Self-driving cars could “make congestion dramatically worse,” warns a headline in the Atlantic‘s CityLab. Simulations show that, if just 25 percent of cars on the road are self-driving, the article says, there will be a lot more delays at intersections.

It’s not surprising that the transit crowd would want to try to discredit the idea of self-driving cars, but this is a particularly pathetic attempt. The CityLab article is based on a study that assumed that, for the sake of passenger comfort, self-driving cars would be programmed to accelerate and decelerate no faster than a light-rail or intercity train. Such slow acceleration, the study found, would increase the time it would take cars to get through stop lights.

The study was seemingly done by people who haven’t ever seen a self-driving car in real life, or maybe any car. There’s an obvious difference between cars and trains: people stand up and walk around in trains, so acceleration and deceleration has to be slow. So far, no one has designed a self-driving tall enough to stand in, so there’s no need to cripple the cars that way.

Although self-driving cars are still rare, tens if not hundreds of thousands of cars on the road have adaptive cruise control, which controls the rate of acceleration and deceleration in traffic. These cars will accelerate just as fast, and probably decelerate faster, when the speed is controlled by the computer as when controlled by a human. It sounds to me like the people who did this study tried to make up an unrealistic condition just to be able to throw dirt on the concept of self-driving cars.

Making things up seems to be common among transit advocates. A group called the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy has decided that it controls the term “bus rapid transit” and should be allowed to “certify” that a project truly is or isn’t bus rapid transit. The group’s criteria is that the buses have to have their own dedicated lanes. For some reason, the Denver Post decided this was news-worthy enough to put in a story about the group asking Denver’s Regional Transit District not to use the term bus rapid transit with reference to the agency’s planned Boulder-Denver service.

The problem with that definition of BRT is that there is almost no place in the United States outside of, perhaps, the Lincoln Tunnel where bus traffic is dense enough that the buses can fully utilize their own lane. Dedicating an entire lane or pair of lanes to buses means that most of that lane capacity will be wasted. The dedicated lanes of the Los Angeles Orange Line, for example, are empty 99.8 percent of the time.

That’s why many transit experts distinguish between two types of bus rapid transit: type 1, in which the buses share lanes with other traffic; and type 2, in which the buses have their own lanes. Since we know that variable toll systems can be crafted to guarantee that the lanes will never be congested, it makes a lot more sense, both for earning revenue and for reducing congestion, to open up the lanes to toll-paying cars as Colorado is doing. The problem is that transit is highly politicized and transit advocates think the only way they can have what they want is to take it from someone else.

Speaking of politicized, it is likely that politics were behind the decision to shut down the New York subway system in the face of a snowstorm prediction that turned out to be wrong. Apparently, two trains got stuck in the snow during a storm four years ago, so rather than take the heat if another train or two got stuck, Governor Cuomo decided to strand everyone by shutting down the entire system Monday at 11 pm.

“The trains need to move as part of keeping the tracks clear and will be running all night anyway,” reported one transit expert, so closing them to the public did nothing but reduce revenue. This is the first time since the subway system opened 110 years ago that it was shut down for snow, which seems especially absurd for those parts of the system that are underground.

Of course, the nice thing about automobiles is everyone can make their own decisions about whether the weather is suitable for travel. While they may not always make the right decisions, at least one wrong decision doesn’t shut down transportation for the nation’s largest city as it does for mass transit.