The New Yorker this week has an excellent article about our current, century-long automotive era. Was it a mistake?
I’ve noted over and over on this site that I don’t drive. I also don’t live in a city, so not driving is definitely challenging. I have the driver’s license manual on my desk, every year I update the paperwork that the state requires to take the written test, but I never actually go through with it. The main reason is cost. I’m not without means, but I don’t like throwing money away, and cars are, to me just money-sinks. I can get income out of a house I own by renting the spare rooms. You can’t really do that with a car (yes, I’m aware there’s an app for that).
Increasingly, I don’t have to drive. People are willing to drive me places, or barring that, there’s ride-sharing and taxis and if I’m in a big city, there’s functional transit. Most places I travel to can be reached via combination of all of the above. The combination of the above is in fact much cheaper than driving—I and a transit planner friend of mine in the private sector (who also doesn’t drive) crunched the numbers. Nathan Heller, the author of the New Yorker piece, writes:
Tell someone that you cannot drive, and they respond as if you had confessed an intimate eccentricity, like needing to be walked on with high heels before bed. “Re-e-eally! ” the reply goes. “How do you . . . ?” The answer is planes, trains, buses, ferries, cabs, bikes, feet, and the occasional shared ride: almost anywhere in the world can be reached this way for less than the amortized cost of a car and its expenses.
I rather wish that the cars drove themselves and that there was a roving fleet of autonomous cars right now---but that’s still over a decade, likely several decades, away.
The author of the New Yorker piece, Nathan Heller, also appears to be like me, also I think similar in age to me (I’m in my late 30s). He had one lesson and said “nope”. That was also me at 16. I’ve had a few since, and I can drive a golf cart, but basically, it’s still a nope.
Mr. Heller describes how the car came about when many American cities were in the process of building out their transit systems. Those of you at Netroots Nations probably discovered that Philadelphia has subways, buses, and trolleys, all of which survived the advent of the automotive era to some degree. In 1914, when cars came on the scene, the city and its transit companies were preparing to build an even more extensive subway system than the one it currently has today. It never did.
Big, sprawling Midwestern cities all had mass transit that functioned, when today we’re told it can’t happen and can’t be done. You could get all over Los Angeles and Long Beach by trolley car, whose routes suspiciously map those of today’s freeways. (Yes, I know that conspiracy theory isn’t true, by the way.) Much of the Midwest and Northeast were connected not just by rail but also by neat systems called interurbans, which were electrified long-distance trolley systems. These built the first suburbs. They were not dissimilar to modern-day light-rail systems, and were much more extensive. Most are gone, a few survive as heavy rail commuter routes. Now we sit in traffic.
Heller:
For years, I counted this inability to drive as one of many personal failures. More recently, I’ve wondered whether I performed an accidental kindness for the world. I am one of those Darth Vader pedestrians who loudly tailgate couples moving slowly up the sidewalk, and I’m sure that I would be a twit behind the wheel. Perhaps I was protected from a bad move by my own incompetence—one of those mercies which the universe often bestows on the young (who rarely appreciate the gift). In America today, there are more cars than drivers. Yet our investment in these vehicles has yielded dubious returns. Since 1899, more than 3.6 million people have died in traffic accidents in the United States, and more than eighty million have been injured; pedestrian fatalities have risen in the past few years. The road has emerged as the setting for our most violent illustrations of systemic racism, combustion engines have helped create a climate crisis, and the quest for oil has led our soldiers into war.
Every technology has costs, but lately we’ve had reason to question even cars’ putative benefits. Free men and women on the open road have turned out to be such disastrous drivers that carmakers are developing computers to replace them. When the people of the future look back at our century of auto life, will they regard it as a useful stage of forward motion or as a wrong turn? Is it possible that, a hundred years from now, the age of gassing up and driving will be seen as just a cul-de-sac in transportation history, a trip we never should have taken?
There are also, despite what people here in the city where I work think, 8 parking spots for every car. That’s well over one billion parking spots in the US alone. We’ve paved swaths of America over for something that does not bring individuals any income—unless they own a parking garage, and as Harrisburg has discovered, that’s not even profitable.
Drivers inevitably fight back. People hate sitting in traffic, so they press for more lanes. By the way, that never works as a relief for congestion, but we keep building them anyway. Sometimes they bill drivers directly for those lanes (called, somewhat pejoratively, “Lexus Lanes”). Even though many cities fought back against being carved up like thanksgiving dinner by highway networks, many cities still lost that fight and are dealing with the aftermath today. They wrecked neighborhoods of color. The Vine Street Expressway in Philadelphia, completed in my childhood, displaced an old African-American community and parts of Chinatown. Philadelphia still has much of its central city preserved but an exploration of Google Earth in much of the US shows we’ve paved over downtown with surface parking lots.
A major barrier to affordable city housing is the law in many cities requires one parking space (or more) per unit. That’s going to raise your costs. When cities then decide to eliminate that barrier—one of the easiest ways to spur affordable housing, drivers fight back, fearing something will be taken from them. I wandered around some of the neighborhoods near the Philadelphia Convention Center---the city is undergoing a building boom---and of course there were lots of very expensive new townhomes that all had storage for ones SUV. I saw one infill development that had two car garages that took up the entire first floor of the homes under construction. These homes of course were not affordable for middle-class people.
Heller spends a good amount of time on autonomous vehicles, correctly pointing out they’re nowhere near ready for primetime and that many techbros are deluded. I might yearn for them to exist so getting around is slightly more convenient, but I accept they aren’t ready and won’t be for a long time. Still, if they did come to pass next year, would this just be a bandaid on what we already have? Heller interviewed Samuel Schwartz, once NYC’s Traffic Commissioner. Schwartz notes that one of everyone’s chief worries---job displacement---is a big one, and one not really considered by the techbros cheering this technology on. He says the industry should not get to make policy on this, and I especially chuckled at this part, remembering how much I enjoyed showing people around Philadelphia the day and a half I was there:
Even so, Schwartz urges caution in making arrangements with the private sphere, recalling a fancy transportation-innovators’ summit to which he was invited. “I was struck by how little the attendees knew about urban transport, how enamored they were with gadgets, and how much they were complicating things,” he writes. “When it came my turn to present, the solution I proposed for trips of less than a mile—and more than half of urban trips are this short—was shoes, available since 1600 BC.”
Something to think about. At any rate, I really recommend you all read the New Yorker article.