Transportation
Self-driving cars: What will 90% fewer accidents accidents do to insurers?
Human drivers are responsible for the vast majority of car accidents. A recent McKinsey study on self-driving cars is bad news for insurance, companies, it’s good news for just about everyone else. The research firm predicts that autonomous vehicles could eliminate around 90% of all automobile accidents in the U.S., saving thousands of lives and preventing up to $190 […]
The poverty-public transit connection
Seattle, which last year upped its minimum hourly wage to $15, just launched an innovative concept in public transit: income-based fares for its impoverished population. While fare hikes always make the news, Seattle’s King County Metro and Sound Transit has begun offering transit riders income-based discounts, which can drop fares by more than 50%. As […]
Proof that compact cities lead to reduced car use
The more compact the city, the fewer the cars… right? A new study — Connection Between Built Environment and Travel Behavior, published in the Journal of the Transportation Research Board — aims to determine whether that commonly-held wisdom is true. “[T]he compact city concept has become a paradigm of sustainable urban development under the premise […]
What will American transportation look like in 2030?
What does the America’s transportation future look like? A new study from the RAND Corporation, Exploring Future Transport Demand in the United States, envisions two different scenarios. The study’s research team imagines two sequences set in 2030, drawing on expert opinions as well as exploring the impact current transportation realities and choices will have on the transportation […]
U.S. car manufacturing set to surpass 2000 peak
Car production in North America is thriving, with U.S. car exports exceeding a staggering two million. As AutoBlog reports, 2014’s numbers are “just shy” of the record set in 2000. Last year, U.S. factories exported 2.1 million cars, the highest number in history, with around 50% of the exports going to Mexico and Canada, and […]
NHTSA: drunk driving down; drugged driving on the rise
Drunk driving is on the decline, but that doesn’t necessarily mean traffic is safer: While drunk driving campaigns have been particularly effective in recent years, prescription drug and marijuana use is emerging more and more on our country’s roads, according to two new studies from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). First, the positive […]
USDOT’s grim report on transportation in 2045
The U.S. Department of Transportation paints a depressing picture of America’s future transportation landscape in a recent report, Beyond Traffic, Trends and Choices: 2045. The report is part of a larger Beyond Traffic initiative launched by U.S. transportation secretary Anthony Foxx and Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Some of the low-lights? >As The Stack puts it, we can […]
How ridesharing and carsharing insurance works
Carshare and rideshare companies aren’t just changing the way people get around; they’re forcing changes in how auto insurance operates. Geico has begun offering a commercial insurance policy tailored for Uber, Sidecar and Lyft drivers in the state of Virginia. A source explained to BuzzFeed: “It is a year-long commercial auto policy… but like any of […]
More comfortable car trips mean more congestion
Self-driving cars are coming. Drivers are already willing to forfeit the wheel, as we’ve previously blogged, and a self-driving Cadillac appears to be less than two years away. A new study investigates whether two key benefits that self-driving cars promise are likely, based on data from light rail transit and high-speed rail: less traffic, and freeing […]
How cops’ reporting biases impact crash data
Crash data is often mistaken for fact, but reporting bias may affect the data even more significantly than experts have already assumed. A new study from Kibrom A. Abay of the Department of Economics at the University of Copenhagen aims to investigate by analyzing the “nature, and impact of the reporting bias associated with the police-reported […]
VMTs on decline since ’92, with men driving most by far
Call it the great American car devolution: Americans have been driving less since at least 2004 — if not earlier, according to a recent report by the Washington Post. While VMTs, or vehicle miles traveled, peaked 11 years ago, individual states’ VMTs peaked as far back as 1992. And among the drivers who are clocking […]
