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Comment by mtberatwork | Hacker News Reader

> the US went to the other extreme and is only slowly turning around.

US car manufacturers are doubling down on large trucks and SUVs and the current administration continues to thwart progress on tackling climate change and other societal concerns. I would say the US, at least on a macro level, is still on the "other extreme" path.

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> US car manufacturers are doubling down on large trucks and SUVs

Manufacturers are building lots of SUVs because this is what people in the US prefer to buy. If manufacturers build tons of subcompacts instead they would have to drop prices and probably sell those subcompacts at a loss.

If you wanted to sell more small cars instead you should convince consumers to buy them (e.g., via end user incentives), which would make it profitable for car companies to build lots of them.

The deck is stacked, though. CUV's are considered trucks for the purposes of CAFE regulation. If they were considered the cars that they really are, they would be more fuel efficient, more expensive and manufacturers would be pushing small cars a lot harder to bring those averages down.

Serious question, are you saying trucks have more lenient CAFE regulations than cars?

Yes, "passenger cars" and "light trucks" are different categories in the regulations, and have different formulas for their target fuel economy.

Yes, that's the point. It's a signal that the US, as a whole, is still very much in the mindset of building infrastructure and communities centered around the car (in fact, centered around bigger, less efficient vehicles). Sure, you have pockets that are trying to do things differently, but again, on a macro level, the US is still very much "auto oriented" and doesn't appear to be turning much around at any kind of pace of other Western countries.

Is this really surprising? The benefits of driving a large vehicle are all internal (comfort, safety of vehicle occupants, cargo capacity, range between fueling). The costs, however, are mostly external (road maintenance, emissions, safety of non occupants, space consumed for parking).

You'd need to substantially incentivize smaller vehicles to overcome these things, but we actually incentivize larger vehicles (through looser emissions standards).

I think you really touch on the core problem. All the negative externalities are eaten up by the community. The obvious solution is to stop subsidizing cars and instead start teaching the negative externalities. Ready first steps: 1. massively increase gasoline tax. 2. Get rid of all street parking.

I personally would prefer to just ban all combustion engines, but people seem to think I'm insane when I propose this.

Banning all combustion engines is too extreme, see this chart for reasoning: https://image.slidesharecdn.com/13hja01motivepowermst-141217...

SUVs are subsidized relative to cars which always causes inefficiency. People have complex preferences and cost is always going to be a significant component. Distort price and actions stop reflecting actual preferences.

Advertising. People buy large SUVs because of advertising, and American car companies advertise SUVs because they turn more of a profit with larger vehicles than smaller vehicles.

I know several people who, like myself, used to drive small pickups and now drive midsize ones. We would prefer to drive small ones, but they don't make them anymore.

Among people who are willing to restore old vehicles, some small trucks are becoming classics.

They can't sell small trucks in the US because of the Chicken Tax:

https://fee.org/articles/chicken-tax-makes-trucks-expensive-...

Don't pretty much all overseas car companies build vehicles for the North American market in North America these days? That would make the tariff point moot. My "Japanese" mid-sized truck that's bigger than I really need it to be was built in Mississippi.

Actually, lots of cars are made in foreign countries, namely Mexico and Canada, but automakers like Ford and GM.

Notice how I said "North America", not "The United States"? Thanks to NAFTA, you distinction is largely irrelevant in terms of tariffs.

Actually its a cycle.

The cost of gas goes up, and people scramble to get more fuel efficient cars. Gas does down and they want larger utility vehicles.

Toyota made out like crazy when gas prices went through the roof in the early 2000's. They were already manufacturing the Prius and once gas prices went over $3-$4/gallon, people suddenly started buying motorcycles, started biking more and started buying Prius' in droves.

Now that gas has stabilized for the most part to around $2.20/gallon, you're seeing more people not really care either way and I have friends who have sold their Prius' to get more snow friendly vehicles like a Subaru or a Toyota AWD SUV.

Their decisions are based nothing on social concerns, it's all about how expensive it is to own the cars they currently have. Make fuel expensive and its painful to own a large SUV and they'll switch. When fuel is cheap and they're going to buy whatever suit their needs.

Yep, and in a democratic nation, anyone who tries to add high taxes causing their large cars to be much more expensive to own and operate will be voted out, so the only thing that can really stop them is when the price of fuel is forced up by sheer lack of supply.

Lack of supply is not sufficient to raise the price enough. To keep climate change below a 2 degree rise, we must leave 4/5ths of our current oil reserves in the ground. And not only that, once oil reaches ~$80 / bbl, vast amounts of tar sands become viable, increasing our oil reserves massively.

So I guess that means that they won't be stopped until some other external force I didn't account for stops them.

I'm curious to see how it plays out with the 20-somethings in the US. They've been brought up on more civic-mindedness and their trend is back to urban areas for living. They'll be a better bellweather.

I’m not sure 20-somethings are more civic minded. They voted in the last election at participation rates consistent with the last 40 years for that age group. Participation rates will probably increase as they age. Unfortunately priorities tend to change as people age too.

The participation rate for the next election is where I hope to see a jump for that age group. The last presidential election hopefully scared them into understanding the importance of voting.

And they'll move out of the cities into suburbia in their 30s, as they always do.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-47529562

Over the past decade, about 550,000 more Britons left London than moved to it.

This trend is not unique to London; it is seen in many big US cities, including New York, Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles.

... People arrive in their 20s looking for jobs, then retreat in their 30s. Although it seems more likely they they only retreat to "commuter" distance -- in London that's about 40-60 minutes from a main rail terminal, which of course leads to increased pollution.

... The vibrancy and job opportunities offered by our biggest cities appeal to students and young professionals. This shapes these cities in terms of the shops, bars and other facilities they offer.

But among older residents, the desire for things like more space and a less urban environment grows, and many move out.

I think it depends on your idea of suburbia. We tend to have smaller cities surrounding our major city. These smaller cities have mixed use neighborhoods - commercial and residential - and lots of multi-family homes. I grew up in such a city in a multi-family home (locally, we knew them as tenements). An article appeared recently about the trend toward purchasing multi-families again due to their cost-effectiveness. So, I'm not certain of the 30-somthings move to the burbs trend yet.

I live in Minneapolis and I've seen this first hand. The funny thing is all of the downtown areas have been gentrified so much, instead of attracting the young 20's tech crowd, all the new condo's they've built are priced too high for their target market so now the young kids are simply moving out the suburbs right away.

I have a few younger nephews who graduated, were all about the music scene and after a year of looking for a decent apartment in the city, just gave up and bought a house in the second ring suburbs. They still work downtown and take the train in and get on near a park and ride, but the over gentrification has soured them to living in the city. It was funny to hear them tell me the city had no character anymore. It was all geared towards rich, trust fund kids or millionaire retirees.

  People arrive in their 20s looking for jobs,
  then retreat in their 30s.

Terraced house in London: £675,216 [1]

Terraced house in Hertfordshire: £380,897 [2]

The only surprising thing here is people are having to save until their 30s before buying a house.

[1] https://www.rightmove.co.uk/house-prices-in-London.html [2] https://www.rightmove.co.uk/house-prices-in-Hertfordshire.ht...

Both are unaffordable to normal people, especially with £1500 a month rent.

But fundamentally you can't have a high density city and houses - the land value is just too high - and people don't want to bring kids up in tower blocks.

Another issue with living in urban areas, at least in the US, is education. Schools in urban areas deal with more issues around family and poverty. The school buildings themselves are often older and require more maintenance. For young parents who may love urban life, the quality of education becomes a big factor.

Schools cost far more in cities too -- higher salaries for teachers (as housing costs more), higher cost for the usage of the land, higher charges for everything from plumbers to school dinners.

But those vehicles aren't necessarily being bought by urban consumers. Cities already have several disincentives toward large vehicle ownership.

Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and many more cities that are not New York or San Francisco are still filled with trucks and SUVs carrying no passengers and no cargo. Urban economies in the US are largely commuter-based and parking a large vehicle is not a problem for those who go back and forth between a driveway and a parking garage.

And yet not a pip when the new governor of California, Gavin Newsom announced that the high speed rail projects there will be scaled back, markedly.[1] [2] Between Los Angeles and San Francisco, no less !

Atleast not from these pro high-density living and pro urban transit folks. I don't get how you pick and choose what you'd like to criticize and what you'd like to champion on one side and what you conveniently ignore when it suits you, on the other.

I'm sure we can all agree that the LA-SF corridor could badly use a high speed rail line to alleviate the traffic on the I-5, right?

[1]

Gov. Newsom Puts Brakes On California’s High-Speed Rail Plan

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/02/12/gavin-newsom-br...

[2]

California's Newsom Scales Back Plans for High-Speed Rail Line

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-12/californi...

Unfortunately, he was right here, because that project was hopelessly overpriced. Yes, we badly need HSR in America, but the prices they're talking about are completely ridiculous.

What we really need to do is just hire the Japanese to build HSR for us, because we obviously can't do it ourselves.

The Japanese will come here and also have to deal with the hugely inflated prices of land and material acquisition. Everyone in the path of this project or a potential vendor all up and down the line is eager to profiteer and jack up the cost no matter who is engineering it. We need to keep large government projects far away from contractors because like every large government project involved with the private sector in history, costs will rise and rise and rise until people have had enough and the project is scaled back and/or killed. Otherwise, costs will rise until they hit that point, because as a contractor for the government, you have zero incentive not to profiteer.

That rail would do little for density. It might (at a more reasonable cost) be a good thing, but density is about things close to home, high speed rail is about getting people far from home.

I don't believe there is a nefarious scheme in play.

People who live in cities don't need cars.

People who live outside cities still need cars. The manufacturers try to fill that need. The manufacturers, sellers, etc. make the economy go 'round.

It will all change if/when economic forces bring it about. Directly forcing it through politics probably isn't the right approach.

I don't think too many trust the market to make their decisions for them. The purpose of politics is to represent the people and, ideally, do what is best for them. That's definitely not what the market is for!

Get involved in politics if you want to bring about change in the world because companies whose job it is to sell more cars certainly aren't going to be helping improve the environment.

This is the logic that produced the green new deal.

Could you expand? I'm not sure if you agree with the parent, or against the new deal.

The green new deal comes from a place completely detached from reality rather than anything remotely feasible.

Remember, the green new deal not only included destruction of all fossil fuel industries (aviation, non electric cars, trucks, trains, etc) but it also included provisions for people who weren’t willing to work (used to be in the FAQ).

It started as a plan to completely restructure the US into the most socialist country on the planet with an energy economy based on technology that doesn’t exist all in the next ten years.

Politics is not about foisting your vision onto everyone else, despite the current rhetoric in the US.

How does anyone get that from what Bogle said?

> Politics is not about foisting your vision onto everyone else, despite the current rhetoric in the US.

The only paragraph I agree with. But I agree strongly!

Politics is about consensus and horse-trading, and they are much superior to winning and making the other side miserable (for a short while, until they get the chance to do the same)

So you don't think 100% from renewable energy is feasible? If not, then, shouldn't we be creating policies to preserve more fossil fuel to give us more time? It is finite, after all. What exactly is your plan?

Nuclear is the only answer that works based on existing technology. Build it, subsidize it, whatever.

It’s a trivial solution that doesn’t require a fundamental restructure of the economy. It’s just not popular with the left precisely because it is too compatible with our current economic structure.

Australia alone has enough coal under it to burn for a hundred years+. Any policy that doesn’t include nuclear for base load is a policy to burn that coal.

    > I don't believe there is a nefarious scheme in play.

I don't either but I do see it a sad lack of imagination and resignation to out-of-date mythologies about individualism.

There's no defensible reason why work-home-school-retail structures rural places can't nucleate closer together into walkable "main street" towns.

Much of the design of fly-over states is dictated by developers. It starts when a farmer who wants to retires sells a huge tract of land to a development company. The land eventually gets populated with a mind-numbing matrix of boring mcmansions, without regard to utilities, tax base, schooling, or distance.

People then buy into to the facade of rural living but then end up driving 10's of miles for each and every errand and activity. They even take vacations in Europe and marvel at how delightful it is to sit in a town square and be able to walk to everything. When they get back to their ex-burban strip mall hellscapes in the USA, the vast majority just fail to make the connection that it doesn't have to be that way.

It is about trade offs though. I moved from a 10 acre lot to a small city recently.

I love that my son and I went for an hour walk to a park (we passed a different park on the way because we played in that one yesterday) and back. I love that my work is only a few minutes drive away (now that the weather is warmer I need to get my bike working).

I miss other things about my rural lot though. There is no space to drive my tractor collection around. I can't see anywhere near as many stars at night.

It is about trade offs, I was happy in the rural area. I'm happy in town. Some think I like to do are better/easier, some things are worse/harder.

> There is no space to drive my tractor collection around.

I am glad to see a comment like this on HN, despite the impression that everyone here is an SV-focused tech bro. Sometimes it feels good to read about somebody's tractors whilst I gaze out at the soybean field in my backyard. :)

> tech bro

this does not seem to have been said with anomosity, so I take a risk I would not take with more angry interlocutors.

tech bro is casually sexist, right? Could we avoid that, at least when talking between nice people?

I understand the sentiment but in my experience there are a lot more of us out there than you might think. It's probably the very tendency that makes a humble spread in the sticks appealing that also has us mostly laying low in the comments.

This was my front porch in Ohio this morning: https://i.imgur.com/B7KSFP6.jpg

> People then buy into to the facade of rural living but then end up driving 10's of miles for each and every errand and activity. They even take vacations in Europe and marvel at how delightful it is to sit in a town square and be able to walk to everything.

Most of Europe hasn't been built like this for many decades, and have been going the other way as well. You won't find many new developments in this spirit, and what already exists often isn't accessible. Being able to sit in a town square is vacation for a lot of people in Europe as well, especially if you haven't been grandfathered in.

>Much of the design of fly-over states is dictated by developers.

Unnecessary bullshit. The entire part of the South Bay and nearly all of Los Angeles suffers from the same driving dependency. It has nothing to do with ignorant armchair analysis of how “the flyover states” work.

Sorry, I didn't intend to be flippant about "fly-over" states.

But, yeah, the farmland-developer-mcmansion-exburban-dystopia transition is something I've seen too many times in too many places.

> It will all change if/when economic forces bring it about.

I agree, but I also think political policy decisions created the rules of the market, which in the case of the US, incentivized individual car ownsership. For example, creating a highway or creating a bus only lane, are political decisions that directly affect the market forces.

>People who live outside cities still need cars. The manufacturers try to fill that need. The manufacturers, sellers, etc. make the economy go 'round.

Sometimes I wonder if it has to be that way- how much more does a light rail or bus line cost than a highway does to connect smaller towns?

"Smaller towns" are one thing, but there are a lot of people who live outside any city limits. You're not going to link up every rural farmhouse with busses and light rail.

Even those who do live in town are likely to have friends and relatives who don't, and they're unlikely to want to rent a vehicle every time they leave town to visit them.

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