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borders. China, with 22,000 kms (14,000 miles) of HSR in December 2016, accounts for twothirds of the world's total.High-speed rail functions best when using an integrated system of specialized rolling stockand dedicated tracks. They normally operate on standard gauge tracks of continuouslywelded rail on grade-separated rights-of-way that incorporate a large turning radius. TheX2000 in Sweden consists of specially-designed trains that run on the same tracks as intercitytrains. There is no single standard that applies worldwide. Speeds at the high end range from250 km/h (160 mph) to 320 km/h (190 mph) and at the low end of around 200 km/h (120mph).Every two weeks I travel from Strängnäs (80 kms west of Stockholm) to Göteborg and spendthree days there. I have three choices for getting there and back: train, plane or automobile.Door-to-door by train takes four hours in each direction and costs 250, including a taxi toand from the train station. Door-to-door by plane takes four hours in each direction and costs 350, including three days of parking at the airport. Door-to-door by automobile takes sixhours in each direction, including a half-hour pit stop going and coming, and costs 300 (fuel,mileage charge and three days of parking in Göteborg). I can work comfortably for three ofthe four-hour train trip, uncomfortably for one hour of the plane trip and not at all for the sixhours of the car trip. I don’t fly, and rarely drive. I just did the math. Train wins.Today, a non-stop train trip between Stockholm Central and Göteborg Central on the X2000at a quite-good-enough-speed takes 3 hours and 9 minutes. Swedish transport authorities saythat the same trip by high-speed train will take two hours. For me, who has to get to and fromStockholm instead of hopping on at a station south of Stockholm, in Södertälje (home ofScania), it would cut maybe half an hour. If I could fly from a local air strip fifteen minutesfrom our home, a trip, door-to-door to Göteborg could be made in two hours.People who say they are giving up flying as a sacrifice to save the Planet remind me of thekids who gave up eating black jelly beans as their Lenten sacrifice. They didn’t eat the blackjelly beans during the rest of the year either. Telling people they have to give up their annualvacation to a place where they can only fly is cruel. Politicians of all colors and business peoplewill continue to fly because they have to. Laying a guilt trip on people and ruining peoples’livelihoods is, unfortunately, standard practice for besserwissers. Let’s address the problemand reduce emissions from planes.Beating Traffic Ten Years LaterBEATING TRAFFIC: TIME TO GET UNSTUCK was published in 2007. It is only 136 pages, but it took metwo years to write (I had a day job). My reason for writing it was that everyone, from punditsto punters, was saying that traffic congestion would be eliminated if only cities charged carsfor the privilege of entry and if all highways were converted to toll roads. London started itscharge in February, 2003, and Stockholm turned on its control points in August, 2007. Mysimple message was that if you don’t address the reasons that traffic congestion exists in thefirst place, you will not fix the problem by forcing people to pay even more money than they7 P a g eThe Dispatcher –April 2018

already do to put their lives’ daily puzzles together. People will just be poorer and congestionwill still be there. As we have seen, they are and it is.I began writing THE DISPATCHER in late 2013 because the same pundits and punters were sayingthat almost all deaths on our roads could be eliminated if we took humans out from behindthe steering wheel and substituted a robot. My message is that there is much that can bedone—and, indeed has already been done (see chart below)—to reduce fatalities on ourroads without spending huge sums of money on a technology that is far from being ready foruse and could put motorists and pedestrians at risk. As we have seen, it has. I continue mywork.One of the publications that continues to ruffle my feathers with its congestion chargingrhetoric is THE ECONOMIST. The March 3rd 2018 issue had a 12-page section and a Leader pagejust on Autonomous Vehicles (their term for humanless-driven vehicles, or H-DVs). In additionto the standard claim that AV’s will save a million lives a year, it made many other statementsabout the benefits. So I thought I would use my recommendations for ‘beating traffic’ and seehow whether H-DVs could potentially solve the problems I identified as the main reasons whywe get stuck in traffic.Roots of CongestionSome say the reason for traffic congestion is that there are too many vehicles in the sameplace at the same time. That’s an effect, not a cause. The cause is that our land transportnetworks (roads and rails) are out of sync with the distribution and sizes of the places wherepeople live, work, shop, recreate, and educate. This problem is exacerbated in successful cityregions experiencing growth, like Los Angeles, New York and London. Allowing workplacesand retail centers to spread out of the central cities into greenfield 3 sites was the biggestmistake that politicians made. Building ring roads around cities, like I95 and I495 aroundBoston just asked for trouble.8 P a g eThe Dispatcher –April 2018

Let the Kids Walk to SchoolWhen many of us grew up, we walked to our small, local grade schools and even to middleand high schools. Today, communities, large and small, have consolidated their schoolsostensibly to save money on building operations and maintenance and to provide betterfacilities. Even if the school is close enough for some kids to walk, their parents worry abouttraffic and predators. Add to this the growing trend to allow students the choice of whichschool they wish to attend, and you have children commuting to school like their parentscommute to work. School buses, parents driving their own and other children older teensdriving themselves create heavy traffic in the morning and afternoon on roads that were notbuilt to carry it.What can H-DVs do for this problem? Save money on bus drivers, maybe? Imagine a schoolbus full of kids of any age with no driver/supervisor on board. The problem was caused byincreasing the catchment areas of schools, and it will only be solved by reducing thatcatchment area, and addressing the predator problem, to allow children obtain a goodeducation and socializing experience without having to use any form of transport. This is whatI wrote in 2007, so no change.Separate Transportation from RecreationIt wasn’t one of the examples given by Toyota for its e-Palette Concept Vehicle, the fullyautonomous BEV, but why not a gym-in-the-box where you could spend your commute doingyour exercises. I guess that wouldn’t go very well with seat belt laws. Ride sharing to the gymwould get a few cars off the roads, although a better option would be to have more gyms sothat everyone who can could simply walk. Not much to gain here from H-DVs.Shop LocallyWhen I wrote BEATING TRAFFIC, it was at the height of the Big Box Store Boom. The U.S. hadbeen ‘Walmarted’, and many European communities’ retail facilities were on their way tobeing abandoned in favor of the out-of-town shopping mall. What a difference a decade canmake. Today, shopping has been ‘Amazoned’. Instead of driving to the mall, the mall is drivingto everyone in the form of delivery trucks. Instead of congestion around the malls we havetruck traffic on our residential streets. As far as congestion is concerned, it won’t matter ahoot if the trucks are driven by humans or robots. Stop home deliveries, especially of stuffthat people can buy in local stores, like groceries and pizzas. Establish pick-up points anddeliver goods them during the night.Give Commuting a RestIn my book I devote a lot of space to the physics of traffic congestion. It’s a lot like Whack-aMole: you stop it in one place and it pops up in another. If people all switched overnight totaking a bus or train—which given our current settlement patters would not be possible, butjust for argument’s sake—the buses and trains would be unable to cope. So people wouldsimply start switching back to taking their cars until there was equilibrium. If some peoplestayed home from work, including people who would normally drive or take public transport,then there would be more seats on the bus or train and more space on the roads at the sametime, so people would not have an incentive to switch modes.9 P a g eThe Dispatcher –April 2018

Those who advocate H-DVs say they will be capable of driving more closely together, therebyimproving flow and adding capacity to roads. There is plenty of evidence to show that addingcapacity to roads simply encourages more users until the road becomes overcrowded. Myadvice still holds: take a day or two off the commuting treadmill each week and work fromhome. There has never been a better time to do it.Accept Some Friendly AdviceIn 2007, we had a little over ten years of experience with on-board navigation systems.Personal navigation devices (PNDs) from companies like TomTom and Garmin had been onthe market for three years. These devices were capable of providing good route guidance withdecent traffic information. Map-based Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) using the‘Electronic Horizon’ concept were just starting to be taken off the test bench and put intovehicles. The iPhone arrived in 2007 and opened up many new possibilities for driverinformation and assistance. Today, with much more powerful sensors, more detailed andaccurate map data and Cellular-V2X starting to come on line, we can provide more and betterinformation to drivers and directly to on-board systems that assist in the driving tasks. Theseadvances will also be useful for H-DVs.The question is whether these improved information systems will help to reduce trafficcongestion. Incidents, which include accidents, comprise 25% of the reason for trafficcongestion, so to the extent that the systems can help to avoid collisions, they will help.Maybe they can help with weather-related crashes (15% of total) by providing early warningsand better vision in snow and heavy rain.What’s the verdict?As I wrote at the close of BEATING TRAFFIC, “From the time the idea for the book first enteredmy mind until the time I sent the manuscript to the publisher, I have seen my position changeon some issues as new facts were presented and old information became discredited. I wentinto the book as a firm believer in educational vouchers, and came out of it as a totalsupporter of small, local schools.” When I started THE DISPATCHER, I was curious about HDVs. I still am. But I am convinced—for now—that they will not help beat traffic.Mapbox – What Is It?I read the following quote from the CEO of a company I had never heard of and thought, Whathave I missed?“We (Mapbox) have more sensors on the road today than the entire connected car spacewill have by 2020,” said Chief Executive Officer Eric Gundersen.So I visited its site and sent a few notes around to friends to find out more. Its site says thefollowing:“Mapbox is the location data platform for mobile and web applications. We providebuilding blocks to add location features like maps, search, and navigation into anyexperience you create.”Barry Glick, founder of MAPQUEST and a standard-bearer for the digital mapping movement,said to me of Mapbox: “I have been quite amazed and impressed at how successful they’ve10 P a g eThe Dispatcher –April 2018

been, given the competition from Google Maps API and many others. They are pretty muchdominating the market now for non-Google mapping toolkits used by app developers. Theirinitial focus was clearly on the visualization aspect (i.e., cartography), but now they’ve addedother map-related functionality as well. One thing that’s helped them is they’ve had plenty ofinvestment.”The company is filling gaps left by the sales of MapQuest to AOL (2000), Telmap to Intel (2011)and deCarta to Uber (2015). Tesla paid 5 million to Mapbox for a two-year licensing deal inDecember 2015, according to a regulatory filing to help them assemble their on-board maps.But its pitch goes beyond map display and processing. It is using location data as a base layerfor future maps—pairing it with camera systems, such as Mobileye’s, or its own sensor data.This is what interests automakers and investors. SoftBank Vision Fund is among Mapbox’smajor investors. SoftBank led a 164 million financing round in October, 2017. Through itssoftware installed on phones, Mapbox said it plots some 220 million miles of road dataglobally a day, providing an updated snapshot of basic features like street lanes.Musings of a Dispatcher: Who Washes a Rental Car?DOES ANYBODY WASH their rental car? I am reacting to the predictions that in the future themajority of us will become tenants in megalopolises, renting the tools and services we needto move and work. In this dystopic future, ownership is restricted to the very few who will seeto it that the tools are serviced and the vehicles in which we move are sufficiently clean.Ownership for the rent-takers is deemed to be fine, but ownership for the masses is equatedwith waste: cars are idle, houses are empty and tools are hung on hooks for most of their lifecycles.Thomas L. Friedman in his recent book, Thank You for Being Late: An optimist’s guide tothriving in the Age of Accelerations, states: “In the history of the world, no one has everwashed a rented car.”4 Friedman is an author and weekly columnist for the NEW YORK TIMES,and has worked as a journalist for that newspaper since 1981. The book is actually two in one,as the subtitle hints. In meticulous detail, Friedman first describes the forces that are causingthe world to spin at an accelerating pace, similar to Harari’s descriptions in Homo Deus andTegmark’s in Life 3.0. These forces, he says, are causing massive upheavals for individuals,industries and countries that we have yet to acknowledge, let alone effectively address.Then he takes us to his home town, St. Louis Park, Minnesota, to describe what it was like togrow up in a place and at a time when the world was not spinning out of control. He uses hisexperiences with family and friends, in school and community activities, to explain why it isessential to “reconstruct social ties so that people feel respected and welcomed and this isthe way to make America great again,” as Laura Vanderkam wrote in her review of the bookin the WALL STREET JOURNAL. What he says rings very true for me.It is in the chapter Mother Nature as Political Mentor that the ‘washing the rental car’reference is made. By ‘Mother Nature’ he means Earth, as a “bio-geophysical, rationallyfunctioning, complex system of oceans, atmosphere, forests, rivers, soils, plants and animalsthat has evolved since the first hints of life emerged.” He is looking for a model to identify away to survive and even thrive in a period when everything, including the climate, is changing11 P a g eThe Dispatcher –April 2018

so quickly. Over the course of its 4.54 billion years, selection and the use of constant feedbackloops. Mother Nature is a lifelong learner, and now we humans must become lifelong learnersas well.“There is no perfect human analog to the way nature unconsciously evolves a sense ofbelonging in ecosystems, but there is a rough parallel—and that is promoting a culture ofownership in human societies, which always creates more resilience,” writes Friedman. Hequotes an education expert, Stefanie Sanford of the College Board: “Ownership is the onething that fixes more things so other things can be made easier to fix. When citizens feel asense of ownership over their country, when teachers feel a sense of ownership over theirclassrooms, when students feel a sense of ownership over their education, more good thingstend to happen than bad.” Amen.I personally find it strange that so many people seem to be bent on giving up ownership as away of life in favor of buying services as they go. My maternal grandfather’s family weretenant farmers for centuries, and my maternal grandmother’s family were day laborers, bothliving in the same village in central Italy. When they came to America in 1914-15, alreadymarried and with two children (my mom came a year later), they lived in an abandoned U.S.Army barracks close to the mine shaft my grandfather walked into every day for the next fortyyears. After four years of saving, they were able to buy a house lot in the neighbor-hoodwhere their friends and family had already settled. Their neighbors helped them build ahouse, just as my grandparents would help those neighbors build theirs. As soon as he couldafford it, my grandfather bought a car that he drove himself and his two brothers-in-law tothe mine every day so that they didn’t have to travel on the trolley where the mafia collectedits daily dues, the Fascists spread their propaganda and the plain clothes Pinkertons, whowere paid by the mine owners, spied on everyone.In Europe, we are only a little more than a century away from a time when men and womenwere fighting for the right to own the plot of ground where they lived and farmed, for theright to keep what they grew rather than giving it all to the landlord in return for the privilegeof working and living on that landowner’s property. It wasn’t until 1856 that the last state(North Carolina) eliminated the law that only land owning ‘free’ men could vote in the UnitedStates. And now we are just going to give up all of those rights in order to be free to choosewhatever tools and services that are on offer from the folks (Google; Amazon; Facebook) whowill decide for us what is on offer? That’s not my cup of tea.If we don’t continue to exercise our ancestors’ hard-won rights of ownership, who will owneverything that we use? To whom or to what will be paying our rents? It used to be priestsand the emperors, then the Church and the kings, then the industrial and financial barons.You can be certain that the one-percenters, those who own more than half of the world’swealth, will be sleeping in beds they own, so you will probably be sleeping in one owned bythem as well.No. Sorry. I am taking those reports on the death of ownership with a very large grain of salt.We do not have to re-adopt the tenant farmer lifestyle and the subservient mentality of thepeasant class in order to avoid the cataclysmic end of the Planet due to climate change. Butwe do need to take ownership of the problem in a way that we have not done so thus far, andwe have to do this together in our communities. This means we need to allow other peopleto take ownership of the problem as well, at their own pace and in their own way. We needto stop telling them that they are too uninformed, too uneducated, too unevolved to see whatwe see. If there is a need for better proof that this ‘I-know-best’ attitude creates a huge12 P a g eThe Dispatcher –April 2018

tsunami-like backlash we only need to look at what happened on the 8th of November, 2016in the U.S.A.Everything-as-a-service is taking the so-called ‘sharing economy’ a thousand steps too far.Sharing is not riding in the same taxi with a stranger or paying to use a stranger’s car whilethey are working or sleeping in a stranger’s bed that they have offered to you for the nightfor a fee. Sharing is giving your neighbor tomatoes from your garden, shoveling the snow offthe old neighbor’s sidewalk and giving him a lift to the doctor—all for free. That’s sharing. Therest is just a gig for profit. 13 P a g eThe Dispatcher –April 2018

Footnotes:1. The U.K. had stated before it voted for Brexit that it would continue to use its own methodof handling vehicle-based emergency calls that has been operational since 2004.2. There are 50 countries in Europe, even though the EU has appropriated the designation ofthe continent for its members.3. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines a Greenfield Site as ‘an area ofagricultural or forest land, or some other undeveloped site earmarked for commercialdevelopment or industrial projects.4. The original quote was in the book A Passion for Excellence by Thomas Peters. In a stu

No furs in San Francisco Merging sharing Numbers of things Virtual feelings China’s One Belt One Road No more slow boats High-speed Rail Clipping wings . respectively CAR2GO and DRIVENOW. Together they claim they will have four million users. DRIVENOW lost 34 million, or 42 millio