Planners and planning advocates are obsessed with manipulating people’s behavior, and in particular with reducing the amount of driving we do. One dictionary defines “obsess” as “Preoccupy or fill the mind of (someone) continually, intrusively, and to a troubling extent,” and it is certainly troubling that so many planners believe their goal is to destroy one of the major engines of our economy and spend much of the effort towards achieving that goal.
One simple trick improves the fuel economy of this minivan by almost 50 percent, but planners ignore such improvements in favor of simply demonizing auto driving. Photo by Kevauto.
A case in point is an article in Vox titled, “How to end the American obsession with driving.” The article was written by journalism student Gabrielle Birenbaum, who believes that driving is destroying the planet. Wildfires and hurricanes (which seems to think never happened before) prove that global warming is happening; transportation is “the biggest sector of pollution”; and automobiles produce 58 percent of that pollution. Therefore, she reasons, we must reduce driving. Continue reading
