I missed these subjects on transportation technology

CATO has an interesting conference:

"While transportation planners debate investing in highway capacity or building rail transit and high-speed rail, another alternative may make more sense. As discussed in O'Toole's recently published book Gridlock, new technologies can cost-effectively increase the capacity of existing highways to move people faster and safer while using less energy. Many of these innovations are already available, ranging from adaptive cruise control now being sold on many cars up to completely automated vehicles. The main obstacles to more widespread deployment are not technical but institutional and bureaucratic. Please join O'Toole and Huhnke to find out how transportation could be transformed in just a few years."

Tomorrow, Rayburn office building, Washington DC.

I guess CATO is not as much of a Communist organization as I originally believed.

Here is a little about Randy O'Toole and his research:

"Far from protecting the environment, most rail transit lines use more energy per passenger mile, and many generate more greenhouse gases, than the average passenger automobile. Rail transit provides no guarantee that a city will save energy or meet greenhouse gas targets.

While most rail transit uses less energy than buses, rail transit does not operate in a vacuum: transit agencies supplement it with extensive feeder bus operations. Those feeder buses tend to have low ridership, so they have high energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile. The result is that, when new rail transit lines open, the transit systems as a whole can end up consuming more energy, per passenger mile, than they did before."

Maybe CATO will see the problem as one of liberating our roads for automation.

And this (85 days ago):

"Last weekend, Volkswagen Group of America and Stanford University's School of Engineering hosted a dedication ceremony on the Stanford campus for the new Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory (VAIL) that included the "first ever" autonomous parking demonstration by a driverless car."

And this:

"The San Francisco BART board voted on December 12 to award a joint venture of Flatiron and Parsons a contract to build a 5·2 km cable-hauled people mover linking Coliseum BART station with Oakland International Airport."

Cable cars coming to Oakland! What about that.

I type in search terms so you don't have to!