OpenMarket: Automobiles and Roads

In a recent article in Energy and Environment News, several prominent climate scientists bash the Trump administration’s proposed rollback of the Obama administration’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) and carbon dioxide emission standards for model year 2021-2026 motor vehicles. Their argument, or rather innuendo, is that the Trump proposal is wrongheaded because, well, climate change is bad.

Yesterday, the New York City Council voted to impose a one-year cap on the number of ride-hailing vehicles able to operate in the city. The bills also allowed the city to impose a minimum level of compensation for ride-hailing drivers.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on August 2^nd proposed to revise Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards and carbon dioxide tailpipe standards for model year 2021-2025 motor vehicles, and set new standards for model year 2026 vehicles.

Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA), the outgoing chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, this week released a legislative discussion draft of a new infrastructure bill, attempting to build consensus on modernizing federal programs related to surface transportation, water resources, and project permitting and environmental review. In this post, I’ll focus on the surface transportation components.

CEI has released my third annual report on state barriers to vehicle platooning, Authorizing Automated Vehicle Platooning: A Guide for State Legislators, 2018 Edition. (Read the 2017 edition here and the 2016 edition here). Automated vehicle platooning refers to an application of driving automation system technology that allows vehicles via wireless connection to coordinate speeds in order to safely reduce the gap between leading and following vehicles.

Back when CEI published “Free to Prosper: A Pro-Growth Agenda for the 115th Congress” at the end of 2016, we wrote that “[t]o better promote high-value, low-cost mobility, Congress should … remove government barriers to competition and innovation in the transportation sector.” Passing reasonable automated vehicle guidelines would be a strong step in that direction.

In September 2017, the House of Representatives passed the SELF DRIVE Act by unanimous voice vote. The bill would for the first time establish a national regulatory program for highly automated vehicles (HAVs), defined technically as vehicles equipped with SAE International Levels 3-5 automated driving systems (ADS)—or, in plain English, vehicles that offer limited- to full-self-driving functions. See SAE’s Recommended Practice J3016 for more detail.

A new report by economist Jonathan Lesser of the Manhattan Institute challenges the conventional wisdom that zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) are superior to new internal combustion vehicles (ICVs) on environmental grounds. Lesser’s analysis is detailed and quantitative but the basic idea is simple: Zero-emission vehicles are only as clean as the electric power sources they plug into. 

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is the national safety regulator of heavy trucks and buses, or commercial motor vehicles. It was created in 2000 after Congress spun off CMV operations regulatory functions from the Federal Highway Administration’s Office of Motor Carriers amid complaints from highway safety advocates that the Federal Highway Administration wasn’t taking seriously the CMV regulatory component of its mission. Two decades later, these complaints from safety advocates, which supported the creation of FMCSA, are still being made.

California joined by 16 states and the District of Columbia yesterday petitioned the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to stop Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt from revising his predecessor’s greenhouse gas emission standards for new cars sold in 2022-2025. The coalition’s press release claims their “lawsuit is based on the fact that the EPA acted arbitrarily and capriciously, failed to follow its own regulations, and violated the Clean Air Act.”