February 21, 2018 10:32AM

Infrastructure We Don’t Need

By Randal O'Toole

Here's the great thing about driverless cars: They will need no new infrastructure because the people designing them are making them work with existing infrastructure. All they ask is for cities and states to fill the potholes and do other basic maintenance.

Here's another great thing about driverless cars: Most congestion results from slow human reflexes, and simulations show that congestion will significantly decline if as few as 5 percent of vehicles on the road are driverless. So, even if you don't have a driverless car, you will benefit from others being driverless.

So why is Bexar County (San Antonio) Commissioner Kevin Wolff proposing to use federal infrastructure dollars to build new interstate highway lanes open only to driverless cars? On one hand, they don't need special lanes. On the other hand, separating them from other traffic eliminates the congestion relief benefits they can provide.

Kevin Wolff is the son of Nelson Wolff, San Antonio's leading streetcar supporter and a long-time proponent of pork barrel in general (among other things, he has a stadium named after him). Kevin opposed the streetcar, but he supported another even more foolish rail-transit proposal.

The state of Texas is planning to add four lanes to relieve congestion on Interstate 35 in San Antonio. All four would be "managed," meaning tolled to make sure they never get congested. Wolff's idea is to dedicate two of those lanes to driverless cars, which means two fewer lanes for other people to use.

Kevin says he floated his driverless-lane idea to the Trump Administration, which has proposed to spend $20 billion on "innovative" infrastructure projects. "They told me, 'This is just the kind of proposal we want to fund,'" he said.

Actually, it is just the kind of proposal they should not fund. It isn't necessary. It doesn't relieve congestion and will probably make it worse than having four managed lanes. It doesn't help restore crumbling infrastructure. It merely adds more infrastructure that won't have a source of funds to maintain it.