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Saturday, December 20, 2008
The Automotive Society
By way of the indefatigable Glenn Reynolds, we have this report that Americans are driving less:
Report: America's Love Affair With Cars Is EndingAccording to a just-released report from the well-respected Brookings Institution, the US is experiencing its longest and quickest decline in the amount of driving since World War Two — a decline which the report’s authors claim marks a permanent shift away from the automobile and towards other forms of transportation.
As Robert Puentes, co-author of the report says, “With important conversations underway on infrastructure spending as economic stimulus, it’s critical for the new Congress and administration to recognize the long-term implications of these travel trends and to use this as an occasion to put forth a new vision that reflects new realities and is not just more of the same.”
I’m excited that we finally seem to have realized we need to fix and expand our embarrassingly decrepit infrastructure here in the US, but I get worried when it seems like the majority of what we’re going to do is patch up existing roads and build new ones.
What if we did that and then 20 years from now people were driving half as much as they are even today? We would have wasted a ton of resources on the wrong thing.
There are days your Curmudgeon wonders whether anyone else in America still thinks with his head rather than his desires. An economist could correct this gentleman at once. Perhaps he didn't have one handy.
First, Americans' "love affair with cars" is nothing of the sort; it's a preference for autonomous mobility. Other things being equal -- and in many cases, other things not being quite so equal -- we vastly prefer to come and go as we please, bringing whom and what we please, according to our own schedules and priorities. There are few places in the United States where mass transit is sufficiently prompt and flexible to meet that desire -- especially mass transit operated by government.
Second, the trends the Brookings Institution report cites:
- Market saturation of vehicle ownership
- A plateau in the number of women entering the workforce
- A possible ceiling in the amount of driving any one individual can tolerate
- Increased ridership on mass transit
- The development of commercial centers closer to home
- Rising unemployment
...are not reliable for the long term. Peaks and valleys in all of them are frequent, unpredictable occurrences. In addition, some are variably interpretable. For example, just what does "market saturation of vehicle ownership" mean or imply? That simply because we've reached 1.0 privately owned automobiles per licensed adult, we'll need our roads and our mobility less? As for "a plateau in the number of women entering the workforce," are we intended to infer that women outside the workforce don't drive, or don't have need of cars?
Finally, "permanent" is a word economists never use. Quite the contrary: the longer and stronger a trend in human affairs, the more likely its near-term reversal. Or, as Baron Philippe de Rothschild put it, "Trees do not grow to the sky."
But really, the article is a probably deliberate, and rather adroit, attempt to change the subject without appearing to have done so. Stipulate for the sake of argument that Americans are driving less these days. Go further: stipulate that our distribution, and the distribution of our commutation points and shopping centers, is changing in such a fashion as to reduce our need, however conceived, to move our bodies and possessions frequently over long distances. In the early decades of the Twentieth Century, when the car became America's beloved, most Americans lived within walking distance of where they worked.
Americans like their mobility. Ours is not an "automobile society;" it's an "automotive society."
Commuting is admittedly a variable matter: tolerable for some, unpleasant for the rest. Your Curmudgeon would greatly prefer to travel to and from The Place Of Little Appreciation in a fashion that requires less of him, all taken with all. But mass transit is inapplicable to his situation, as it is to that of the majority of Americans. We're dispersed too widely for it to be practical:
- In time spent in transit;
- In cost (particularly when tax-funded subsidies are included);
- In frequency of availability;
- In the proximity of its stops to our homes and places of work.
Very dense populations, such as those of our "vertical" cities, can feasibly apply mass transit to commuters' needs. Suburban populations are less favored, and rural ones are beyond the imagination.
But the apostles of the planned society, such as the "well-respected" Brookings Institution, are at war with personal transportation. Affordable personal transportation renders a people un-herdable. Such a people cannot be compelled to concentrate in tight little zones where their masters can regiment them as they please. Mobility is fundamental to freedom; when his subjects can flee, an autocrat's power is tentative at best. Barry Bruce-Briggs's classic work The War Against The Automobile treated with this three decades ago.
There are reasons to hope that Americans will need to drive less in the decades ahead. But only a fool would imagine that we'll cease to cherish the latitude that comes with owning one's own personal means of escape -- and plenty of decent roads on which to employ it.
Comments
I think all these folks actually believed their grandfathers when gramps said “I walked ten miles to school, both ways, in the snow, with the wind in my face, and liked it!!
Seriously, this automobile is evil/total driving levels are going down meme is nothing new. And you sir are quite correct in stating (one of) the hidden agenda(s) is in working toward a more “hive like” metro area (or areas) with the rest of the country used for agro and ecco concerns. (And “camps” for “reprogramming” all those pesky non-conforming constitutionalist /libertarian(small “l")/conservatives out there.)
Posted by Guy S on 12/20/2008 at 12:15 PMFran, you pretty well nailed it. Like “gun” control which is less about guns than about control, the incoming regime appears to be contemplating a gosplan (Государственный комитет по планированию, State Committee for Planning). Working in concert with the incoming warmista John Holdren as
seancescience adviser you can bet that individual liberty is about to take a serious hitPosted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ on 12/20/2008 at 12:16 PMOne trend not mentioned that has a huge effect on the amount of driving is the rise in companies allowing (and even encouraging) their employees to work from home. My husband, for example, is employed by one of the large banks still standing. He and a large portion of his coworkers not only work from home over their internet and phone connections, but are also paid a premium to do so. Even better, they have their work mail sent to one of the local bank branches instead of having to drive to one of the major bank centers in the area. Once the commute is taken out of the picture, they are free to do as little driving as they have to, or drive as much as they really want. With more and more people working from home, or working closer to home, the amount of total miles driven would naturally drop.
Posted by Melody Byrne on 12/20/2008 at 12:46 PMEven if the report is correct and automobile use is decreasing, the idea that using resources for building and repairing roads is a waste does not fly. If 20 years from now people are driving half as much, the roads will still be used and they will need repair half as often. Of course, if funding for roads can be cut to the point of deterioration of the infrastructure, then people will be motivated to drive less due to the unpleasant conditions and increased maintenance costs on vehicles. Which, to me, seems a more likely enviro-motive.
Posted by on 12/20/2008 at 01:08 PMGreetings & Salutations, you Superior Scribbler, you! Melissa B. here, The Scholastic Scribe, & the “Original” Superior Scribbler! 2 things on my mind today: I’ve been nominated for a pretty prestigious blog award, and would greatly appreciate your vote; so if you click on over to my place, you’ll see the info. It’s an annual award from EduBlog, and I’m up for Best Individual Blog. And also, don’t forget to come by tomorrow for the Silly Sunday Sweepstakes. Thanks for your support!
Posted by Melissa B. on 12/20/2008 at 02:02 PMPublic transportation is a long-time fetish in Chicago, and even in my beloved Phoenix we have just blown hundreds of billions on a light-rail line for no discernible reason, other than the fact that the federal government loves to give states money for light rail projects.
Chicago is so beholden to the entrenched interests of Big Transit it is simultaneously funding an expansion to the Blue Line out to O’Hare to the tune of a several billion even though the CTA just received a $250 million bailout and will likely need one again in a few years. And that expansion? Oh yeah, it will be an express line that saves commuters all of 11 minutes going from O’Hare to downtown.
One last anecdote. I live in on the South Side, where the University of Chicago is. My last girlfriend lived on the North Side, about as far north from downtown as I am south. Taking the CTA there, either the train or a combination of buses, took roughly an hour and a half each way. By car (on a normally traficked day)? 20 minutes. And it’s in the former transportation system that the Brookings Institution is putting all of its faith?
Posted by on 12/20/2008 at 02:32 PMA national rail and commuter network is good in a place like Europe. The towns are very tightly compacted, and close to each other, even with the wide swaths of farmland. But even they do love their cars. For the same reasons that we do.
If we got it out of our heads that transit was just for poor or minority folks, it’d fly here, too. We used to have transit as good as Europe’s is now, before it was all ripped up after World War II. My father never owned a car until he got married; trollies, buses, and bicycling were his options for getting around, and to the steel mill where he worked, and it was clean, cheap, and ran on time without being the burden on the city purse that it is for cities now. And his city was only 100,000 strong at that time.
But once again, people like car busters and others with a herd minded agenda have to go ahead and ruin the revival of transit with their crap. Transit would make my drive easier, and I would have a way to get around and not bum rides when the car’s in the shop. Or when I want to have a few drinks at a party and not get a d.u.i.
I’m also very pro-cycling, but am put off by all of the leftist types that inhabit that cause, too.
Posted by mts on 12/20/2008 at 06:18 PM
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