The Absurd Primacy of the Car in American Life
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
It's crazy how in a city of New York's caliber, with great public transport, so much space is taken up by cars for so little gain. The total lack of "walking streets" (streets entirely for pedestrian use for Americans unfamiliar with the concept!) is baffling to me. I think it would be perfectly fine to for example close something like Broadway or even 5th Avenue to cars, the businesses on these streets derive almost no traffic since it's all pass-through. Can you imagine how much better that would be for almost everyone, businesses included, what a destination that would create with a whole avenue packed with people? Close of the streets around squares, instead of creating islands in the middle of traffic you'd get street cafes. Just one, pretty please?
One solution is telecommuting; get people of the road by having them work from home. Another is mandating fuel efficiency and reducing the pollution cars produce. It's outrageous that children getting leukemia and respiratory illnesses are considered acceptable loses so that people can drive enormous SUVs purely as status symbols instead of for their utility. You want to drive a vehicle that gets less than 20 MPG? Fine, you're also going to pay a gasoline consumption tax to support the social programs that take care of the families your pollution is giving cancer.
Most importantly to me, and the point the author leaves out, is that cars are highly subsidized. The irony of American car ownership is that we consider public transportation socialist, while spending trillions of tax dollars on public roads. I would love to take the train to work, where I can read a book, write, or program instead of sitting in traffic for an hour... but for some reason we consider sitting in traffic for an hour on a publicly-funded road "freedom."
We know this can work because the run up on crude caused miles driven to decline.
But that requires some serious political will, and that ain't gonna happen.
In general I'm a fan of taxing pollutants to account for their true costs, but it's not as straightforward as it might appear.
Seriously, who really wants to spend so much time sitting in traffic? But in many places, it simply isn't affordable to live close to work, and the design of our cities makes dense living infeasible or impossible. This is a failure of government, and I don't see how it's possible to fix it because we aren't electing people who will, we're electing people who perpetuate the status quo at best.
[1]: http://autotraveler.ru/en/spravka/fuel-price-in-europe.html
I am in favor of telecommuting if it is offered to make life better for the employee or to improve the employer's profitability. However, I often see it advanced as a transportation policy. On that front, it fails because its objective is to reduce the amount of transportation that occurs. Since the beginning of time, humans have embraced transportation because it improves their quality of life. Any policy that seeks to reduce the amount of transportation that occurs is literally retrograde and reactionary.
The US doesn't have a yearly road tax based on emissions? I'm a bit surprised, seems so obvious.
Gasoline is one of the few products sold in the US where the advertised price includes the taxes, and I suspect that's because people would flip out if they realized how much of their fuel cost was taxes.
Taking Germany as a random example, gas taxes there are €0.6545 per liter plus 19% VAT, making for a total tax rate well beyond 100%.
Despite your other excellent points, this one is "typical American", even though you might not be American. I once went to a conference from Jancovici (He did an excellent job at touring France to explain what the global warming was, its origins, and its solutions), here's an example of his 1.30hrs session:
- 1st slide: The awesome downwards curve of car consumption. Individual consumption was divided by, like, 10 in 40 years. Great!
- 2nd slide: The shameful exponential curve of total car petrol consumption. The he stops and asks people what they think. Of course cheaper cars means more cars on the road and any improvement leads to more consumption! When you're in the audience you're compelled to reckon that no fuel efficiency whatsoever will solve anything related to car transportation.
Here's the rest of the conference, in case you're interested:
- 3rd slide: Basic physics calculations about moving 1t of iron through the streets. Then on and on with half the city space spent in parkings, 3/4 of the city space designated to car transportation, while only 20% inhabitants move around with a car and the rest 80% move around with public transportation. And the accident rate.
So basically the individual transportation is the weapon with which we commit suicide. It doesn't matter how much, since it's an order of magnitude more than any other way of life.
- 4th slide: Solution is mass transit. High density. Shield a question about "mass transit pollutes too". Shield another with "But people want green lawn". Shield the most important one about "Big cities pollute the most", but let's come to that later.
- 5th slide: Microeconomy crash course about the offer curve, the demand curve, the point where they meet. And how tax alters them. Take the example of how tax on wages lower both the demand and the offer of employment, and create massive unemployment in Europe.
- 6th slide: Externalities of the carbon market that should have been included in the cost of the cars. The subventions like you say, the cancers you mentionned, the accidents: Excellent points. Don't forget the road police is currently funded by a flat tax on all citizen, preventing renewables from progressing. So is the DoD, which costs trilions to attack so many countries for petrol. Plus the cost of terrorism, mainly due to attacking countries for petrol. All that should be included in the cost of car per km.
- 7th slide: "If we had a carbon tax", for every liter of gas/petrol/fuel, it would lower the demand for petrol and the offer. We could alleviate taxes on wages, because employment is a complementary alternative to fossils. And we want employment while we don't want fossil energy, and we want externalities to be paid by fossil energy.
Tax on petrol is the tax which is the most "even" per pollution unit, which also means the least costly to implement. Petrol taxes are higher in Europe than in US, which means we're architcturing our cities differently, and that takes dozen years, which means our cities are more ready in the face of fossils-independence. And that's why you're so focussed on "car efficiency" while Europe is a little more focussed on getting rid of the car altogether. (although I reckon we're both far from doing enough)
- And a few more slides about how electricity is better than fossils (hint: Yes electricity is often made from coal, but since it's centralized they can lead to much better ways of designing an ecological procurement); how cities with no cars would be nicer, more economically efficient, with more "good" mixity, more fair to the Third World (read: USA's pretense of WMDs in Irak), and how advance on renewables can be a strategic commercial/geopolitic advance in the 3rd millenium. How a blind approach to it puts the 2050-world through a series of riots and Arab Springs.
- Last slide: While we're at it, let's mention that hydroelectric dams are ecologic up until 10km3, and harmful beyond that, because there's always someone in those conference who's skeptic "because dams hurt the nature".
Conclusion: Drop the ideas of regulating the market with pollution limits, consumption per km, laws about architecture. Only an expensive petrol will trigger the right and most efficient changes, and they all revolve around city architecture and lower footprint. Also drop the idea that a rise in the cost of petrol will lower the demand. Even a $100 barrel doesn't accurately picture the amount of externalities. Even at $100 a barrel, you need to add taxes to compensate the state for the deaths, accidents, cancers, wars and social inequalities created by fossil energy, so that other forms of energy don't bear this cost.
Telecommuting works, but it has been proven to have deleterious effects on workers and their progression within a company. If you are willing to take a risk on your career, then do it.
Cars are not subsidized. Gas is taxed as a usage fee at the state (14%), Federal (12%), and local (2%). Public roads are paid for by its users, however, the plateauing of revenues because of the CAFE standards has lead to the development of toll based roadways, which do not need subsidies.
Public transportation is socialist as it takes money from the gas taxes paid for by the public roadway users and heavily subsidizes public transportation. There is always a discussion to raise the rates on public transportation users to fully pay for its costs, but there is an outcry from its users. This is not to say that I am against it, public transit provides employment opportunities to low-income individuals who are not able to afford vehicle access. This is a public good that I am okay with using my taxes for.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Average_Fuel_Economy
[2] http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/publications/gastax.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTran
Nothing else will work outside of extremely dense cities like Manhattan (even outside of Manhattan in the rest of NYC, the existing public transit doesn't work very well).
You need a system that gets people to their destination quickly, is on-demand, and uses low energy, in order to overcome the place in society that the automobile occupies today. SkyTran is the only thing that can do that.
Subways don't work: they cost an absolute fortune to build, and only work in extremely dense areas. They run on regular schedules, and stop at every stop, so they aren't very fast. And they're linear; they don't work too well in a situation where a city is laid out in a large grid, unlike Manhattan which is a narrow island.
Buses don't work: they're horribly slow, they don't maintain a consistent schedule, they take convoluted paths to try to maximize ridership at the expense of travel time. The only things they have going for them are capital cost and reconfigurability: it doesn't cost anything to deploy them because they use existing streets, and you can change the routes easily (it's more trouble to inform riders of the new route and change the signage than it is to change the route of the bus itself). Buses also are gas guzzlers and terrible polluters: it's better for the environment for all the bus riders to drive themselves in a reasonably modern car, unless it's an electric bus.
Light rail doesn't work: it costs a fortune to build (not quite as bad as subways), it puts local businesses out of business during construction, it disrupts other street traffic, it's almost as slow as buses (light rail has to stop for traffic lights just like cars).
SkyTran is the answer to all of this: it only costs $1M per mile to build (compare that to subway or light rail costs), it's electric powered, it's very low-energy (uses the equivalent of two hair dryers to go 100mph), it's on-demand (you can call a car with your smartphone), it takes you directly where you want to go with no stops, it doesn't force you to share space with strangers, and the system is fully automated.
Unfortunately, everyone dismisses it as "impossible" while simultaneously wanting to spend hundreds of billions on high-speed rail, light rail, and Hyperloop, things that are either unappealing to users or just plain sci-fi (whereas SkyTran has actually been demonstrated to work and uses existing technology, and really isn't all that complicated).
I get things thrown at me by random drivers at least once a month. I have to be constantly aware of drivers chatting on cells not seeing me and literally hitting me head on at intersections.
Trying to date, at my age, with no car is almost impossible.
Pretty much the only other people I see riding bikes are the homeless. And then there is the stigma that if your riding a bike, it means you obviously have DUI and/or other issues.
But I love riding my bike. I've been a constant bike rider since I was 6yo and it has and always will be a source of joy and freedom to me.
Like I enjoy saying "drive a car, burn money and get fat...ride a bike, burn fat and save money."
How deep is this stigma in Florida? I guess that this stigma is regional. I definitely don't feel this stigma living in Western Europe.
Counterpoint: many affluent suburbs are adding multiuse paths all over the place.
In downtown Atlanta most of the bike riders are younger people and they're rarely dressed for riding. They are however aware of their rights and usually ride with a chip on their shoulder.
In the United States, the land usage policies actually encourage people to move out of towns and cities into the suburbs. This is known as urban sprawl or urbanization and it makes public transit less effective and more costly to implement and maintain. The taxes are much lower on vehicles and fuel, and acquiring a driver's license is trivial. Thus vehicle ownership is much more attainable and appealing.
Because of the high vehicle ownership in the United States, communities have developed with distinct residential, commercial, and industrial zones that are often many miles apart. There are residential zones that touch commercial and industrial zones however they're often low income zones that are usually in disrepair or high in crime making them unfavorable.
Because it's so easy to acquire a car and communities are planned around vehicle ownership, not having one raises questions and if you're not living in a low income zone, it's often assumed that your lack of a vehicle is due to a restriction such as a DUI offense.
The OP asked about the stigma of bike riding and I was providing some context to help him understand why the stigma exists. I wasn't trying to advocate for or against anything, just trying to explain the current state of affairs.
Apparently speaking the truth has become a punishable offense around here.
Like I enjoy saying "drive a car, burn money and get fat...ride a
bike, burn fat and save money."
So I had an image of what our fellow cyclists would look like when
my husband, son and I arrived in Castagneto Carducci for a cycling
vacation. They would look like Mr. Hampsten, who at age 45 remains
boyishly thin and agile, bouncing with energy.
I was wrong. For the most part, our group consisted of ordinary-
looking, mostly middle-age men and a few middle-age women.
These were serious cyclists. One of them was Bob Eastaugh, a 63-
year-old justice on the Alaska Supreme Court who said he rode mostly
to stay in shape for his true passion, downhill ski racing.
And our trip was challenging. The longest hill was 15 miles, the
steepest had a 15 percent grade, the longest one-day ride was 90
miles, and the terrain was never, ever flat. It is hard to imagine
that a group of middle-age adults could have handled an equivalently
difficult 10 days of running. What, I wondered, made bicycling
different?
It turns out that others, too, have been struck by the paradox of
bicycling fitness.
“When I first got into cycling, I would see cyclists and say, ‘O.K.,
that’s not what I perceive a cyclist to be,’ ” said Michael Berry,
an exercise physiologist at Wake Forest University. Dr. Berry had
been a competitive runner, and he thought good cyclists would look
like good runners — rail-thin and young.
But, Dr. Berry added, “I quickly learned that when I was riding with
someone with a 36-inch waist, I could be looking at the back of
their waist when they rode away from me.”[1]
The Bicycling Paradox: Fit Doesn’t Have to Mean Thin
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/health/nutrition/17essa.ht...
I might lose 5 pounds a season in a typical year, despite burning close to a thousand calories a day. But my bet is much of the reason for that is offset eating.
Of course, I agree wholeheartedly that I'm healthier at the end of a cycling season than before. You just might not realize it by looking at my physical proportions.
Here in Europe bikes become a lifestyle item. Just get yourself a real cool bike, with a carbon belt drive or one of those Titanium bikes, and dress accordingly.
The data cited are irrefutable. The points made are perfectly logical.
And yet many of the comments make it seem like the author insulted their mother.
It's that car culture, the almost religious emotional attachment to the automobile, that makes the US so unique. I don't believe there's an equivalent anywhere else. It's really quite fascinating.
The article fails to point out the US is spread out, people live far apart, and there are few if any viable alternatives for transportation, even in areas with high population density.
Question though: did you consider alternate forms of transportation when you decided where to live and work? Or did you just (even subconsciously) presume a car was necessarily part of the picture?
That's one of the cultural issues at play, here. For many, not only is single car commuting just assumed, anything else is virtually unthinkable, affecting any number of decisions people make.
Yes, I know it doesn't solve the "problem" completely, but it is a step in that direction. The next step would be sharing rides.
Edit: not sure why the downvote. That's a genuine question.
Living in a rural area is a lifestyle choice that typically necessitates a car.
If not owning a car is a priority, you'd make a different lifestyle choice.
Which is really my point. For most people, owning a car isn't seen as a lifestyle choice. It's seen as a default. Automatic. Not even part of the equation. And that's cultural.
We used to live in southwest Missouri. Losing the car would probably have put us anywhere from 3 to 8 (driving) hours away from anyone we knew, depending on how the public transit is in Kansas City or Tulsa or St. Louis. I wouldn't be surprised if Chicago was the closest city where you could really be fine without a car.
I live in Canada... I live three hours from my own mom. And we live in the two largest cities in my province, separated by vast swathes of cattle pasture and wheat fields.
I live 2 hours from the nearest city that has any significant public transport (central Pennsylvania). Getting rid of a car isn't worth introducing a 2 hour drive to visit family that lives here -- they're why we live here in the first place.
Right.
That's a lifestyle choice.
The choice you're making is choosing to optimize access to family at the expense of requiring a car.
You could choose to live in or nearer to a city, making public transit an option, and renting for those times when you want to visit family. But that would, of course, introduce a barrier to visiting family, and you've decided that's not acceptable.
That's fine! You're obviously free to make that choice!
But don't claim you had no choice, and that it isn't because you've chosen to optimize for a certain lifestyle.
You can look at the bus schedules and see they don't pass close enough to the areas I need to go, its not practical, I don't know how people dependent on it function without losing 4-6 hours a day.
What I considered was where I could afford a house, where my wife worked (the city we live in), school districts, etc. The fact that everything is country roads or major highways between cities.
Fact of the matter is, unless you make a high income to live in a major city like NYC, Boston, San Fran, etc. You can't be a functional adult in the U.S., you're just extremely limited on where you can seek employment, accomplishing basic tasks like buying food (grocery stores are often a few miles away, and small shops/convenience stores are overpriced have few if any options, especially healthy ones), you'd have to take days off just to go see a dentist/doctor or a government office. We're spread out, and the fact is we like that way, most of us feel claustrophobic in a major city where total strangers are a thin wall away and your apartment costs half your monthly income and is the size of your college dorm.
The aggregate cost is likely to be far less than that of owning your own vehicle.
Strange, I'm not seeing that at all.
Of course our big cities are not great due to the automobile, but the average person can't do anything about that.
The craziest thing to me was recently a twenty year old borrowed money to purchase a stick-drive car when she doesn't drive stick and already had a recent, usable car. Why? Now she's going to have no money for years to come!
That whole mindset is foreign to me - I'm an adult which means I can afford to rent any vehicle I need to use, or hire somebody to drive me whenever I want and it's still probably cheaper than owning one vehicle in the long run.
I've lived in Switzerland and all over Asia without owning a car. Loved public transit and never wanted a car.
- Public transit in the US sometimes feels like riding a rolling homeless shelter. I know it's a chicken-and-egg thing, as most people have cars. I have no issue riding public transit in the US, but I couldn't see my parents taking public transit. So having a car is part of becoming like my parents.
- Being able to drive a car (auto or stick) has practical advantages for emergencies. So there's a provider element.
- Having a car is a symbol of independence. People who have cars in the US sometimes have friends asking to bum rides. So not have a car is seen as not being independent.
That's just crazy! It means five people can't drink. All that's needed is maximum one car for five people, maybe two if traveling from dispersed locations. Keep designated drivers to a minimum.
Remember this is America we're talking about. Locations are really, really dispersed. Carpooling 5 people could mean the driver is dropping people off for an hour and a half.
That said, where I live, giving up my vechicle would be like just giving up in life. I need a car in the suburbs. I honestly don't know how people do without them, unless they live near good public transportation.
And yes, I guess America is very vechicle centric, but for good reason. They built it so spread out. They built most of our infrastructure like the 50's would last forever. A home, and a car for every American. We would always buy American products. We would never have to live like the rest of the world?
I look for work and apartments within several minutes walk from a major train station.
I can't imagine owning a car - the paperwork, regular checkups, constant looking for parking space, worrying about how to keep the car long term on a long trip overseas. Do I own the car, or does the car own me?
When I have to travel somewhere inconvenient by public transportation I call a taxi or a Uber. I do this maybe once a month or two. If there's an event on a weekend and I could walk there in less than an hour from home, occasionally I'd walk instead of catching a taxi or Uber.
I have visited a city with lacking public transport before, you're right, being unable to drive, and cannot travel anywhere without having to call a Uber every time, even to the corner shop few kilometres away, I feel like I'm trapped.
Btw, the US is huge. People here don't use enough caution when driving, but it would be impossible for most everyone to hold down a job without a car. Driving is a needed right when it shouldn't be.
I work internationally with a company of americans and the entire company is remote. Every single one of those Americans works from home, so would they still need cars? I know it's not the majority of people, but there's still a large chunk of people who can get to and from work without a car in the US as well.
He was very well organized on the public transit front. Like knowing exactly when to leave the dorm to catch the bus without having to stand out in the cold for more than 5 minutes. This is something I didn't master until moving to a city myself.
Now that I've lived without a car for so long I'm not even sure I want another one. Buses, Uber, and rentals fill the void nicely.
People in big cities should realise that owning a car doesn't mean you have to use it daily. I have a very well-maintained mid 90's Japanese car that sits in a garage and is only taken out for trips during the weekends. Being able to afford a new car, I have saved an enormous amount of money compared to my peers.
Why? You can bike there.
A lot of people do weekend trips with bike and tent here, even families.
I know even a family that bikes every year up to Denmark and back for vacation (living near Hamburg), even when their kids were still little (you can buy carts to attach to a bike which can seat multiple kids + store bags)
And if you take your bike in bus or train, you can get literally anywhere in Europe within of a day.
Also ropes, parachutes and other adventure activity equipment doesn't bike well.
And otherwise, as I said, bike to bus stop or train station, should be < 10 miles, take bike on train, go wherever you want, bike to destination.
Costs you like 10$ and you can get anywhere easily.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/03/braving-...
Some cities are getting much more "bike friendly", thankfully.
The other issue is distance. The American West in particular is rather big and has large parts that are sparsely populated. If you bike from, say, San Francisco to Los Angeles, you are covering a much longer distance compared to biking from Hamburg to Copenhagen.
There has been progress, in that it seems there's been more interest in long distance trails (usually "rail trails") of late. Beyond these trails, you'd have to bike on highways. Many highways are designed primarily for automobiles and are not terribly "bike friendly" at all.
Rail trails are great, but I've never seen any that were actually useful for practical purposes. They're usually in rural areas or other places where they're not going to actually help you travel between two points that you would want to travel between. They're fun because they usually have nice scenery (they're usually rural), there's no cars on or near them, they're almost nearly flat (they were built for trains, which can't go up and down hills easily), they let you see stuff that you can't see from the road, and they're usually long enough to make it worth doing. However, you still need a car, to transport yourself and your bike to the rail trail.... as I said, they're not practical, they're just a fun excursion. Another similar thing is tow paths: back in the 1800s they built tow paths along canals so that mules could pull barges. Now these paths are all used for hiking and cycling, and can stretch for very long distances, usually much longer than rail trails. Rail trails are frequently not that long, because they're not able to secure rights to the land for the trail for that much distance; either part of it is still used by the railroad, or the railroad is eliminated and the land sold off. Frequently landowners adjacent to the railroad oppose efforts to turn it into a trail and get the local government to prevent this because they don't want cyclists robbing them and vandalizing their property (yes, these are actually raised as valid concerns!).
In small cities it's often feasible to live within walking/biking distance from town center even if the public transport is poorer than big cities.
For whatever reason, the US has simply decided it prefers the waste of automotive transportation. I'm sure there are many factors... cheap fuel, plenty of land, racism and other social factors, etc.
b. It's not a failure of society, it's just the nature of public transport - you simply can't provide direct connections from anywhere to anywhere, you'll always have to walk from/to stations and change lines. The city I live in, although in Europe, is very well communicated, but I work in such place that I can't get there directly from where I live and the whole trip using public transport takes me an hour one way, while with car it's 15 minutes. Now tell me that I should use public transport and waste 40 hours in buses each month.
c. Renting a car doesn't resolve any of the issues mentioned in the article - you still drive a car, just not yours.
b. You can't link everything, but in many parts of the US, we haven't even tried. Take DC - we have a basic metro downtown, but precious little rail access from the suburbs. There is no light rail across Fairfax or Montgomery Counties. The subway that exists is falling apart because local governments refuse to provide appropriate funding.
c. It means you aren't driving during the week, only when you actually need to get out of the city. If enough people car-share, there are fewer cars being produced (building cars is resource-intensive).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
If you were an investor, the up and coming item was streetcars, as the article mentions they were better than horse-drawn carriages, so taking a stake in these would have been a good idea. The article mentions that the transit systems are expensive to maintain; as publicly held companies, they need to make money. The current day transit systems with rail lines are heavily underwater and have a difficult time making any money, let alone addressing maintenance issues: BART, Metro, and Max. Knowing the return on investment from existing data, would you as a private investor purchase any of those lines.
So, the conspiracy can be developed in retrospect, but an over arching plot fails to account for some of the opportunities that fit more into an investor trying to make monies.
From the link:
"On April 9, 1947, nine corporations and seven individuals (officers and directors of certain of the corporate defendants) were indicted in the Federal District Court of Southern California on counts of "conspiring to acquire control of a number of transit companies, forming a transportation monopoly" and "conspiring to monopolize sales of buses and supplies to companies owned by National City Lines"[35] which had been made illegal by the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. In 1948, the venue was changed from the Federal District Court of Southern California to the Federal District Court in Northern Illinois following an appeal to the United States Supreme Court (in United States v. National City Lines Inc.)[36] which felt that there was evidence of conspiracy to monopolize the supply of buses and supplies.[37]
In 1949, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, GM and Mack Trucks were convicted of conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to local transit companies controlled by NCL; they were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize the ownership of these companies. The verdicts were upheld on appeal in 1951."
Then you have President Eisenhower appointing the president of GM as the secretary of defense:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Erwin_Wilson#Secretary...
..and Francis DuPont appointed as chief administrator of highways, whose family, coincidentally owned the largest share of GM stock:
actually the inefficiencies are spent on taxes rather than the engine itself.
its really hard to read through the extremely biased article. it literally admits airplanes are more inefficient but cars are worse because they are used more. That's a special kind of logic there.
I myself live in Philly which is one of few places you can exist in america without a car. I also give up a lot of freedom. it means not being able to go hiking in the woods, or pretty much anything outside the maybe 5 or 6 places in america with enough population density to warent a good mass transit system.
cars in many situations also save copius amounts of time. A trip to north east philly is about an hour and a half by mass transit, 25 minutes by car. time savings that would eclipse any theoretical 10 years of life expectancy loss from cars.
cars have done wonder's for economy as well.
> actually the inefficiencies are spent on taxes rather than the engine itself.
Incorrect - the efficiencies are to do with basic physics, and the laws of thermodynamics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency
"Modern gasoline engines have a maximum thermal efficiency of about 25% to 30% when used to power a car. In other words, even when the engine is operating at its point of maximum thermal efficiency, of the total heat energy released by the gasoline consumed, about 70-75% is rejected as heat without being turned into useful work, i.e. turning the crankshaft."
> its really hard to read through the extremely biased article. it literally admits airplanes are more inefficient but cars are worse because they are used more. That's a special kind of logic there.
Incorrect - what the article actually says is:
"Transportation is a principal cause of the global climate crisis, exacerbated by a stubborn attachment to archaic, wasteful, and inefficient transportation modes and machines. But are cars the true culprit? "
So we are talking about who contributes the most to global warming - and the answer, no matter how you look at it, is cars. Airplanes contribute around 8 percent - cars contribute some 83 percent.
> cars in many situations also save copius amounts of time. A trip to north east philly is about an hour and a half by mass transit, 25 minutes by car. time savings that would eclipse any theoretical 10 years of life expectancy loss from cars.
Incorrect - firstly, what exactly is the price of a life? I can tell you that to most people, if you told them, can I take 10 years off your life, you would hardly be met with joy. Secondly - this disparity you refer to isn't due to any inherent strength of cars - more, it's just to do with very poor investment in public transport in the US. If you journey outside the United States, to other lands, you will see what some good planning and smart investment in pubic transport can bring.
It's like saying, here are my two children - Alice and Bob. Alice is well fed and does sports every day after school. Bob is beaten and malnourished, and we keep him chained in the basement. Here, I'm going to race Alice and Bob - gosh, Alice can run fast!
I would get rid of my car if I could but need it to get to work in NJ, even so, I hardly ever use it outside of my commute.
Airplanes are actually more efficient than cars the way they're used. Cars are usually single-person affairs. The average occupancy is well under two. Passenger airplanes usually fly close to full, and typical fuel efficiency is in the neighborhood of 70-120 seat-miles per gallon.
On the flip side, planes usually take off and land at airports that aren't that close to your destination.
"Driving an SUV or even a mid-size car from New York to L.A. is worse for the planet than flying there. This is true in part because cars’ fuel efficiency has improved far more slowly than planes’, but also because of Americans’ increasing propensity to drive alone, which has made car travel less efficient and more carbon-intensive per passenger-mile in recent years."
Which article did you read?
1. Public transportation is a huge vector for viral diseases. 2. You can drive to a place any time of the day. Public transport doesn't always work 24/7. 3. If you live in a shitty neighborhood, you most likely would not want to walk or take a bicycle everywhere. So in some ways cars can make you safer. 4. Car efficiency and safety is something that is getting improved all the time. 5. If something bad happens (think hurricane), relying on public transportation will get you stranded with much higher probability.
2. You fit your life to the schedule, just as you fit existing journeys around the fact your car can't do 300 mph or drive over water. It isn't worse, just different.
3. Perhaps the neighbourhood wouldn't be so shitty if everybody wasn't in a car isolated from their surroundings.
4. Cars have been getting bigger all the time, those efficiency gains have been squandered on SUVs.
5. Maybe, although basing your transport policy around freak events isn't that sensible.
>You won't be getting on a plane then?
Most people don't ride planes very often. If you rely on public transit, you have to use it multiple times per day. People can go months or years before boarding a plane.
>Perhaps the neighbourhood [sic] wouldn't be so shitty if everybody wasn't in a car isolated from their surroundings.
No, the neighborhood is shitty for various other reasons which have nothing to do with cars. America has long had a problem with race relations.
>Maybe, although basing your transport policy around freak events isn't that sensible.
What "freak events"? Hurricanes happen here quite frequently, as do lesser storms.
The U.S not driving won't make much of a dent in climate change, not with China and other industrializing nations. But if you really cared about greenhouse gases, not soap boxes, let's talk about eating meat.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/21/giving-up...
Attempting to use public transport for me would involve an hour walk (in the snow, half the year), and an hour and a half on the bus. A car, on the other hand, is right around a 20 minute drive on a bad day.
I live outside of Detroit, but I'm originally from Indianapolis. That's ~300 miles, a 4.5 hour drive by car. I drive that stretch about once every other month to visit family, do work functions (I work from home; my company is in Indianapolis) and other things.
As I make this drive, through what is almost exclusively small towns and farms, there's no way public transportation could be made affordable enough to cover the vast distances required so that the reliance of cars in this area would be diminished.
And that's in the Midwest, where the cities aren't that far apart (every major city is 2-5 hours away from the others)! Imagine Texas, where you can drive in a straight line for >10 hours and still be inside that state.
In Germany. In Baden-Württemberg to be exact. And by "countryside" I mean 10-30km.
But why on earth would you live hundreds of miles away from where you work? First thing I did when I started going to university in Baden-Württemberg was move there.
As for when I visit my parents or siblings (about 600km away), I take the train.
I work remotely, but occasionally it's nice to get face time with the team.
I moved for my wife, who got a job (in an industry where there's not a lot of jobs) in the area.
I can't afford to live in a good neighborhood of a city with good public transit either though so I'm damned if I do and also... if I don't
..and relevant documentary:
If your life is arranged such that all the places you commonly need to go are > 10 miles apart from each other, consider changing that.
It seems to me to be a throwback idea that has lived on. I don't think a new car can really be seen as a rite of passage in the current culture of tuition inflation/stagnating wages. It is more like a luxury you are lucky to be able to truly afford (I'm not talking a 72 month payment plan, no down payment afford here) a year or less out of college.
A good hunting rifle, shotgun, or pistol costs less than an iPhone...
I'm not the one with ~50 firearms in the immediate family...
Yes, because iPhones are overpriced crap. A much cheaper way to deal with your telecommunications needs is to get a good Android phone that's a couple years old. You can get a Samsung Galaxy S4 now for about $100, and they're still pretty current, the software is still updated, and they work just as well as some new $700 model. You're not going to get any kind of decent gun for $100.
When you turn 8 years old or so, you typically get your first bicycle. And this lets you exert some independence from your parents - you're able to ride faster than they can run and catch you for the first time. Later, you might get a better bike and be able to ride even faster and further. You can spend an entire day away from home on the weekends, visiting friends that you'd otherwise have to ask mom for a ride to go see.
But the downside to a bicycle is that when it rains, you're probably going to be stuck wherever you are. And then you turn 16 and get your learner's permit. Now you're able to go faster and farther, and travel when it's raining.
So it's part of the process of the little bird leaving the nest and becoming an independent person.
For many people, that's the first time you can do anything at all. When I was growing up, my bike could get me absolutely nowhere - there wasn't even passable terrain on the side of the highway. You could maybe push and carry a bike for an hour then ride for another 20 minutes to get into town or to where other people lived.
"Germany builds another new bike highway in the European bike highway grid allowing anyone to bike from any point in the EU to any other point in the EU easily".
"Average age for kids to get a bike goes down even more to below 3"
Infrastructure and culture over here in Europe are very different – you can easily bike to another country and back, without ever having to worry about finding somewhere to bike. You can literally bike or walk anywhere.
A lot of that obviously because walking and biking infrastructure in Europe has existed for millenia on these scales.
¹ Biggest improvement to bike technology in the last 25 years: Disc brakes
It seems like most individuals would rather not have horrendous commutes, but they work where the jobs are and they live where housing is cheap and those two things are often far apart. These same individuals have little political pull in terms of zoning laws and urban improvements to make the necessary changes to the infrastructure to allow them to live close to work.
If suddenly, say GE, or any major employer in a town had a financial incentive to lobby the local government to make it easier for employees to live close to where they work, things would probably change a lot faster.
A deduction on your Federal taxes wouldn't necessarily affect the tax money collected by the local or state government, which is usually the one responsible for building various roads. State and local governments may or may not even collect income taxes (some do, some don't).
There were no economical alternatives to our current housing situation, so like many other commenters, we have to use a personal vehicle even though we'd prefer to avoid it.
Some cities bikes are so ubiquitous you have to really want to steal it to steal it. Last time I was in Ghent bikes were everywhere. If you didn't have one just grab the nearest unlocked bike off the rack. Most likely its 50 years old and the owner has abandoned it. Now that is a bikable city!
During interim if we find carpools and try that, in theory we could reduce much of the climate, health, traffic, and deprecation concerns.
It would be good if the author of the article went more in-depth about the causes of car culture and potential policy solutions. The car is a status symbol of independence in American culture, but I don't think the prevalence of that culture can be separated from how our infrastructure is heavily biased towards utilizing public space for parking spaces, roads, etc. I personally dislike driving and would much rather walk or take a train to where I'm going, even if it took a bit longer.
In my city, there is no public transit at all that would allow me to get to where my doctor is, and it would take almost 2 hours for me to bike there across very dangerous roads not designed for bikers. My city also banned ride sharing services for a time, so the only options would have been "bumming" a ride from someone or taking an expensive cab - both car-based modes of transit. Taking public transit to another place I could have biked from more easily would have taken just as long as biking the whole route. Towards the end of the route, I would have had to somehow bike on a highway with cards speeding along at 60+mph, too.
Even in another city designed with bike lanes when I had very obvious flashing lights attached to my bike, I got hit by a driver who wasn't paying attention when he turned right onto the road in front of me. Drivers in my current city are much less aware of bikers than there, and I've seen Uber drivers in another city with a similar lack of public transit yelling and harassing bikers sharing the road quite unobtrusively.
Another factor here is that the elderly get heat strokes during the summer when temperatures exceed 100 degrees. I'm not sure how well walking to their bus stop would work.
There need to be better solutions here than the gas guzzling monstrosities that people drive everyday. I try to reduce my carbon footprint and gas bill by driving an efficient car. The infrastructure for electric cars, which would help the dependence on fossil fuels but not entirely solve deaths from vehicle accidents (though it might prevent some, because of large crumple zones), simply isn't there yet. Until better public transit gets more funding, the increasing availability of affordable electric cars may be a good stopgap solution, at least.
That's not to deny that your particular situation is indeed impossible, but the idea that you need bike lanes and your mantra of being in danger strikes me as not reflecting the actual safety, convenience and abve all _enjoyment_.
Cycling has overall better life expectancy outcomes than driving and is pretty safe.
You may want to consider a pedelec/electric-assist bicycle (I recommend recent models using the bottom bracket motors from either Bosch or Shimano) if your trip is too long.
There is a better solution, it's called SkyTran PRT. No one in this country will even consider it, but they're building it in Tel Aviv now.
The market or job isn't always 2 blocks or even 2 miles away.
...The Absurdity of an Atlantic Article.