it's not only problem. corruption is one of the problems but unfortunately for different reasons after the disintegration of the soviet union the disintegration of ukraine as independent state, not only corruption but the principal appeal of democratic count country, new institutions, parliament, judicial system and economic system. that's why i don't think it's so easy to say only with corruption. first of all, if you don't have the old system you cannot struggle against corruption because to have corruption you need institutions. without institutions you cannot get corruption. that's why when i said before we need the whole road map which we

can propose or elaborate with ukrainians, not without ukrainians but without ukrainians and help them political, economic, social and also including corruption and this is the big joke for many years this is not -- you cannot battle corruption in one year it's quite difficult in the society of ukraine. >> we have time for about two more questions so let's do the gentleman right there in the middle standing up and then we'll come down here. >> thank you. i'm a president of georgian television station. let me remind you of a statement that appeared in august, 2008 when military confrontation was started against georgia and my question is about russia/georgia relations. how do you see these relations in a country where governments declared policies to join nato?

thank you sir. >> >> well, we had the satisfaction of the statement of georgian prime minister in new york during the general assembly of the united nations that the policy of georgia is to step by step normalization of relations with russia. and here we go we have that we have problems. we have history and we need from both sides work to restore normal relations between our too two states. i think it's possible. we have a lot of -- we have good, important history, long

history among our people, among our cultures and i think that moving ahead with this political will i think that normalization will be -- it is possible. but it will need time. >> i think this will be our last questi question. >> my name is audrey all said the, i'm one of the fellows at the wilson center this year. i would like to return to the question about the right to protect. and my question specifically is what russia's policy in particular is on right to protect if it construes it as being appropriate to intervene when cultural rights are being threatened, whether an existential threat would have to be present. in other words, russia's policy and the way it construes the idea of right to protect.

thank thanks. >> well, i think that for the first time we started 20 speak about this when the military force was used against the civilian population and i don't think that we can -- we can today define in all details when you can use this right or when you don't use this right. but it was the real violation of human rights killing civil population and it was considered important to use this right. how it can be used in other occasions i don't think that today i can -- somebody can define exact ly i don't think that you can use as -- it's not

normal but it's close to something something exceptional. we have exceptional situation in ukraine and that right was used. >> on that note, which reminds us that a lot has not been defined in this area, but i really want to thank you very much for a wonderful explanation. it's very rare we get the view from moscow directly. >> this is not view from moscow. i am not official. this is my personal view. that's why i -- i don't think that everybody in moscow agrees with me. >> in fact, that's true. do you feel lonely with your position? >> oh, i don't know. maybe. >> but thank you very much. it is definitely not an official but a very educated opinion based on years of stellar diplomacy and thank you very, very much.

[ applause ] thank you. >> tonight on c-span 3, it's american history tv with discussions on u.s. strategy in vietnam at 8:00 p.m. eastern. then the impact of the jazz age on modern america follows at:45. then america's role in the world adds umpire or empire. and at 12:30, james madison's role in writing the u.s. constitution. american history tv begins tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern . >> next, a discussion about the future of self-driving cars as specialists review break throughs in technology, the impact on urban transit, and privacy and security concerns. the kato institute hosted this

discussio discussion. >> good afternoon, everyone, welcome to the kato institute. my name is matthew feeney, a policy analyst here. i'm very excited to welcome you here for what will i hope be an interesting discussion on self-driving cars. it's an interesting topic because we're at a stage in history when where asking questions when it comes to the widespread use of these vehicles and we have three experts here to help talk about it. before we begin, i'd like all of you to please turn off your cell phones so we won't be interrupted i would also like to say we will do a q&a session after all speakers have had their turn. at which pointly be calling on you the three speakers we have today are randy o'toole, mark scribner and they'll be discussing a range of different issues such as transit and

regional planning, the legal and regulatory issues as well as privacy. now the first speaker is randall owe tool. i'll introduce them before they speak. randall o'toole is a senior fellow at the kato institute where he works on urban growth, public land and transportation issues. he's the author of a number of books including "gridlock, why we're stuck in traffic and what to do about it" "the vanishing automobile and other myths" "reforming the forest service" and "american nightmare, how government undermines the dream of homeownership." his writings have appeared in numerous national journals and newspapers and is the author of the most recent policy analyst that will be out later, the policy of implications of autonomous vehicles. he was educated in forestry at oregon state university and economics at the university of orego

oregon. >> thank you. now we have to wait for the slide show to come up. i hope you're all familiar with driverless cars and the issues behind them what i want to do is get in-depth into how self-driving cars are going to impact our economy. and in particular urban areas. already four different companies have received licenses to operate self-driving cars on an experimental bases any california, nevada, and a number of other companies have said that they're working on self-driving cars and have demonstrated them in various forms. an google in particular has published a lot of its demonstrations of videos of self-driving cars dealing with things like getting around traffic detours, dealing with bicycles, dealing with

obstructions in the road and so on and so forth. i think the important thing to understand if you aren't familiar with the technology is that self-driving cars have all the computing on board. they're not connected to any central computer telling them what to do. it's all on board which means that what is happening with the car is dealing solely with what the car sees and knows about the area. now the implications of self-driving cars are, first of all, that we may see a major reduction in congestion because self-driving cars will have much faster reflexes than humans and most congestion is due to slow human reflexes. we're going see an expansion of mobility. right now only about two out of three americans have a driver's license. this will enabled non-licensed people to travel just as much as licensed people. i'm looking forward to the day when i'll be able to put my dogs

in the car and send them to the vet. we're going to see soon the introduction of cars that twenty even have a human driven capability. so these cars will be specifically or especially for people who don't have driver's licenses so, for example, this gentleman is legally blind yet he's happily driving the new google car without human-driven options. another major implications of self-drives cars is that it will change the way we look at transportation. right now about half of all americans say that their main constraint on travel is not cost but time it's not the monetary cost but time costs. and with self-drives caring that time cost largely goes away. you can surf the internet, play games with your children, train dogs on board the car while

you're traveling if you have a self-driving car. that means that will change how we look at transportation and instead of trying to live a place that's near to where we work or do anything, we can have a fairly remote home and have a long commute. when we want to get groceries we send the car, we don't have to send ourselves. we're also probably going see a confluence of self-driving cars and car sharing. some people think that in the future all cars will be shared. i'm not so sure. i think people will still want to own their own cars but people who don't will be able to use car sharing. and that will change the calculus of driving. right now most people if they own a car the cost of taking a flip a car is they're marginal or variable costs which is only about a third of the cost, the total cost of car ownership. so if you're car sharing, the

cost of driving is going to be the average cost, a total of the fixed and variable cost. that means you probably won't drive as much or travel as much if you're car sharing than if you're not. that in itself may be one reason why some people won't want to car share, they'll want to own their own cars so they can reduce the marginal cost. what are going to be the implications of self-driving cars on urban transit? right now we have urban transit in almost every major city in the country. in fact, lots of little teeny cities and minor cities have urban transit yet outside of new york urban transit plays a fairly minor role in transportation. in the new york urban area about 3 % of all commuting done by transit, about 10% or 11% of all travel is done by transit. the next highest in san francisco at about 18%.

these numbers are commuting, but when you talk about all travel the numbers are about one-third of commuting share which means in most urban areas transit carries about 1% or 2% or less of all travel. it's pretty insignificant. urban transit was mostly private before 1970. since 1970 it's been nationalized or municipal palized and we've poured almost a trillion dollars of subsidies into urban transit and we've seen per capita transit trips for urbanites fall from 50 trips a year to 40 trips a year. so it's not been a high success. right now at one time urban transit was mainly for people who didn't have cars but right now only about 4.5% of workers in america live in households without cars and most of them don't take transit to work.

so transit isn't even important for people who don't have cars much less people do. if you think low income people are the main users of transit, well, it turns out you're most likely to use transit to get to work if you have earned $75,000 a year. more likely than if you earned less than $25,000 a year. so when you subsidize transit to some degree, you're subsidizing the rich rather than the poor. if you think transit is a good way of saving energy, it turns out transit saves hardly any energy at all over driving. if you want to save energy, you encourage people to buy more fuel efficient cars such as a prius. if you think transit saves money, it turns out transit costs more than three times as much per passenger mile as driving so that's when you count subsidies of course. we subsidize transit to a far greater degree than we'd subsidize driving in order to

make transit appear cost competitive with driving. so what happens when we take this heavily subsidized and largely failed transit industry and add driverless cars to the mix? well we look at manhattan where there's two million jobs in about seven square miles and three-fourths of them take transit. it's hard to imagine we could substitute self-driving cars for transit. rail transit is always going to be important for manhattan as long as there's two million jobs in lower and midtown manhattan. but that's the densest job market in america. the second densest is the chicago loop where there's about 500,000 jobs, about half of them take transit to work. again, we probably can't see self-driving cars taking all those people to work but it might help for some. downtown washington has about 380,000 jobs, about half take transit to work boston has about

240,000 jobs, about half take transit to work. philadelphia 240,000 jobs, about half take transit to work. >> in these cases, i don't see self-driving cars being an ultimate replacement for transit however that's it. that's pretty much the line, those five or six cities are where transit really makes a big difference and where frying to get rid of transit and replace it with self-driving cars is going to cause too much congestion. for most of those cities outside of new york, bus transit probably makes more sense than rail transit but that's another issue. then we go to atlanta. 173,000 jobs in downtown atlanta but only 14% take transit to work. so if we substitute self-driving car which is will be -- have faster reflexes and less congestion well i don't think you'll see any increase in congestion, you'll probably see a reduction in congestion. houston 170,000 jobs, only 13%

take transit to work. denver, 10,000 jobs, 20% take transit to work but that's not going to be big enough of a market to support transit in the future. so basically outside of five or six cities i don't see transit as being a viable alternative to self-driving cars and car sharing in the future. i see car sharing and self-driving cars as almost completely replacing transit everywhere except for those few places. so we have to think about how are we going to wind down transit? how are we going to change transit in the future to adopt to the self-driving cars? we also have to think about long-range transportation planning. congress has for years mandated that urban areas have metropolitan planning organizations that engage in 20-year regional transportation plans and that rewrite these plans every five years. a few years ago i went through plans for the 70 largest urban

areas in the country and i found that about half of them base their plans on what i call the fantasy model which is that we'll a imagine a world without cars and design for that world and hope for that people follow our imagination. for example, sacramento wrote this plan in 2006 and they specifically said they've engage 234d this fantasy that they can live without cars for the last 25 years, which means the last five iterations of their regional transportation plan and for some reason it didn't work out. people are driving more and more even though they're not building any roads and there's more and more congestion, people are still driving even though they're spending lots of money on light rail, they're not luring people out of their cars? so what's the solution? their solution was to continue the policies of the previous plan. and we see this over and over again in cities across the country engaging in the fantasy rather than the reality building

light rail despite fact that construction costs are growing to be extremely high, my former hometown of portland in particular seems to be in a race with seattle for who can build the most build the most expensive light rail in the universe. seattle is right now winning, but portland is coming back with a plan that will have a $2 billion tunnel. and i don't see any of these plans being viable in the future when we have self-driving cars. i don't see why we're going to need to have light rail or anything like that. this is not a surprise. it should be totally predictable that if you engage in fantasy planning that people will not respond to your fantasies. as brown said, the link between transportation is too small to relieve congestion, reduce greenhouse gas emissions or save energy. so what happens when we introduce self-driving cars into

urban areas that have been engaging in fantasy planning, which means about half the urban areas in the country. what are self-driving cars going to do to the amount of travel? are people going to drive less, because they're car sharing, and they'll have a higher marginal cost of travel? or are they going to drive more, because more people are actually going to have access to self-driving cars? are they going to drive more, because their travel budget is different? cost is not the issue, time is the issue, and now they can travel and be productive while they're traveling. nobody knows the answers to these questions. and urban planners, frankly, are ignoring them. not a single regional transportation plan that i've ever seen has even mentioned the possibility of self-driving cars in the future. most of them -- none of them are trying to model it. a few of them have asked these questions. and thrown up their hands and said, there are no answers to

these questions. so about 60 american cities instead are planning for 19th century technology like speak cars and light rail rather than planning for 21st century technology. what should they be doing instead? i suggest they should focus on dumb infrastructure. what do i mean by dumb infrastructure? well, the mini tell system is an example of smart infrastructure. they gave everybody in france a dumb terminal to access a smart system that would allow them to do things like make plane reservations, make restaurant reservations, buy theater tickets and things like that. but, the company that was managing it had to keep up the technology. they had to keep their smart infrastructure up, and they couldn't afford to do it, they couldn't keep up with the internet. so instead, they abandoned it in

about, what was it, 2003. and today france, just like everybody else, relies on the internet which has the smart in your terminal. and the internet itself is a dumb communications infrastructure that doesn't contain the intelligence needed for you to do what you want to do on the internet. in the same way, highways can be smart or dumb. a dumb highway, basically, is pavement. and then the smarts come in your car that knows how to deal with that pavement. a smart highway has all kinds of communication systems in it that tells your car things like -- electronically tells you that there's an accident up ahead or red light up ahead or congestion or whatever. the problem is, maintaining that smart infrastructure is going to be very expensive, and it's not going to work very well. so it's much better to have dumb infrastructure and let the smarts be in the vehicle. another example of dumb infrastructure is rail transit -- or excuse me, smart

infrastructure, is rail transit. it only goes to places we build the rail line. the trains will go there reliably as long as we maintain them. so we have a $60 billion maintenance backlog. trying to provide smart infrastructure, just provide basic dumb infrastructure, which means keep the streets paved, keep the pavement smooth, keep the stripes on the -- dividing the lines in plain sight. and try to use a consistent form of signage across the country so that your smart car that works in california also will work in new york and virginia. in short, what we should do is try to solve today's problems today. don't try to foresee the distant future. instead, just try to leave the future with as many options as possible. so that they can solve their problems without being encumbered by a huge debt that

we put out today, in order to build something that turns out not to be worthwhile at all. build and maintain dumb infrastructure, and -- i don't know why it didn't show my last point, which is, don't manage vehicle-to-infrastructure communications which i think our next speaker will talk about a little bit more. thank you. >> thank you, randal. up next we have marc scribner, a research fellow at the competitive enterprise institute where he works on transportation, land use and telecommunications policy issues. he has written for "usa today," the "washington post," and the national review, and his work has been cited by the "wall street journal," "washington post," "boston globe," politico, he's widely cited. the bbc, c-span and more. he received his undergraduate degree in economics and

philosophy from george washington university. marc? >> well, thank you, matthew. and thank you all for being here. i'm going to talk about some of the regulatory issues that we have coming up. and i'm not going to -- let's just go for the overview. i'm going to begin by talking about the recent regulatory developments at the federal and state levels. i'll follow up with some discussion of the national highway traffic administration. and sort of our traditional safety philosophy at the federal level, spoiler alert i'm not a big fan. then i'm going to give some examples of how we're already potentially screwing up the regulation of automated vehicles. and i'll close with some principles for sound public policy. so recent automation policy development. these states in green here are states that enacted legislation that specifically recognizes the

legality of automated vehicles. these states in yellow are considering similar legislation. so in imme meanting the statutes, we have a few examples so far. nevada was first out of the gate in 2012. california has released the first part of its rules earlier this year that came into effect last month. these governed manufactured testing. the district of columbia here has proposed rules in april. they haven't gone anywhere yet. i think you'll see why. there are some problems with them. at the federal level, we haven't seen any specific regulations yet. nhtsa did issue a policy back in may 2013. among other things, what they did there was basically caution states about overregulating, overlegislating at this early stage. and they also laid out the definitions of automation. i'll show you those in a second. while these aren't automation specific, there are two recent

developments that have come out of nhtsa that will likely impact automated vehicles in the future. the first example was this tesla motor vehicle safety standard. in august of this year, nhtsa proposed rule making on vehicle-to-vehicle communications, what randal mentioned when he was closing. and i'll get to those later. here are the automation levels as defined by nhtsa. zero, simple, no automation. that should be pretty obvious. level four is full self-driving automation. this is where you can start talking about having murphy beds and wet bars in your vehicles, giving new meaning to the term fully loaded. but that is where you have the driver has no responsibility, and possibly no ability to retake manual control at any point. these levels in between, i'm not going to focus so much on them. i don't find them as interesting.

although we're seeing level one. level two vehicles available to consumers. level three are coming, depending on how the regulatory and liability issues are sorted out. but i want to begin by talking about nhtsa. i think this letter evans quotes gives an idea on where i stand on this. i'm not saying anything about the people who work at nhtsa, i just think their philosophy has gotten highway safety priorities backwards. so what nhtsa has done for the last two decades, in fact, what its purpose was, was to focus on the effective and safe automobiles. the problem with this approach is that most crashes have always been and continue to be caused by driver behavior. so what we end up -- what happens is, here's the policy failure, so we focus on rare product defects blown way out of proportion. we work to mandate low value, high cost safety technology,

particularly technology that deals with post-crash, air bags and the like, and then we downplay everything else. i think the latest example is gm's effective ignition switch. i just want to say right now, i'm not defending gm or their crappy ignition switch, but it's garnered a lot of media coverage and gone to several congressional hearings. to put this in perspective, this is likely responsible for a few deaths per year since 2005. compare that to the 30,000 annual deaths annually that can be attributed to driver behavior in some part. in fact, since 2005, there's about 130,000 gm deaths that are largely a tributed to behavior that we're essentially ignoring. if we were to -- we might get closer to my position, repeal the vehicle safety act. i don't think that's going to happen. what can w