“Although this tactic looks to the future, it is quite old. For decades, it has been a common tactic of conservative think tanks to fight against plans for high-capacity transit by pointing cities to some other technology instead, such as dynamically priced high-occupancy toll lanes, bus rapid transit (as an argument against proposed rail projects), and personal rapid transit. Driverless cars and data-driven vans are just the newest technology filling in the blank. For many years, Cato Institute senior fellow Randal O’Toole opposed plans for rail by calling on cities to make bus improvements instead. But a July 2018 post on his Cato Institute blog gives away the game. In it, he wrote that “in the short run, agencies can experiment with low-cost improvements in bus service,” but ultimately they “need to back out of transit services that fewer and fewer people are using . . . [and] die with dignity.”7” (Steven Higashide, Better Buses, Better Cities)