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.
