-charlottes-progress.html#.Up86uNJwq6V
U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, Charlotte’s former mayor, touted the Queen City as a model for a nation that he said must move beyond partisan squabbles to fix its crumbling infrastructure.
Bloomberg: Metro-North Rebuked by U.S. Rail Regulator Over Accidents
The top U.S. railroad-safety regulator ordered Metro-North Railroad’s operator to act immediately to boost safety following a series of accidents, including the Dec. 1 derailment in which investigators think the train’s driver wasn’t fully alert before the crash.
Bloomberg: The Chicago Tribune: Once a model of rail transport, Metro-North becomes a target of inquiry
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-blm-news-bc-train03-20131203,0,4369001.story
ALBANY, N.Y. — Two years after being singled out for international honors, Metro-North Railroad finds itself facing a wave of retirements, under three federal safety investigations, and explaining to officials and riders why a locomotive engineer drove a speeding train into a deadly curve.
NPR: NTSB Bars Train Union From Crash Inquiry, Citing Confidentiality
The investigation into the Bronx train crash that killed four people Sunday will continue without the direct involvement of the rail employees union, the Association of Commuter Rail Employees. The move came after the union's leader said at a Tuesday news conference that the train's engineer, William Rockefeller, had gone to sleep at the controls before a catastrophic derailment.
The New York Times: Lessons Unlearned on Rail Safety
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/04/opinion/lessons-unlearned-on-rail-safety.html
… The question for the rest of us is why that train — and thousands of other trains in commuter and freight railroads across the country — had no automated system to slow or stop it when it ran out of control.
STATE NEWS:
Streets Blog: New Mayor Moves to “Pause” Construction of Cincinnati Streetcar
http://streetsblog.net/2013/12/03/new-mayor-moves-to-pause-construction-of-cincinnati-streetcar/
Yesterday was day one for the mayoral administration of John Cranley in Cincinnati, as well as a new roster of City Council members — and it was pretty chaotic. The swearing in of the new officials was met with a massive protest last weekend. Urban Cincy reports that nearly 1,000 Cincinnatians rallied to complete the Cincinnati streetcar, which is already under construction. Cranley campaigned on halt the project even though the cost of stopping it could come close to the cost of finishing it.
Streets Blog: Robert Grow on Utah’s Decision to Build Transit and Shun Sprawl
http://dc.streetsblog.org/2013/12/03/robert-grow-on-utahs-decision-to-build-transit-and-shun-sprawl/
… Ever since, Utah has been a national leader in transit-oriented growth, putting into practice the values Utahns articulated during a long and painstaking public process.
The New York Times: More Late-Night Time for Boston Transit Users
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/04/us/more-late-night-time-for-boston-transit-users.html?_r=1&
…So Mr. Gillespie, a student at the Startup Institute in Cambridge, which helps people prepare for and find jobs in the region’s innovation economy, was thrilled to learn that come springtime, the subways and certain buses will run until 3 a.m. on weekends.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch: St. Louis is not alone in resurgence of streetcars
In their heyday of the 1920s, Tampa’s streetcars shuttled more than 20 million people a year across a 53-mile network in the Florida city.
Express Milwaukee: Walker’s Book Rewrites High-Speed Rail History
Among the many fibs, distortions, smears and lies of omission in Unintimidated, Gov. Scott Walker’s new autobiography, is his version of the events surrounding the cancellation of $810 million in federal funds to go toward a high-speed rail link between Madison and Milwaukee and, potentially, throughout the Midwest.
The Washington Post: Metro report to show service improvements
Metro’s latest report card on itself addresses a concern many riders have with these quarterly performance overviews: Your experience may vary.
The Washington Post: MWAA announces more Silver Line delays
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/dr-gridlock/wp/2013/12/02/mwaa-annouces-more-silver-line-delays/
Officials at the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority announced Monday additional delays to completion of the first phase of the $5.6 billion Silver Line rail extension.
Politico Morning Transportation
By Adam Snider | 12/4/13
Featuring Kathryn A. Wolfe and Kevin Robillard
METRO-NORTH DERAILMENT DRAMA: Trains run past the scene of a fatal Metro-North derailment for the first time today, but the full tale of an accident that killed four people is far from told. The train operator apparently fell asleep or otherwise zoned out before the crash — his lawyer said he had “highway hypnosis.” Much of that info broke yesterday thanks to reporters talking to Anthony Bottalico, general chairman of the Association of Commuter Rail Employees, which was a part of the investigation. Emphasis on “was.” After a slew of Tuesday stories about the train driver nodding off before the crash, the NTSB last night took ACRE off of its investigation. Groups working with the safety agency have to abide by its rules, including a strict gag order on publicizing information from an ongoing investigation. The NSTB said Bottalico “discussed and interpreted information related to the on-going investigation.” Kathryn has much more in her story: http://politi.co/ILMMCZ
One example of what he said: “People use the word ‘zoned out,’ ‘nod,’ ‘fell asleep,’ “ he was quoted in the New York Times. “I’m not a sleep expert.” http://nyti.ms/1eUBiIa
Not the first time: The NTSB kicked the National Air Traffic Controllers Association off of an investigation in 2009 after the group talked about it in press conferences and releases, including after a warning. http://1.usa.gov/1cXxLXp
Hudson Line service resumes today: The Spuyten Duyvil station in the Bronx will be reopened today, just three days after the accident. Only one of the three tracks will be open, however, and the MTA will run three morning rush hours trains instead of the usual six, with delays of 10 to 15 minutes.
HAPPENING TODAY — Gas tax bill: With ten months until the next transportation bill is due and top players stuck in a staring contest over how to pay for it, Rep. Earl Blumenauer has an idea: Boost the gas tax 15 cents and pave the road for a future vehicle miles traveled fee. Today he’ll roll out dual bills to hike the gas tax up to 33.4 cents per gallon within a few years, as outlined in Simpson-Bowles, and to expand Oregon’s landmark VMT pilot program. Pros get a jump on everyone else with text of the gas tax (http://politico.pro/1jiptOI) and VMT (http://politico.pro/1hwIOws) bills. And if that’s not enough, Pros get my story — along with some very skeptical congressional reaction — a full day before it’s in the paper: http://politico.pro/1jkdG2B
T&I markup: The House Transportation Committee marks up a pair of transportation bills today. One (http://1.usa.gov/1jifM2M) would ensure that any FAA action to address sleep apnea for pilots or air traffic controllers goes through a formal rulemaking, similar to a version for truckers that was enacted earlier this year. The other bill, the Transportation Reports Elimination Act (http://1.usa.gov/1cTpzHX) from Chairman Bill Shuster and top Dem Nick Rahall, updates the list of reports DOT has to file.
WEDNESDAY GETS INTO THE WEEDS. Thanks for reading POLITICO’s Morning Transportation, your daily tipsheet on trains, planes, automobiles and ports, where today’s ominous deadline is the next FAA bill being due in 666 days. Satan was unavailable for comment. Please send me your tips, news and insights: asnider@politico.com. And follow me on Twitter: @AdamKSnider.
“Runnin' down to the station, catch the first mail train I see …” http://bit.ly/171aiSy
BILLIONAIRES LOVE TRANSPORTATION: And they’re using their riches in some visionary ways. Kevin has the front-page POLITICO story, complete with original artwork by our own Matt Wuerker: “Stodgy world of planes, trains and automobiles, meet the billionaires with ‘Star Trek’ dreams. Technology moguls are brimming with ideas for bringing flying robots, self-driving cars, people-moving tubes and space-traveling tourists to the sleepy realm of transportation, which hasn’t seen a major shakeup in decades. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos wants his drones to air-drop packages to your house, Google is putting big money into driverless cars, PayPal entrepreneur Elon Musk has outlined a concept for shooting passengers through a giant ‘Hyperloop’ and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic would launch tourists around the Earth. But the people who changed the way you shop, send money and search for information are finding it won’t be as easy to change the way you drive, ride and fly.” His story looks at the likelihood of each: http://politico.pro/1cXKUzv
Speaking of… SpaceX’s first mission to put a satellite in geostationary orbit yesterday was a success. http://bit.ly/1bHwkQ8
TRANSPO STAFF NEWS: There’s a slew of transpo staff changes to catch up on — starting with five-year Blumenauer transportation aide Tyler Frisbee leaving the Hill for San Francisco. Her last day is Friday, according to an email she sent around that was obtained by MT. House Speaker John Boehner promoted Natasha Eckard; she’ll be an assistant to the speaker for policy with control of transportation and infrastructure issues (http://1.usa.gov/1bGZmPY). On the second day of the Todd Hauptli era, AAAE announced a handful of staff promotions: Steve Gironda, VP, Finance; Jeff Holman, VP, Information Services; Pat Raker, Senior VP, Training and Technology Services; Melissa Sabatine, Senior VP, Regulatory Affairs; and Brad Van Dam, Senior VP, Government Affairs (http://bit.ly/1ckehhx). And WTS International, a group promoting women in transportation, has hired Lynda M. Dorman as its chief corporate relations officer.
** A Message from Stop Air Tax Now: As part of a potential budget deal, Congress is seeking to double the TSA Passenger Security Tax! As if raising the cost of air travel were not bad enough, the funds collected would not be used to improve aviation security. It’s a classic bait and switch! **
WHO’S DOWN WITH PTC? Kathryn has the big picture on positive train control after the Metro-North crash: “There’s little dispute that PTC can save lives, and most industry players and policymakers agree conceptually with installing the technology. However, there’s been significant pushback against the mandated deadline because of the technological complexity of making the shift, along with the financial costs. Freight railroads in particular have asked for more time to implement PTC, since only one of the four major freight carriers has said it will be able to meet the deadline. The Association of American Railroads stressed that it supports installing PTC and has already spent nearly $3 billion in PTC-related upgrades, but it warns that meeting the system-wide deadline will be all but impossible.” Much more in her story: http://politico.pro/19frdAZ
HEADS UP — California HSR hearing: House T&I’s rail panel is planning a hearing next week on a judge’s recent ruling against the California high-speed rail project, subcommittee Chairman Jeff Denham told MT. The hearing, preliminarily set for next Thursday, will focus on a Sacramento judge’s move to block the sale of bonds for the project and to force the California High-Speed Rail Authority to rewrite its financing plan, said Denham, a long-time critic of the $68 billion project. A formal announcement on the hearing could come today. Denham also said he and staff are still gathering information on the Metro-North derailment and have not decided about a hearing on the issue.
WHITE HOUSE CLARIFIES CHINESE AIRSPACE ISSUE: From a senior administration official, trying to clear things up after reports of China’s new airspace rule and Japan’s refusal to comply: “What the FAA has done is simply reiterate longstanding practice that for the safety and security of passengers, U.S. civilian aircraft operate consistent with NOTAMs the world over.”
THE AUTOBAHN (SPEED READ)
- Supreme Court hears case over frequent flier programs. POLITICO’s Josh Gerstein: http://politi.co/19g9n0E
- EPW ranking member David Vitter will announce in January whether he’ll run for governor of Louisiana. WaPo: http://wapo.st/1eUEZ0u
- Who knew you could get rich investing in a bankrupt airline? WSJ: http://on.wsj.com/1cXziMU
- Metro is taking flak for an ad showing a woman who wants to talk about shoes, not bus reliability. DCist: http://bit.ly/IKWpSm
- Free Amazon deliveries? “How To Hijack a Drone For $400 In Less Than an Hour,” via Threatpost: http://bit.ly/1bgqcZa
- Tesla hires Florida lobbyist Jeff Sharkey in bid to work on autonomous cars. SaintPetersBlog: http://bit.ly/1cjiBNZ
- House Judiciary takes a page from T&I Chairman Bill Shuster’s WRRDA playbook with new patent reform video. Watch it: http://bit.ly/18kyIGz
THE DAY AHEAD: All day — The American Trucking Associations hosts its first executive summit to explore strategies that maximize the payback for fleets that make investments in technological advances and data analysis. Irving, Texas.
All day — Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell hosts the 2013 Governor’s Transportation Conference, themed “Road to the Future.” Richmond, Va.
10 a.m. — U.S. PIRG Education Fund releases a report showing that on average, residents of America’s cities are driving less and using other modes of travel more. Online.
10 a.m. — House Transportation Committee marks up pending legislation. 2167 Rayburn House Office Building.
10:30 a.m. — Rep. Earl Blumenauer introduces a new bill to increase the federal gas tax in accordance with recommendations made by the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction proposal. HVC-201.
11 a.m. — Export.gov hosts a webinar on the India automotive market including trends, ramifications of booming middle class, what automotive OE and aftermarket distributors want from US suppliers. Online.
11 a.m. — The Council on Foreign Relations holds a conference call briefing to discuss “ongoing tension over China's new air defense zone in the East China Sea and the implications for Japan and South Korea.” Teleconference.
2:40 p.m. — Bob Dinneen, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association, hosts a discussion on the impact the proposed 2014 Renewable Fuel Standard targets would have on agriculture and rural economies. Teleconference.
4 p.m. — Co-Chairs of the Congressional Public Transportation Caucus Reps. Dan Lipinski and Michael Grimm hold a staff, industry stakeholder and media briefing titled “Public Transportation and Economic Productivity: The Story of Economic and Technology Clusters.” 2253 Rayburn House Office Building.
THE COUNTDOWN: Surface transportation policy is up in 301 days and FAA policy in 666 days. The mid-term elections are in 335 days. DOT appropriations run out in 43 days.
CABOOSE — Hopscotch crosswalk: Yep, it’s just what the title implies. And it’s in Baltimore! See for yourself via NPR: http://n.pr/IDuIdl
HAPPENING TODAY: WOMEN RULE — This morning, POLITICO, Google and the Tory Burch Foundation present ‘Women Rule: Marks of Leadership,’ an event featuring several female leaders, including a keynote address from OMB Director Sylvia Mathews Burwell; a conversation with Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her daughter, filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi; Linda Hudson, President & CEO of BAE Systems; Elizabeth Robinson, Chief Financial Officer, NASA, and many more. Join the conversation with hashtag #WomenRule and tune in from 8 a.m. — 2 p.m. at www.POLITICO.com/Live.
** A Message from Stop Air Tax Now: Passengers and airlines already pay 17 federal aviation taxes annually, which totaled $19 billion last year. The federal tax bite on a typical $300 domestic round-trip ticket is now $62, or 21 percent of the total ticket price. Higher taxes drive up the cost of air travel for our customers and dampen demand, which hurts the economy, jobs and reduces air service to communities. A4A, labor and consumer groups have joined together to oppose this unfair and unwarranted tax hikes. Let Congress and the President know that you oppose the proposed increases to the TSA Passenger Security Tax. Go to stopairtaxnow.com to let your voices be heard — loud and clear — and to stay updated on our progress. **
Stories from POLITICO Pro
Blumenauer launches longshot transportation bills
Billionaires and their transportation toys
PTC gets new spotlight after N.Y. derailment
Blumenauer launches longshot transportation bills
By Adam Snider | 12/4/13
Rep. Earl Blumenauer has had enough.
With some of the top players in next year’s transportation bill stuck in a staring contest over how to raise billions of dollars, the Democrat will introduce two simple bills today to address what he calls the upcoming “infrastructure cliff.”
One would raise the gas tax to 33.4 cents cents per gallon, nearly double the current rate of 18.4 cents, over the next few years. That bill would also peg the tax rate to inflation so that its purchasing power doesn’t decline over time.
The other bill would let states look into charging drivers by the mile — a so-called “vehicle miles traveled” fee — by expanding a pilot program started in Blumenauer’s home state of Oregon. The program would be voluntary and allow states to choose how exactly to test the concept of charging for road use.
In short, his idea is the “big and bold” proposal that former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood had promised would come from the White House but so far has not materialized.
“There is an opportunity in the course of the next couple of months to actually get some bipartisan movement,” Blumenauer said in an interview.
Addressing the “infrastructure deficit” — the hundreds of billions of dollars that experts agree the country needs to spend on roads, bridges, ports, railroads and airports — is “every bit as serious as the budget deficit,” Blumenauer said.
But to date, there’s not much sign of progress on finding revenue to pay for the work. With 10 months until the next bill is due and the Highway Trust Fund that pays for road, bridge and transit projects slated to go bankrupt soon afterward, the conversation is stuck in neutral.
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx says it’s up to Congress to find the money, but a key House panel says DOT should take the lead. Sen. Barbara Boxer is floating the idea of replacing the flat gas tax with a percentage sales tax, but her House counterpart, Transportation Chairman Bill Shuster (R-Pa.), says it’s too early to even talk about funding.
For years, the problem has been that although policymakers agree that American infrastructure needs a major upgrade and expansion, there is no consensus on how to pay for it. All the possible solutions — including the two Blumenauer is proposing — are fraught with political peril.
Americans overwhelmingly oppose a gas tax increase — a Gallup poll earlier this year found two-thirds of drivers are against the hike, even if the money goes to roads and bridges.
The VMT system is still facing public angst over whether the government will be able to track the location of every car. Just last year, the House approved on a voice vote language that would bar the Department of Transportation from spending any money to implement a VMT program.
To build support for his ideas, Blumenauer took a methodical approach to rolling out his bills. Well ahead of today’s introduction, he talked to DOT’s Foxx and Transportation Committee Chairman Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) and ranking member Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.).
“I don’t want folks to feel blindsided,” Blumenauer said. But giving people a heads up doesn’t guarantee their support — and that support will be hard to find.
“It’s as crazy as crazy can be,” one senior GOP member of the Transportation Committee said of Blumenauer’s proposal.
A gas tax increase is “dead on arrival,” said former Transportation Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.), a key player in last year’s transportation bill, adding that “the only way they can pass it is to take over the House in the 2014 elections.”
But even a Democrat-controlled House may be reluctant to take it on, and President Barack Obama has steadfastly refused to accept a gas tax hike that would violate his pledge not to raise taxes on middle-class families.
One senior Democrat on the Transportation Committee was brutally honest about Blumenauer’s plan for the gas tax and VMT bills: “I have no idea what he’s doing.”
“We couldn’t get a nickel past Obama,” the lawmaker said of a failed 2009 bill that was derailed by the administration’s opposition to the 5-cent gas tax hike needed to pay for it.
Republicans admit there is a problem, even though they might be opposed to the tax increase that Blumenauer argues is needed to fix it.
“The dirty little secret is somehow, some way we have to address how we’re going to pay for transportation,” said another GOP member of the Transportation Committee. “It’s a conversation we absolutely have to have.”
But could a gas tax break through the blanket Republican hatred of taxes? “I don’t think so,” the member admitted.
Blumenauer’s bills might be long shots, but the math behind the problem he’s addressing is inescapable.
The country needs $100 billion over the next 10 years just to maintain current highway spending levels, according to the Congressional Budget Office — but experts and policymakers agree that’s not enough and needs to increase. The transit account needs another $30 billion over the next 10 years as systems around the country face repair backlogs totaling billions of dollars.
And there’s another twist in this transportation tale: Like any major legislation, there’s a scoring problem. Specifically, experts say the official estimates of revenue generated by a gas tax increase are too low.
The CBO, working from estimates from the Joint Committee on Taxation, issued a report earlier this year that looked at a number of options, including the gas tax. The CBO found a 35-cent increase would yield $42 billion extra in 2015, slowly ramping up to $51 billion by 2023. That equates to $1.2 billion for each penny next year, increasing to just shy of $1.5 billion per penny 10 years from now.
JCT has not said how exactly it calculated that figure, but several transportation-financing experts say the panel considers macroeconomic factors like businesses taking higher-depreciation write-offs due to greater expenses, which lowers the total revenue estimate.
The Highway Trust Fund would likely take in about $1.5 billion for each extra penny in the gas tax, a figure both experts said is the consensus in financing circles. But if CBO only gives lawmakers credit for part of that money, a bill that stabilizes the HTF could still be scored as increasing the deficit — a virtual death sentence in the Republican House.
The math might be messy. But the problem is here to stay until Congress addresses it.
“If they don’t deal with it now, they’ll deal with it sometime,” one GOP congressman said. “It’s an issue that’s not going away.”
Billionaires and their transportation toys
By Kevin Robillard | 12/3/13
Stodgy world of planes, trains and automobiles, meet the billionaires with “Star Trek” dreams.
Technology moguls are brimming with ideas for bringing flying robots, self-driving cars, people-moving tubes and space-traveling tourists to the sleepy realm of transportation, which hasn’t seen a major shakeup in decades.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos wants his drones to air-drop packages to your house, Google is putting big money into driverless cars, PayPal entrepreneur Elon Musk has outlined a concept for shooting passengers through a giant “Hyperloop” and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic would launch tourists around the Earth.
But the people who changed the way you shop, send money and search for information are finding it won’t be as easy to change the way you drive, ride and fly.
They’re confronting a transportation sector where public investments are drying up, engineers complain about crumbling roads and bridges and it’s been ages since government initiatives created the likes of the Interstate Highway System. So the billionaires are trying to adapt their shared disrupt-or-die ethos to an industry marked by an obsession with safety, heavy regulations and a fear of failure.
If they succeed, these tycoons would go down in the history books not just next to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs but also alongside Henry Ford and the Wright brothers. But their visions vary wildly in their practicality — self-driving cars could be on the road as soon as 2020, while Musk’s Hyperloop is a pie-in-the-sky proposal that may never move beyond the idea stage.
Can these big-thinking magnates fill transportation’s innovation void?
“You clearly have got companies that are in it to disrupt the space,” said Scott Belcher, president of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America, a trade group that works at the intersection of technology and transportation. “They don’t want to get dragged down by the government or by the traditional provider.”
But he warned that no single company can single-handedly transform transportation.
Here’s a look at how each of the billionaires’ ideas may fare:
1) Amazon’s drones
Bezos’s announcement Sunday that Amazon hopes to use drones to deliver smaller packages in the next “four, five years” generated a wave of both gee-whiz headlines and skepticism. The FAA has been noncommittal about Bezos’s plan, and even industry backers said the technology needs to improve before drones can deliver DVDs and dresses to people’s front doors.
But Bezos was clearly reveling in the space-age nature of his plan when he revealed it to Charlie Rose on “60 Minutes.”
“I know this looks like science fiction,” he said. “It’s not.”
Deploying the drones would create a major challenge to UPS, FedEx, the Postal Service and other dominant “last-mile” shippers.
Amazon seems to know it will have to persuade the FAA to change its regulatory roadmap, which for now doesn’t include allowing the pilot-less autonomous drones that Bezos’s ideas depend on. The FAA confirmed to POLITICO that Bezos had reached out to safety regulators before Sunday’s announcement, and it’s unlikely Amazon will remain quiet.
How likely? It’ll happen, but Bezos will need cooperation from the FAA and local governments to meet an ambitious timeline.
2) Musk’s Hyperloop
Frustration with the delays and high costs plaguing California’s $68 billion high-speed rail project led Musk to seek an alternative.
“How could it be that the home of Silicon Valley and JPL — doing incredible things like indexing all the world’s knowledge and putting rovers on Mars — would build a bullet train that is both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world?” Musk wrote in a blog post introducing his idea in August.
What he came up with was as bizarre as it was futuristic: He wants to enclose people in aluminum pods and shoot them in a steel tube at speeds exceeding 700 mph, allowing them to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 35 minutes. Engineers have said Musk’s plan would work — at least on paper. But not even Musk was willing to put up the money to make it a reality.
The lack of interest in constructing a Hyperloop points to a second major difference between Silicon Valley and the transportation world: Major infrastructure projects can’t be coded in a dorm room or a garage. Musk said constructing the Hyperloop would cost $10 billion — a fraction of the high-speed rail plan’s cost — but critics said the amount relies on savings that would never materialize in the real world.
“If and when Mr. Musk pursues his Hyperloop technology, we’ll be happy to share our experience about what it really takes to build a project in California, across seismic zones, minimizing impacts on farms, businesses and communities and protecting sensitive environmental areas and species,” the chairman of California’s High-Speed Rail Authority said at the time.
Raising that money, passing through environmental reviews, acquiring land and constructing a project take years. Since California voters approved the rail project in 2008, Apple has gone through five iPhone models.
“It’s hard to pull innovation into transportation just simply because the infrastructure is owned and operated by public entities for the most part and they’re political and they’re cash-constrained,” Belcher said.
Musk’s other major foray into the transportation world — the Tesla electric car — has met much more success. The company’s stock has had a strong year and Tesla paid back its government loans years early.
But the company has battled with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration over a series of three fires in its signature Model S cars. While the investigation is ongoing, NHTSA could order a recall if it identifies a major problem.
In the tech world, that kind of product failure could be quietly buried and even praised as an experiment. To safety-conscious auto consumers, it would be a permanent black mark.
How likely? With no prototype in development, the Hyperloop is likely to remain a theory for now.
3) Google’s driverless cars
Google isn’t alone in trying to create an autonomous car. But for now, when people think of a self-driving car they’re likely to associate it with the company that makes search engines — not car engines.
“It took Google to basically poke everyone in the eye to get GM to start talking about it and to get Nissan to announce that they’re going to have a driverless car on the road by 2020,” Belcher said. He noted that GM has been researching autonomous cars for the last 15 years and that some of Google’s employees on the driverless car project used to work at GM-funded university research centers.
Google certainly hasn’t been shy about its ambitions. “We want to fundamentally change the world with this,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the New Yorker for a piece on driverless cars last month.
Transportation experts say driverless cars are not only practical — they’d be an improvement.
Human error is responsible for about 95 percent of car crashes, a rate that computers could theoretically reduce significantly. A recent study from the Eno Center of Transportation estimated that driverless cars could save $447 billion and 21,700 lives annually by eliminating crashes, and could shrink the auto fleet 40 percent by making it easier to share rides and cars among multiple people. Autonomous cars could also better adjust to gridlock, speeding up commutes and saving gas.
But again, innovation will be slow. The full benefits of autonomous cars won’t be realized until they reach a critical mass. The nation’s automotive fleet turns over about once every 18 years — Google is only 15 years old — so realizing all the technology’s benefits will take decades.
The buy-in for driverless cars by industry and government is high. While automakers disagree on when autonomous cars will be ready, they agree on the goal. Federal safety regulators are expected to issue rules on connected vehicle technology — a key part of making cars autonomous — early in 2014. Earlier this year, Google hired former National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Deputy Director Ron Medford as the safety director for the driverless car program.
How likely? Will definitely happen, but the timeline is still in question.
4) Private spaceflight
More than trains, planes and automobiles, billionaires really want to go to space. Bezos, Musk, Branson, Google co-founder Larry Page, ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen have all invested millions in various spaceflight companies.
In 2010, President Barack Obama cleared the field for space companies by announcing that NASA would stop flying astronauts to low-Earth orbit and instead contract out to the private sector. Musk’s SpaceX has had significant success, winning a NASA contract to supply the International Space Station. Hundreds of people have also put down $250,000 deposits to be able to fly on Branson’s Virgin Galactic whenever it begins offering flights.
But more ambitious plans — Musk wants to fly to Mars and Bezos has said he is “super passionate” about “mak[ing] it so that anybody can go into space” — remain grounded for the time being.
How likely? Already happening, but tourism in orbit remains years or decades in the future.
PTC gets new spotlight after N.Y. derailment
By Kathryn A. Wolfe | 12/3/13
Reports that operator error may have caused Sunday’s Metro-North derailment are drawing new attention to positive train control, a technology that could have prevented the accident that killed four passengers and injured dozens.
Though the investigation is still in its early stages, officials and local media reports have suggested that the veteran engineer at the controls may simply have nodded off at a crucial moment, sending the train hurtling at 82 mph into a curve that had a speed limit of 30 mph.
That’s just the sort of situation PTC is intended to prevent, assuming it was indeed operator error and not a mechanical problem. If the Metro-North train and line had been equipped with a PTC system, it would have detected the train’s high speed before it reached the sharp curve and slowed it down automatically, even if its human engineer was asleep.
Steve Ditmeyer, a former Federal Railroad Administration official who is now a professor at Michigan State University, said if the operator failed to reduce the train’s speed, PTC would almost certainly have prevented the disaster.
“It would give the engineer a warning that brakes will be applied starting in so many seconds,” Ditmeyer said. If the engineer didn’t quickly comply, the computer on board the train would have “implemented an automatic brake application to slow the train down for the curve,” he said.
Marjorie Anders, a spokeswoman for MTA, said the equipment involved in Sunday’s crash had warning indicators, and even some provisions for autonomous emergency braking when a train is approaching a stop signal or coming too close to a train ahead.
“That did not happen in this case because the train had a clear signal all the way to 125th Street, indicating no traffic ahead,” she said.
She also said the train was equipped with a “dead-man’s pedal that must be depressed or the train brakes will apply.” That suggests that whatever the engineer’s state of consciousness was, he wasn’t so incapacitated that he removed pressure from the pedal.
By law, passenger rail services and certain freight railroads must install PTC by December 2015. Congress enacted the mandate as a direct response to a 2008 incident in Los Angeles where a commuter train and a freight train collided, killing 25 and injuring some 100 others. The conductor had been texting prior to the crash.
There’s little dispute that PTC can save lives, and most industry players and policymakers agree conceptually with installing the technology. However, there’s been significant pushback against the mandated deadline because of the technological complexity of making the shift, along with the financial costs.
Freight railroads in particular have asked for more time to implement PTC, since only one of the four major freight carriers has said it will be able to meet the deadline. The Association of American Railroads stressed that it supports installing PTC and has already spent nearly $3 billion in PTC-related upgrades, but it warns that meeting the system-wide deadline will be all but impossible.
Smaller outfits like commuter railroads, including Metro-North, will have an even more difficult task, according to a Government Accountability Office report on PTC, because they mostly operate over tracks that they don’t own.
That report noted that commuter lines “generally must wait until freight railroads and Amtrak equip the rail lines they operate on.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who has been a harsh critic of Metro-North for the rash of recent incidents, doesn’t support extending the deadline, and he said Sunday’s accident shows the need for more safety measures.
“I’d be very loath to be more flexible or grant more time [for] additional delay,” he said.
On Tuesday, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), who knew one of the commuters killed in Sunday’s crash, introduced legislation intended to help railroads obtain financing to speed up deployment of PTC technologies.
“There’s no debate about the effectiveness of this technology. We know it works. We know it will save lives,” he told reporters Tuesday.
“The problem is that because of the recession and other factors, the systems are not on track to meet this deadline,” he said. “Large, large amounts of the system will not be covered by PTC in time.”
Rather than delaying the 2015 implementation deadline, he said he’d rather see more federal money be made available.
Specifically, his bill would allow the $35 billion pot of federal money available as part of the Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing program to be used for PTC implementation. It also would reauthorize the Rail Safety Technology Grant program, which has been allowed to lapse, and double its authorization to $100 million.
Similar legislation was included in the rail title of the Senate’s MAP-21 reauthorization, but the rail title was dropped in conference.
“I don’t think there’s a strong opposition to the concept of having PTC,” Maloney said. “The point is that we should stop focusing on the deadline and start focusing on the means by which we are going to rapidly implement lifesaving technology by using existing federal financing sources more intelligently.”
Others have already taken aim at pushing the 2015 deadline out, however. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, has introduced a bill that would extend the deadline to 2021.
NATIONAL NEWS:
Charlotte Observer: Foxx calls Charlotte’s progress a national model
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/12/03/4517081/foxx-calls-charlottes-progress.html#.Up86uNJwq6V
U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, Charlotte’s former mayor, touted the Queen City as a model for a nation that he said must move beyond partisan squabbles to fix its crumbling infrastructure.