Tag Archives: automobiles

We can’t replace petroleum-fueled motor vehicles with ones powered by electricity, according to a new report, because mining enough lithium to power the batteries for those electric vehicles will destroy the world. Or part of it, anyway. The only solution, says the report, is for countries like the United States to replace private vehicles with public transit.

The only way to prevent this, according to a group called the Climate and Community Project, is to ban cars.

Why is it that, no matter what the problem, leftists think the only solution is to ban cars and spend more money on mass transit? According to a sociologist I once knew named John Finley Scott — who is better known for having created one of the first mountain bikes than his sociological research — most auto opponents are people who didn’t learn to drive until their late 20s or later, by which time they knew they were mortal and found driving to be terrifying. They can’t imagine anyone actually liking cars or driving, so they see nothing wrong with ridding the earth of such an evil invention. Continue reading →

When I heard that the World Economic Forum proposed to ban car ownership, I dismissed it as left-wing nonsense that would never get far with elected officials. But earlier this week the Scottish government announced it planned to ban car ownership as a part of its campaign to reduce per-capita driving by 20 percent by 2030.

Of course, they say such actions are needed to reduce climate change, but the truth is that a lot of people have hated automobiles for decades and are just using climate change as an excuse to carry out their vendetta against personal mobility. They also claim to care about income inequality, but the automobile did more to reduce income inequality in the 20th century than just about anything else. Continue reading →

A recent article in the New York Times is off-target when it calls automobiles “turbo-boosted engines of inequality.” The article points to some genuine problems, but those problems are not the fault of automobiles. Nor is “accessible public transportation” the solution, as the article claims in its conclusion.

The most egalitarian transportation since the first warlord tying a horse to the first chariot made fast transport accessible only to the elites. Image from 1985 Yugo brochure scanned by Tony DiGirolamo.

The truth is that automobiles are the most egalitarian form of transportation since walking. Horses, intercity trains, streetcars, you name it, were always used mainly by the relatively wealthy and were inaccessible to the poor, especially in cities. It was only when Henry Ford developed the moving assembly line that mechanized transportation became available to the vast majority of people. Continue reading →

Americans drove 101.0 percent as many miles in August of 2022 as they did in the same month before the pandemic, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. This is in spite of the fact that fuel prices in 2022 were at least a dollar more per gallon than in 2019 (more than $3.70 per gallon of regular in August 2022 vs. under $2.70 in August 2019).

Amtrak is unusually late in issuing data for August.

Driving surpassed 2019 levels in 26 states and fell short in 24. Arizona saw a huge gain of 39 percent while Alaska driving grew by 15 percent, Connecticut by 11 percent, and Idaho and Florida by 10 percent. Driving dropped 21 percent in Delaware, 13 percent in Hawaii, and 10 percent in New York and Pennsylvania. Driving grew in both urban and rural areas, but urban driving grew slightly more than rural. Continue reading →

The average car used less than 2,800 British thermal units (BTUs) of energy per passenger-mile in 2019, according to the latest edition of the Department of Energy’s Transportation Energy Data Book. This is nearly a 25 percent improvement since 1999. It also made cars more energy efficient than transit in every urban area in the country except New York and San Francisco.

Click image to download a 16.4-MB PDF of this report. Click here to download Excel spreadsheets for the 361 tables in the report (11 MB).

The Department of Energy releases its annual update to the data book every February, but I wasn’t paying attention when the last one came out. In fact, it doesn’t say a lot that’s new since the previous one was issued in 2021, but it shows that both autos and airplanes continue to improve their energy efficiencies, the latter by 42 percent since 1999. Continue reading →