Matt Dellinger

Matt Dellinger appears in the following:

Bad Directions: A Cautionary Tale of GPS Misbehavior

Monday, November 01, 2010

Car navigator in action

(Matt Dellinger, Transportation Nation) – When the New York Times reported last month that Google was developing a car that could drive itself through traffic, Jon Kelly at the BBC wondered whether we could ever learn to love driverless cars. Kelly quoted “motoring journalist” Quentin Willson, who doubted the level of trust people would have in robot drivers. “The human brain can react quickly to the blizzard of information we're confronted with on the roads,” Willson told the BBC. “By contrast, we know what sat nav is like—it takes you on all sorts of circuitous routes.”

Indeed. The pair of articles brought to mind a harrowing tale I’d heard about a rogue GPS that had led a friend’s car astray. The vehicle in question was not piloting itself, but was being driven by Liesl Schillinger, a writer and literary critic who happens to write frequently for the Times.

A few years ago, Schillinger was on her way to an interview in rural New Hampshire. It was a humid August day in the White Mountains, and she was driving her rented Hyundai with its windows down, enjoying the “gorgeous and enveloping” smell of pine and trusting fully in her GPS device to guide her.

“At first it was idyllic,” she remembered in an email to me. “I passed a quaint red barn and farmyard, where picturesque Holsteins grazed, then entered a kind of woods.  At first I marveled at how lovely and rugged it was to be driving in such refreshingly unblemished wilderness, but as the road through the trees got steeper, to the point of being nearly vertical (like skiing uphill), I grew doubtful.”

But the fuchsia line on the screen was unmistakably clear, she told me. “The voice kept blandly ordering me onward. It was just a mile and a half to the house, "she" (the voice) said, so I decided to persevere.”

Schillinger came to a clearing in the trees, and found herself and car “atop a rocky plateau, like in the Jeep Cherokee ads—you know,  where the jeep perches on some  jagged butte where it has been airlifted like a stunned hippopotamus.” She stopped and opened her door to examine the terrain, doubtful that her mid-size could handle the steep, rocky grade. She wanted to call the woman she was visiting, but she had no cell reception. So she pressed on, trusting her robotic navigator.

“I managed to drive the car down the rocks, say, five hundred feet, at which point the scree turned into a damp muddy narrow roadlet through a forest,” Schillinger recalls.

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The Furner Problem: How Globalized Capital Complicates Privatization

Friday, October 22, 2010

(Matt Dellinger, Transportation Nation) – This week, in an online excerpt from his new book Griftopia, Rolling Stone muckraker Matt Taibbi offers a startling revelation: “There are now highways, airports, parking garages, toll roads—almost everything you can think of that isn’t nailed down and some things that are—for sale, to bidders unknown, around the world.”

Taibbi says he dropped his fork when he first learned, in 2009, that the Pennsylvania Turnpike and other pieces of infrastructure had been offered “for sale” (or long-term lease, as the case may be). He was even more alarmed to learn that the investors behind these deals were in many cases—brace yourself—not American.

This won’t be news to readers in Chicago, where the Skyway toll bridge was leased to a Spanish-Australian consortium in 2004 (five years before Taibbi dropped his fork), nor to readers in Indiana, where, in June 2006, the same consortium took over operations of the Indiana Toll Road. The dialogue surrounding this latter deal involved a fair amount of xenophobia. At a Privatization Conference in September of 2006, Ryan Kitchell, the Indiana Official who lead the team that struck the already-triumphant lease deal, told a roomful of bankers and DOT finance officials that this “Furner problem” (think “foreigner” with a flat midwestern drawl) had taken them by surprise. People in the finance world, he said, took for granted that money knows no borders. L’argent sans frontieres, as the French toll operator APRR, now partially owned by an Australian fund, might say.

Taibbi’s book excerpt, it should be said, does pour some new gasoline (or crude oil) on the fire by focusing his umbrage on the presence of Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds among those parties looking to turn our infrastructure into cash flow. He draws connections between a Nixon-era OPEC embargo, the war in Iraq, and the seemingly bum deal Chicago got in privatizing its parking meters.

Let’s set aside for a moment the argument over the virtues and pitfalls of infrastructure privatization. Taibbi’s piece certainly demonstrates that the “Furner problem” has legs. And that raises, in turn, important questions: If privatization continues, as seems likely since the Obama Administration and governors from both parties seem friendly to the idea, should some preference be given to bidders with American investor pools? Should lawmakers try to restrict foreign investment in the proposed National Infrastructure Bank?

Such economic jingoism gets tricky, as evidenced in this riveting video clip from a Texas Transportation Committee meeting last year, captured by filmmaker Bill Molina, director of Truth Be Tolled. There’s a lot going on in this exchange between Commissioner Ted Houghton and Hank Gilbert, the founder of Texans United for Reform and Freedom (TURF), but if you can get past Houghton’s namecalling (he calls Gilbert a “bigot”), he actually makes an interesting point: If China, say, is loaning us money at interest (for profit) so that we can fund our infrastructure stimulus, then how American are our roads anyway?

Matt Dellinger is the author of the book Interstate 69: The Unfinished History of the Last Great American Highway. You can follow him on Twitter.

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Charlie Wilson’s Bus

Friday, October 15, 2010

(Matt Dellinger, Transportation Nation) – I recently visited Lufkin, Texas, to meet with Louis Bronaugh, the former mayor of Lufkin and the original champion, in Texas, of the proposed Interstate 69. Like a surprising number of his fellow highwaymen, Bronaugh has a soft spot for public transportation too. In fact, he is now the Chairman of the Brazos Transit District, an agency serving a sixteen-county area in northeast Texas including the cities of Lufkin, Bryant-College Station, Nacogdoches, and the Woodlands.

A privately-funded shuttle bus carries veterans between Lufkin, Texas, and Houston daily. (Credit: Community Transportation magazine)

Bronaugh was mayor for eighteen years, and during that time he grew adept at shepherding public and private largess toward community improvements. His main sidekicks in this were Arthur Temple, Jr., chairman emeritus of Temple-Inland timber company, and Congressman Charlie Wilson, whose covert dealings in Afghanistan (and in various bedrooms and hot tubs) were the subject of the Tom Hanks movie “Charlie Wilson’s War.” All three men played a part in creating a unique transit amenity for veterans in Texas.

Temple helped Bronaugh build a new center for the Boys and Girls Club, a recycling plant, an educational building at the local zoo, and a dozen other amenities. Charlie Wilson, who managed a lumber store for Temple-Inland as a young man, was instrumental in securing federal funding for a local veteran’s clinic and convincing Lockheed-Martin to locate an
electronics factory in town. When Temple died, in 2006, Wilson joined the board of the T. L. L. Temple foundation, and at his urging the board agreed to fund a new Veteran’s shuttle between the outpatient clinic in Lufkin and the VA Hospital in Houston, a two hour drive away.

The grant—$221,000 per year—pays for the operation and maintenance of the bus (contracted through Coach America), which each day ferries thirty to fifty veterans of conflicts spanning from World War II to the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Parallel Universe Parking

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

(Matt Dellinger, Transportation Nation) - I did a double take in downtown Indianapolis. Was that grass where there once was concrete? It was! And what a difference it made.

The transformation of car lanes into people-friendly park space has become a familiar sight in pedestrian-driven New York City and San Francisco, but the sight is startling in cities where the car is still king.

Park(ing) Indianapolis

A pop-up park in Indianapolis near Monument Circle. September 17th.

On Meridian Street, just south of Monument Circle, a loading zone in front of a Borders books had been turned green. Tiles of sod covered a rectangle of asphalt from curb to dotted line, and benches and potted shrubs stood at the corners. Just that bit of green gave the iconic Soldiers and Sailors spire new pop. But on closer inspection there was something sloppy about the patch too. In the middle sat an unlit campfire pit—a flourish that made it clear this was some kind of stage set and drove home the fact that for many Hoosiers a "park" is a place you go camping.

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The second stimulus, I-69, and the battle for local control

Thursday, September 09, 2010

(Matt Dellinger, Transportation Nation)  Along with the proposal to jump-start a six-year transportation authorization with $50 Billion in funding, President Obama on Monday also suggested changes in the way such federal dollars are spent. His Administration's promotion of a National Infrastructure Bank and other reforms are early, tentative steps towards what could be a major reworking of the way we decide which projects to construct.

But deciding how to decide won't be easy. Anyone looking for an object lesson in the difficult issues ahead would do well to study the Interstate 69 controversy in Bloomington, Indiana, where the state and the city have locked horns over the biggest highway project in years.

At Eastern Greene Middle School in southern Indiana, citizens peruse maps of the state's route for Interstate 69

The proposed 1400-mile extension of Interstate 69 into a Canada-to Mexico "NAFTA" highway has been on the books for twenty years. It was one of the high-priority corridors designated in the 1991 transportation reauthorization—a notable exception in a bill that was otherwise hyped as the beginning of post-interstate multimodalism and increased local control over planning.

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A Lively Night in the Fight Over Interstate 69

Thursday, August 26, 2010

(Bloomfield, Indiana - Matt Dellinger, Transportation Nation)  Tonight will be a big night for opponents of Interstate 69 in southern Indiana. The 20-year long local battle against the Canada-to-Mexico highway is reaching a climax. The state has released a draft environmental impact statement for the short segment closest to Bloomington, where the road is widely unpopular.

The Indiana Department of Transportation will host a public hearing this evening on the DEIS.  Public comments against the highway have historically failed to convince the Indiana Department of Transportation or the various Governors who have advanced the project. But one of the most contentious debates has long been based in Bloomington.

Longtime I-69 foes Thomas and Sandra Tokarski, the founders of  Citizens for Appropriate Rural Roads, sent an urgent email to their supporters asking them to attend. “Governor Daniels is  fast-tracking and cheapening I-69,” they wrote, referring to Mitch Daniels’ strategy of reducing engineering standards in order to fit the project into the state’s shrinking budget. “It is VERY IMPORTANT for lots of people to show up and comment on this devastating project. We must speak out or be paved over.” 

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