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.
Her reasoning is faulty every step of the way. First, Americans are not obsessed with driving. Other than people in the auto industry, driving does not continually preoccupy or fill our minds. We drive because it is useful and when it isn’t useful, we park our automobiles and forget about them (which, ironically, is one of planners’ other objections to autos: they are supposedly parked too much).
Nor is driving necessarily destroying the planet. Americans produce about 6.6 gigatonsworld’s total. Transportation represents 28.6 percent of our emissions, so if autos are 58 percent of transportation, then our cars and light trucks represent less than 2.2 percent of world emissions. Our electricity power plants produce 3.3 percent of world emissions, and since there are relatively few of them, they are a much easier target for reducing emissions.
Birenbaum’s implicit presumption that reducing driving is the only way to reduce emissions from driving is also wrong. In the last 50 years, we’ve improved the fuel economy of the average car on the road by almost 50 percent and there is room for more such improvements. One extremely simple way is streamlining. Most cars are visibly streamlined on top, but not underneath. To improve their fuel economy, hybrids like the Prius and Chrysler Pacifica have a smooth panel underneath the car. Normally unseen, this panel greatly increases the fuel economy. A Pacifica without the panel is rated by the EPA to get 22 mpg; with the panel it gets 31 mpg.
Birenbaum also ignores the huge benefits produced by automobiles. Thanks to automobiles, Americans have better jobs, better housing, better foods, lower-cost consumer goods, and many other benefits. Before Henry Ford’s mass-produced Model Ts, income inequality was far greater than it is today; minorities such as blacks were trapped in their restricted neighborhoods; and only the elites got to do much travel. By pretending these benefits don’t exist, it is easy for Birenbaum to imagine that reducing driving has no costs.
Finally, Birenbaum’s ideas for reducing driving, which are taken from New Urban planning dogma, are not likely to succeed. Her lengthy article really only proposes three ideas: add bike lanes to streets; mixed-use development; and congestion pricing of roads.
The chances of the having these symptoms purchase cheap viagra after gallbladder surgery. While we have known that the order levitra appalachianmagazine.com nerves to the penile are working properly. And diabetes affects these blood vessels which viagra generico uk disables the excretion. Food requested improvements to the Propecia tag in 2012 that outlined the sexual unwanted effects, and also that some males have the problems once they stopped taking cialis online without prescription the medicine* they should have made warning labels more accurateIn order to have a valid claim every person should prove that taking Propecia caused him long lasting actual damages. Many American cities have added bike lanes, yet cycling is not a major form of travel anywhere except college towns. In such towns, it is the youthfulness of the population that makes bicycling popular, not the bike lanes.
Congestion pricing is a great idea if it is done right: Americans waste billions of gallons of fuel (and therefore generate millions of tons of greenhouse gases) in congestion. But congestion pricing, if done right, would actually increase total driving because (as I explained in a Cato paper) it would increase road throughputs during rush hours. It sounds like Birenbaum doesn’t want true congestion pricing, however; she wants punitive pricing to force people out of their cars. The problem is that even punitive pricing is not going to add much to the total cost of driving and so it won’t do much to reduce driving.
Her ideas for mixed-use development are simply naive. She thinks that, if cities are designed right, everything can be within a 20-minute walk of everyone. But that’s simply not possible. A 20-minute walk can access, at most, about 2 square miles of land. The Portland area has about 2.1 million people served by seven Costcos. That’s 300,000 people per Costco. Does Birenbaum think we can pack 150,000 people in each square mile of our cities? Or is she willing to give up Costco?
How about education? Portland has one major university, a medical school, one or two minor universities, some satellite campuses of major universities whose main campuses are elsewhere, and a few small colleges that egotistically call themselves universities. It’s not possible for everyone to be within a 20-minute walk of one of these schools.
Consumers benefit from competition, which reduces prices and increases products and services. Portland has about three dozen major supermarkets, but it isn’t enough to be within a 20-minute walk of one of those stores. For them to compete, we have to be within 20 minutes of several of them, and the only way to do that is with an automobile.
I can easily imagine a city in which everyone is within a 20-minute walk of a restaurant. But who wants to be stuck going to the same restaurant over and over? We like variety, and to reach as much variety as possible we need a car.
Birenbaum’s ideal city would give people limited housing options; stores with a limited selection of high-priced products; limited job opportunities; and limited education opportunities. That’s not what Americans want.
Planners’ preoccupation with intruding on people’s lives when alternate methods are available to solve the problems they claim to care about suggest that planners really aren’t concerned about climate change. Instead, they simply want to control people. That obsession needs to end.
Birenbaum also ignores the billions being spent by automobile manufacturers (in the private sector) electrifying cars so they can be powered by CO2-free windmills and solar panels. Perhaps she’s never heard of the Mach-E Mustang.
Willful misrepresentation.
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On its face, single-family zoning is a housing policy that creates quiet, uncrowded neighborhoods by restricting the development of apartments, townhouses, or any other dwelling that’s not a freestanding home. It’s incredibly prevalent in the US (75 percent of residential land is single-family zoned), and, as my colleague Jerusalem Demsas points out, it is incredibly harmful. It has had a racist impact, having been used to exclude people of color from certain neighborhoods, and it overall increases the cost of housing by limiting supply.
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As a rule of thumb, when someone declares something to be racist, it means nothing more than they do not like it.
More on CO2 and automobiles … Engadget reports …
In 14 years’ time, no fossil fuel-powered vehicles will be sold in New York [State] anymore. The state has passed a new law that bans the sale of gas vehicles starting in 2035, requiring all new cars to be zero emission. New York’s Senate and Assembly passed the bill and Governor Kathy Hochul signed it into law last week. The move will help reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 35 percent and help it achieve its climate targets, including an 85 reduction in GHG emissions by 2050.
https://www.engadget.com/new-york-law-ban-gas-powered-car-sales-2035-053554406.html
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Compare that to my grandparents’ house, in West Bloomfield, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Due to single-family zoning, the only activity we can walk to is to see my cousins who also live in the suburb. Any restaurant, appointment, or shopping has to be a car trip.
” ~ Gabby Birenbaum in VOX article
The fundamental problem with Birenbaum is that she refuses to acknlowedge things as to what they are. West Bloomfeld is a township, not a city. Walkability is not a thing for townships. That’s not what they’re about; townships are for poeple who don’t want to live in cities.
And the lack of meaningful logic isn’t just there, she decorates most of the article with brainless bombs like :
“When I lived in Madrid, I could walk or take transit practically everywhere without ever crossing a highway that had no pedestrian infrastructure.”
Wow. Ya. When there wasn’t a good place to walk, ya took the transit cuz there wasn’t a good way of walking.
If the point is to hold up Madrid as a walkable city why this open admission that it’s got it’s own slew of problems?
And of course, the real stinker is she’s just going off her memory. Most people in Madrid live in suburbia and they deal with this like this Ff they’re going to walk to work they have to jaywalk / frogger it across this highway. No protection, no nothing
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.3214387,-3.7531364,3a,75y,27.66h,82.35t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sXefYVaEoHXwnhNUtLofZbw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192
Of those fuzzy memories……
Birenbaum also pulls – some would say dirty – tricks. Like invoking the 20% increase in pedestrian fatalities in 2020. It’s a one-off increase that she plays off as though it were a long time problem. It’s not. They’re measuring # of pedestrian deaths by AUTO MILES DRIVEN. VMTs for auto had a big dip in 2020.
And sucha measurement says nothing about how much walking occured. For example, if people walked twice as much, we’d expect twice as many fatalities, no?
And there’s particularly disengenous thing of throwing in driving being down 42% at one single point during the pandemic. To most people, that comes across as driving was down by nearly half when it was more like 10%.
American cities weren’t well built before 2010. Yet from 2000-2010 the US population increased by 10% while pedestrian fatalities decreased by around 20%.
In fact, if one goes back to the early 90s, the number of pedestrians killed by autos was twice as high as it is today. And that’s before taking into account VMTs and miles walked.
Back in the 90s 1/3 of pedestrian fatalities in auto accidents were elderly. 80% of them happen at night. And god knows how much of the increase since 2010 has been because of cell phones. Those of us who live and work downtown every day have all seen people, faces glued to their phone, blindly walk out into traffic against a red.
The more one digs, the more it’s nothing but obvious that Gabby Birenbaum’s ASSumed that the pedestrian issue is nothing but an issue of more protected crossings.
Nonsense. The EPA says that the entire transportation sector emits 29% of greenhouse gasses and that includes all forms of transportation, not just automobiles.
And the US isn’t the problem. in 2019 (pre-Covid year), U.S. carbon pollution slid to the lowest level since 1992, according to EPA. Rather China is the major producer of greenhouse gasses, emitting more than the U.S. and EU combined and is planning to build 43 new coal-fired power plants and 18 new blast furnaces.
India isn’t far behind. Both countries generate a large majority of their electricity from coal.
Beggaring the United States, with only 4% of the world’s population, isn’t going to make a dent in world CO2 emissions. But burdening the US with ridiculous regulations does increase the power and wealth of the political party promulgating those regulations which, ultimately, is the actual goal.
There is also no such thing as “racist impact”. There can be racist policies, but one needs to identify them as such based on intent. Just pointing to disparate outcomes and then trying to mind-read a particularly uncharitable intent into the policies that contributed to those outcomes is not the same thing. We have an expression for that kind of mistake.
I can usually give novice journalists a pass on this kind of thing. Most just don’t know any better and have a pretty blinkered view of the world. And Vox is…..well, Vox. But when they start citing their own colleagues’ sloppy writing and thinking as fact, well I find that a bit troubling.
“One simple trick improves the fuel economy of this vehicle”
SLOW DOWN. Breaking speed records was an almost daily occurence throughout the 20th century. Cars, ships, planes and trains became faster and faster, year after year. Because the power needed to push an object through air increases with the cube of velocity, this race to ever higher speeds raises energy consumption exponentially. lower the speed, fuel consumption is decreased by the full 75 percent. More efficient technology can not change that – unless in a positive way. If you combine a lower speed with more fuel efficient engines and better aerodynamics, fuel savings can become much larger than 75 percent.
2: Cut the horsepower….. Horsepower gains, drove American obsession with providing cars with more horsepower. Even electric cars in their inane silliness to compete with gas cars install high horsepower motors. Mercedes new EQ vehicle will have a 329 hp (245kw) motor. A decline to 250 hp would decrease energy consumption 50% and nearly double the vehicles battery range.
LazyReader wrote, “Because the power needed to push an object through air increases with the cube of velocity … ”
Aeodynamic drag increases with the square of velocity.
CapitalistRoader,
To be fair, “biggest” doesn’t mean “majority.” The EPA says transportation produces 29 percent of GHGs, which isn’t a majority but no other sector produces that much so it is the biggest. Of course, Birenbaum didn’t make that clear.
Mr. O’Toole,
You’re right, the Vox author’s writing wasn’t clear and I misread it. 58% of 29% is 17%. So light duty vehicles, in which Americans drove 2.4 trillion miles in 2019, emit 17% of US GHG emissions.
The author’s elitist personal example:
…implies that government entities in the US could wave a magic wand and remake US cities developed in the 20th century into a European city developed in the 9th century. It’s ridiculous and dismisses the enormous utility of light vehicles to Americans.
OTOH, a brief bio over at Washington Monthly notes that she’s a child so it makes sense that she has a child’s perspective on life; maybe I’m being to tough on her: