BERKELEY AHS kill hurt

BERKELEY

AHS kill hurt

Karl Hedrick director of the California PATH research group at UC Berkeley, which has been a major part of the automated highway system (AHS) project hits out at the USDOT in the latest issue of their newsletter INTELLIMOTION saying that a “new administration” at USDOT came in, “which doesn’t believe in long-term research.” The lead piece says this is “a shame” and that “we are now in the process of dismantling the (automated highway) program.” He writes: “If ever there were a role for federal support for transportation research, this is it.” He also says the termination of the AHS is politically shortsighted since there would have been rewards “in the political realm” including safety improvement, congestion relief, and emissions reduction.

Comment: Two days participating in an AHS workshop in Minneapolis in 1996 persuaded me that the program was not a matter of longterm research but of forever-research. It was going nowhere. It had no focus. It was without management. USDOT deserve congratulations for acting to terminate it. They should kill ineffectual programs like AHS more often. No doubt it was a cruel disruption for a lot of good able people unfortunate enough to be part of this fiasco, but they have the resilience to pick up and move on to more productive work — which however, Karl Hedrick, is unlikely to include advising government officials what is going to be politically rewarding to them.