Ever since some alarmist came up with the economically nonsensical term peak oil, we’ve been inundated with peak this, that, and the other thing. There’s peak helium. How about peak phosphorus?
More recently, the term has been twisted from a supply issue to a demand issue, such as peak smart phone. And now, peak car. Yet, reading about peak car, the Antiplanner can’t help but feeling that this is neither a supply nor a demand issue but more wishful thinking on the part of city officials who are doing their best to create auto-hostile environments.
Millennials don’t drive? It turns out that’s not true, just as it isn’t true that Millennials avoid the suburbs.
There may be a sorting process whereby people who don’t want to drive concentrate in areas with lots of transit and so-called walkable neighborhoods. But that doesn’t mean that the vast majority of people of any age are giving up their cars.
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Some people think that car-sharing of self-driving cars (which are closer than you think) will reduce the number of cars in cities by as much as 90 percent. While that seems unrealistic, no matter what the reduction in the number of cars, the fundamental assumption of car-sharing is that people will continue to travel as much as they do today, just not necessarily in their own vehicles. Car-sharing may reducing parking requirements, but not the need for road space, fuel, or other inputs to automobility.
If car sharing cuts the number of cars on the road in half but people maintain their mobility, then each vehicle on the road will do twice as many miles per year. That means auto manufacturers will continue to produce as many cars as they do today, but those cars will be replaced about every ten years instead of about every twenty as they are today.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is predicting that shared, self-driving cars will be “cheaper than owning a vehicle.” If so, we may even see a significant increase in per capita driving beyond the increase that will take place when self-driving cars become available to people who currently can’t drive themselves.
Never forget that mobility is an economic activity that generates economic benefits, so reducing mobility reduces those benefits. Despite what the urban planners claim, accessibility is no substitute for mobility, as mobility gives people access to more economic opportunities and competitive markets. We will reach peak car only when someone could invent a form of transportation that is faster, cheaper, and more convenient than driving, and the only likely such invention is the self-driving car.
Whether cycling is 1% or 3% of commuters or trips is huge to cyclists, but it is trivial to real transportation. Plus cycling is so weather and seasonal dependent that transportation peaks are not affected. Plus it is only available at certain times in a person’s life — nowadays kids can’t ride bikes out of sight of their parents; once you have kids you not only need a car but you need an 8-seat SUV; and once you have elderly parents you need a vehicle to take them around.
I am still more skeptical of self-driving cars than the AntiPlanner, and certainly don’t believe it will happen as fast as he predicts, but if you imagine the population adapting to it quickly than I admit the AntiPlanner’s predictions might come true.
Mr. O’Toole,
you really need to write about the fact that almost all smart growth advocates luxuriate in suburban or exurban settings while excoriating the rest of us to adopt a sardine can lifestyle in downtown. I don’t just mean Dan or metty; I mean all of the rest of them. In fact, a newspaper down in LA wrote an article about them and their weak excuses for their “do as I say, not as I do” lifestyle, and this was years before the current frantic push for smart growth:
http://www.laweekly.com/news/do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do-2149098
I like walkable cities, trains and bicycles.
But they are a luxury and I recognize that to have all of these in an urban neighborhood that is clean and safe, I would need to have a lot of money (plus a lot of governmental subsidies). The vast majority of people who are not wealthy live in crowded cities and rely upon public transportation because they have no other choice. For them, bicycling is dangerous and prone to theft They do not live the lives smart growth advocates claim.
As usual, this post by The Antiplanner is an exercise in knocking down strawmen.
There is no one I know of noting “peak car” that every said auto travel would disappear. The main point is per capita usage peaked a decade ago, and now is relatively steady. This is probably explained by an aging population who drive less as they get older, and the fact most “central cities” are growing again, roughly capturing their proportional share of metropolitan growth.
And as usual, Metrof–ks gets his facts wrong. Virtually all the Smart Growth advocacy coming out of the Bay Area comes from those living in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, with similar patterns in Southern California. Take a look at Streetsblog Los Angeles, for example, where they mostly talk about things taking place in Los Angeles proper.
The stupid “Agenda 21” conspiracy buff and anti-Plan Bay Area crowd mainly live in places like San Ramon or the lowest density parts of Marin, never noticing that a central goal of Plan Bay Area is to concentrate most new residential growth in the older cities away from places like San Ramon and low density suburban Marin. But then they see the devils they want to see, and political insanity runs rampant among self-styled “conservatives.”
More on peak travel per capita
http://phys.org/news/2015-05-good.html
Key idea is gradual shift to “access replacing mobility” e.g., greater access equals greater prosperity, not mobility per se, destroying The Antiplanner’s and other auto apologists’ central, usually unquestioned premise.
From msetty’s propaganda editorial disguised as self-evident truth (the reason it’s been shared on a website dedicated to the sciences, where it has no right to be, much less in a form as to carefully disguise its biased editorial position), we find this juicy quote, among others:
We’ll need to design our cities and towns to encourage an attachment to place, rather than endlessly trying to be someplace else. Excess mobility can destroy this sense of place.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-05-good.html#jCp [italics and emphasis added]
So the gist of it is that planners want to reduce mobility with the supposed goal of making us more successful and rich as a result. Yeah, makes a whole lot of sense, and par for the course for the sort of peanut gallery logic spread by msetty and his kind.
Key idea is gradual shift to “access replacing mobility” e.g., greater access equals greater prosperity,
Mobility increases access, it doesn’t replace it. And neither leads, a priori, to prosperity.
“Mobility increases access, it doesn’t replace it. And neither leads, a priori, to prosperity.”
Indeed. Just ignore anything in scare quotes. The setty’s writing is so obtuse with cliches and bee ess as to be completely senseless. I’d rather read spam from p0rn bots.
“Key idea is gradual shift to “access replacing mobility” e.g., greater access equals greater prosperity,”
But what we can take away from msetty’s spew, and the spew of those he links to, is that once more, there is a desperate need for noble government to step in and ensure we all have less mobility and more access. After all, if we live in the 200 square foot apartment on top of the Subway where we work, there is no need for any mobility! We don’t need an evil car…we can bike or take the light rail on those occasions when a trip to the government obelisks is necessary to offer blood sacrifices and our gifts of taxes.
What msetty and his ilk are really saying is that we need to live like the unlucky bastards in the Soviet Union. Cars too expensive, heat too expensive, medical care difficult to obtain, no items on store shelves to tempt us with “consumerism” (that term was invented by sympathetic to communist academia as a defense against the charge that the Soviet Union didn’t have the luxuries the West enjoyed), all life dull & grey and planned by a faceless bureaucrat, who of course lived in some nice dacha in the evil suburbs and commuted to his job by car.
Only by embracing the wonderful world of totalitarianism can we save the earth, combat racism, stamp out consumerism, eradicate individualism, and most importantly, make room in the exurbs for msetty and the other rulers and nomenklatura to live in luxury at our expense.
Mobility determines access – if you lack mobility, you lack access to goods and services. For example, without a car, in downtown Portland you are restricted to a few tiny overcrowded, obscure pubs where you are stuck with whatever “local” beers they may be lucky enough to serve. With a car on the other hand, you can travel the interstate and enjoy the diverse range of beverages available at well-known establishments like Bennigans, TGIFridays, and Applebee’s.
“For example, without a car, in downtown Portland you are restricted to a few tiny overcrowded, obscure pubs where you are stuck with whatever “local” beers they may be lucky enough to serve.”
Lulz @ gilfoil. His comments really crack me up.
But the reality of living in Downtown Portland is that it’s a food desert. It was a long slog to Fred Meyer on Burnside or Safeway in the South Park Blocks from the Old Town area. Having a car sure would have made living there a LOT easier when it came to grocery shopping. But I did get really good at finding cheap happy hour deals in the neighborhood.
I’m glad you find my comments amusing Frank. I post them with the exactly the amount of seriousness that the AP’s posts deserve.
“It was a long slog to Fred Meyer on Burnside or Safeway in the South Park Blocks from the Old Town area.”
Not sure why it’s a bad thing that it’s a “long slog”. The farther you have to drive, the more mobility you have.
@Frank there’s a safeway at 13th and lovejoy, and a whole foods at couch and 12th. Are they new?
Lived downtown in the early ’00s. Whole Foods was built halfway during my first stint downtown. The Safeway in the Pearl opened in late 2008, by which time I had a car and wasn’t living downtown. Walked to Whole Foods from time to time, but it was sooooooo much more expensive and about three-quarters of a mile from my apartment. Was pretty much limited to whatever I could stuff in a backpack, which meant frequent trips for groceries.
With a car on the other hand, you can travel the interstate and enjoy the diverse range of beverages available at well-known establishments like Bennigans, TGIFridays, and Applebee’s.
Yeah, imagine how planners might recoil at the horror of eating at a chain restaurant. Perish the thought.
The fact remains, however, that increased access facilitated by improved mobility would give the average consumer the means to choose whether to eat/drink at the local brewpub or at some chain establishment, and not be constrained by geography. Don’t know why this is a controversial proposition.
Don’t know why this is a controversial proposition.
I think you’re being sarcastic, but just in case you’re not: consider the bureaucrats in any totalitarian society. The idea that anyone should make private choices by themselves is unthinkable. People living in states like Nazi Germany* had every aspect of their lives regulated…even down to how many children they should have to fight in the state’s war slaughterhouses.
This is the sort of society sought by msetty and his ilk. They desire an all-encompassing government, regulating every single aspect of our life, with nothing untouched, and with them at the top, making & enforcing the rules. Naturally, the nomenklatura will not be living in the same 200 square foot apartments the rest of us are assigned to. They will be living in the suburbs and exurbs, far away from the misery of the dense cities where the mere taxpayers are located.
*Why do I mention Nazi Germany? Apart from its model as an almost perfect tyranny, many people don’t know that the modern, regulatory Western government is built squarely on the shoulders of the Nazi one, which perfected the overarching, regulatory bureaucracy.
You don’t need to get on the freeway to get to an Applebee’s in Portland. Just ride the Max a few stops from downtown to the Lloyd Center.
The Antiplanner wrote:
There may be a sorting process whereby people who don’t want to drive concentrate in areas with lots of transit and so-called walkable neighborhoods. But that doesn’t mean that the vast majority of people of any age are giving up their cars.
And that is good news for all sorts of public transportation in the United States, since effectively none of it can operate (or make “capital” improvements) without extensive and generous subsidy from people that do not normally use transit, including in particular highway users.
There were competing perfect tyrannies including the Soviet Union, fascist Italy, and the New Deal. All influenced modern Western governments to some extent. James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941) describes those precursors to the Nazi regulatory state in unflattering terms even though he was a socialist at the time. By 1940 he was evolving and was showing glimmerings of the realization that socialism inevitably leads to a tyrannical idiocracy: