War on Cars at a Fever Pitch in NYC: NMA E-Newsletter #557
In our experience, we have never seen the likes of what is going on in New York City with the war on cars. Not only has the city become one giant speed trap with over 2000 “school zone” speed cameras, soon the city/state plans to implement congestion pricing below 60th street. The government expects motorists […]
Autonomous Cars: Future of the Freeways or Fool’s Errand?
Mass acceptance of a new paradigm isn’t easy to predict. Few of us would have ever thought back in 2009 that people would jump in a car with a stranger or pay to sleep in someone else’s spare room halfway around the world. With millions of people embracing both Uber and Airbnb as part of […]
A Long, Long Away to go for Driverless Car and other Auto Tech News
The New York Times posted an article this week entitled: Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars are ‘Way in the Future.” Indeed they are…something I’ve been saying ever since I started writing about the car of the future and auto tech. Ford’s CEO Jim Hackett said in April, “We overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles.” The […]
Wi-Fi vs. 5G, Battery in the Cloud, a Wheel that Does Everything and Hydrogen Flying Cars
So much news in the Auto Tech Watch, we barely have time to write it all down. Here is the most recent score card on partnerships and hook ups in the Car of the Future Space from the past two weeks. BMW and Daimler are teaming up to develop driverless and electric cars. Volkswagen and […]
Explanation of the California Environmental Quality Act or CEQA and how it will affect Drivers
This article first appeared in the NMA Foundation’s Driving Freedoms Magazine Spring 2019 edition. Beyond the rules update mentioned in the article, All Traffic is Local; additional CEQA rules will be coming online soon that could have an even more significant impact on street design. By July 2020, all California cities will be required to […]
Level of Service: Measuring Traffic Congestion
This article first appeared in the NMA Foundation’s Driving Freedoms Magazine Spring 2019 edition. According to the latest census, 85 percent of all Americans travel to work by single passenger car or by carpool. Since World War II, land use and American culture have been built around driving cars from locations A to B. By […]
All Traffic is Local: A Look at Force-Fed Road Diets
This post originally appeared as the cover story for the NMA Foundation’s Driving Freedoms Magazine Spring 2019. Driving can sometimes be a daily grind. But when cities reconfigure the streets you take every day—presumably, to make them safer—that daily grind often seems much worse. The war on cars, for many drivers, is no longer an […]
How Ride-Sharing Spells Trouble for Car Lovers
36% of adults in America have used a ride-hailing service in 2018 compared to just 15% in 2015. Statistics are often misleading though, and it seems like rural America has yet to buy into the gig-economy revolution: only about 1 in 5 adults living outside of urban centers has ever set foot in an Uber. […]
Bumper to Bumper: How Singapore Is Combating Traffic Jams
The problem of traffic in Singapore has been a subject of heated discussion among drivers and lawmakers for more than 40 years. The problem was first widely addressed in 1975 when traffic shut local traffic at peak times to such a crawl, commuters were only averaging about 12 miles per hour, even on multi-lane highways. […]
Car as a Service: A Forced Trend Going Nowhere Fast
RoadShow recently ran a guide to car subscription plans that run the gamut in type and price. It got me to thinking–do people really want to pay for a car subscription which seems like a cross between car renting and car leasing? It’s a lot more expensive than owning or leasing a car, so why […]