Oil and car companies just sell a product that people want to buy. Toyota didn’t hold a gun to my head to get me to buy an SUV that gets 15 miles a gallon. Attacking them is an out to avoid confronting the real issue, which is that you don’t like the life choices most other Americans are making.
There’s actually some interesting history about how over decades and decades the oil and car companies have done a lot of things beyond just strongly lobbying for planning laws that were extremely good for car drivers and not good for other modes of transport, but even did stuff many years ago like buying up trolly bus and streetcar lines in many cities, ripping up the rails and wires and replacing them with diesel busses. So it’s not quite as consumer-led as you say, the way cities have been designed and have evolved (including in a lot of ways many people now acknowledge is pretty crappy) has actually been affected quite significantly by people who want to sell you cars and gasoline.
> But Bianco points out that this plan wouldn’t have been feasible if the streetcar companies National City Lines purchased weren’t already struggling.
> By the 1930s, LA’s streetcars had become wildly unprofitable and were quickly losing riders. In Transport of Delight, Jonathan Richmond points out that the Pacific Electric company managed to turn a profit in only one year between 1913 and the beginning of World War II.
More importantly, much of the country was developed post-1945, and all followed the same car-dependent model. Atlanta isn't a car-dependent city because of conspiracies. It's because it's unpleasant to do physical activity outside for much of the year between the heat, humidity, and bugs.
Social benefit and profit are different things. Profit is actually private benefit, usually at society's expense, both in subsidies and in externalized costs.
And a for-profit system that's not pulling in enough money will let its service, sanitation, and safety degrade, causing a downward spiral of profitability and ridership.
Public benefit and profit are different, but related. For example, say that it costs Ford $100 make an SUV. They sell it for $200. It generates $10 of negative environmental externalities. And someone buys it for $300.
The benefit generated by the car is $300 - $100 - $10. That amount is split between producer profit and consumer surplus. Note, the more value the buyer gets from the car, the bigger the total surplus, and the greater profit the producer can obtain. Profit and benefit aren’t the same thing, but they generally move in the same direction.
Generally when something is unprofitable, it’s because people don’t value it enough compared to what it costs to produce. Externalities can change that somewhat, but typically not by that much.
Externalized costs for vehicles is extremely well studied: https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/attachments/road-safety/18076.... For example, the externalized costs for my Toyota 4Runner are $0.13-0.21 per mile depending on whether you include crash costs or not. That’s at $50 per ton of CO2, which is probably too low. At $100 per ton that goes up to about $0.25/mile. That’s about $10 for the average 40 mile round trip commute. If you raised gas prices enough to fully internalize that cost, that would be like $200/month. Most 4Runner owners would probably just pay that. Some might get a slightly more fuel efficient car, or live a little closer to home. But those externalities aren’t so big that most people would give up the convenience of personal transit to use public transit instead.
> which is that you don’t like the life choices most other Americans are making
I think this is the fundamental problem. I don't have a bone to pick with oil and gas companies. It's a resource, we need to address climate change, w/e, but fossil fuels are useful and should be used within reason.
But I do have a bone to pick with this idea that Americans are making a choice because I think they're not making a choice with complete information, they're incentivized to make certain choices, and they don't have a good feedback loop to see how their choices affect them. This ranges from highway construction which displaces natural habitats and eventually bankrupts towns and cities as initial costs are subsidized by the federal government (inflation anyone?) to obesity, racism, to loss of local businesses and economies and many more.
And why would their choices be so different to their counterparts in Europe? Especially Denmark, Netherlands, Germany, France, UK etc? Their counterparts in China?
If the infrastructure is built for a certain vehicle then it's not really a choice is it?
Is the Netherlands building 4 to 8 lane highways, tearing down buildings in major cities and building overpasses, and expanding streets so that they can easily fit and park Ford F-150 size trucks? Are there multi-acre shopping malls, Wal-Marts, and associated parking lots?
> If the infrastructure is built for a certain vehicle then it's not really a choice is it?
Right... that's why I don't agree that anybody is choosing here.
Culture, history, and wealth. Americans are more individualistic and anti-social than Europeans, and much more so than Chinese. Some have theorized that the exodus of the most disagreeable 1/4 of the Swedish population to the U.S. in the 19th century laid the groundwork for the modern Swedish welfare state: https://slate.com/business/2019/01/scandinavian-socialism-mi....
This is a continuing phenomenon. The fastest growing ethnic group in the U.S. today is Asians. But when polled, only 7-8% of Asians in Asia would migrate if they had the opportunity: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245255/750-million-worldwide-mi.... The ones that come here are the anti-social ones like my parents, who don't mind leaving behind their kin and ancestral ties to make their home in a foreign country. (They live in a suburb with no sidewalks and drive an SUV, of course.)
History: The American continent has been populated by migration. My wife's family landed on the east coast in the 1700s and kept moving west until they reached Oregon in the 1800s. This has both created a culture of valuing unrestricted mobility, and also as a practical matter meant that most development is greenfield. In Germany even tiny villages have been settled for hundreds of years--there are roads, old churches, etc., that force development into a particular pattern. My town in Maryland was mostly farmland just 50 years ago, and most of the stretch between here and DC is still farmland. The giant freeway connecting the two was built through 20 miles of nothing in the 1950s. But note that greenfield development happens in Europe too, and there's plenty of car-dependent suburbs in parts of Germany.
Wealth: Americans are significantly richer than Europeans, and vastly richer than Chinese. Many, many Chinese people would love to have a house on an acre of land and drive around in an air conditioned car all day. And Americans can afford to actually do that.
Europe has much older cities than the US, and larger amounts of land were already taken up, which has limited the amount of "freeway"-style development.
Arguably if it had NOT been for the interstate highway push in the US we'd have an America that would look more European.
I definitely agree with the latter paragraph. But it’s important to note that places like Amsterdam did invest heavily into car infrastructure as well. It’s not completely true that car dependency was staved off by existing road sizes.
Like you allude to, the US was bulldozed for the automobile. We didn’t develop around it. Amsterdam was following a similar path until mass protests in the 70s about people being slaughtered by cars. (https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in...)
And over the past several decades, they have made vast changes and redevelopments that we should have been following as well.
And now Amsterdam isn’t just amazing for cyclists and pedestrians… it’s also great for driving. ( https://youtu.be/d8RRE2rDw4k)
My point is that consumer demand drives car production and fossil fuel use, not the other way around. If your theory is that people's buying choices are uninformed, that just means you need to focus on informing and persuading people. You're not going to get the results you want by attacking oil and car companies, who are simply selling highly commoditized products in enormously competitive industries.
From 2004-17 I lived in NYC and didn't own a car and very rarely rented one.
From 2017-20 I lived in Chapel Hill, NC and (along with my wife) owned two cars.
From 2021-now I've been back in NYC. We sold the cars and have no plans to ever buy new ones.
I've been roughly the same person the whole time. My change in buying behavior wasn't so much personal preference as much as it was the lifestyle that was enforced by the policy choices of the location I was living in.
Your perspective ignores human nature and how easily influenced people are at scale. Toyota did not put a gun to your head but American society long ago evolved to the point where having a car is a necessity for the vast majority of adults. The real issue is that the negative externalities for those design decisions decades ago have resulted in a lot of harm with little benefit.
They sell a product that people have to buy because decisions that were made decades ago make my life incredibly shitty if I don't buy it. And it doesn't have to be that way. We could have made better decisions in the past. We can still make better decisions going forward.
It's one thing if cars were an optional convenience. It's absolutely insane that they are a necessity in so many North American cities.
> Toyota didn’t hold a gun to my head to get me to buy an SUV
No, but lots of things push people to buy those vehicles.
As others buy giant vehicles, you might want to buy a giant vehicle so that you feel safer on the road. If everyone is riding around in a 4,000 pound (1,800 kg) SUV whose bumper is very tall, you don't want to be riding around in a 3,000 pound (1,350 kg) car whose bumper is low.
As we mandate parking minimums, we create stores that you can't walk to (because they have acres of parking separating you from every store) and we create neighborhoods you can't walk around (because we need enough storage space for all those cars and all those drivers want wide roads so they can get places "fast").
As we criminalized crossing the street (except in specified locations), we made walking slower and driving faster. As we changed our codes so that crosswalks were only mandated every half mile, we made it even harder to cross the street without a car. As our courts allowed drivers to strike and kill pedestrians with no repercussion, we made it easier for drivers to drive fast without fear of their actions; we made it easier for drivers to drive distracted without fear of their actions. That also made walking and biking more dangerous prospects.
> you don’t like the life choices most other Americans are making
People don't make life choices in a vacuum. People look at the world and make choices based on the reality that exists. If you lived in a city where parking was taxed at $1,000/mo, I bet you wouldn't make the choice of buying a car. If we changed our laws to say that killing a pedestrian would involve 1 year in prison and a permanent loss of license, you'd be a lot less likely to check your phone while driving.
Ok, you think those are contrived examples. Let's talk about giving Americans actual choice.
1) Remove all parking minimums. If the market will sell houses without parking (if Americans will make that life choice), we should let them, right? Or do we need to have laws propping up the oil and gas industry and not letting Americans make that choice? If stores think they don't need as much parking, let them build other stores on parts of their parking lots. Or do we need to mandate that stores accommodate cars rather than letting Americans make free choices? If Americans don't like that a store doesn't have a lot of parking, they'll vote with their feet/dollars and go elsewhere. If Americans don't like a home without parking, they'll vote with their feet/dollars and buy other housing. This is the easiest one to say to any skeptic because it's the free market. People will build, buy, and patronize what they feel fits their lifestyle.
2) Remove all road subsidies. Right now, drivers pay for around half of their state/local road usage (https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/, it varies by state). That doesn't even include the huge amount the federal government spends subsidizing highways. We should make drivers pay for what they're using - and if it's too high a price, they'll look for other modes of transportation. Instead, by making road usage cheaper than it actually is, we encourage people to use them more than they naturally would.
3) Remove parking subsidies. The US allows you to deduct parking costs from your taxes. If we're talking about letting people make free choices, let's not offer people money for being car-centric.
4) Explicitly allow accident victims to sue drivers due to their choice of dangerous vehicles. Trucks and SUVs have been exploding in size and raising their bumpers a lot - and that is leading to a lot more pedestrian deaths. Drivers of those vehicles should face the liability of their choice - including the negligence of their choice in protecting pedestrian safety. They should face higher insurance premiums to cover that negligence. Again, this is about people making free choices rather than being protected from the consequences of their actions. If you drive a car that's safer for pedestrians, that's a better choice. If you drive a car that's more dangerous for pedestrians, that's a worse choice - but you don't face any consequence for that.
5) Disallow car parking on public property without paying market rate. Many places offer free car parking on public property and many other places offer cheap car parking on public property. Why should we offer public property to drivers for free? Again, this is about making drivers face the real costs of their actions. By giving drivers so much free parking, we're subsidizing people to buy a car rather than giving them a free choice.
6) Make people pay for pollution/emissions. Drivers should have to pay for the pollution/emissions that their vehicles create. Otherwise, we're not giving people a free choice. If everyone else is polluting for free and you're not, then you're paying for and suffering from their pollution. By making drivers pay for their pollution and emissions, we make sure that we give people a free choice of what they want to pay for.
Others are harder to do completely independently. Building more public transit means making a choice that influences others choices. Building more or fewer roads means making a choice that influences other choices. Making roads safer for pedestrians might make cars a tad slower influencing people's choices.
Oil and car companies don't "just sell a product that people want to buy." We've created a whole system that makes it hard to live without that product while insulating drivers from the costs of their driving. Drivers always think "I pay so much" and it's nowhere near the cost of their driving. Would you support the 6 things I outlined above? Or is your freely made life choice only a choice you'd make as long as the government subsidizes a huge amount of the cost and protects you from the consequences of your actions?
> The US allows you to deduct parking costs from your taxes.
Parking costs in furtherance of a business, yes. Same as the US allowing me to deduct the cost of taking the subway to a business meeting or the utility bills required to air condition my office building.
You know I usually try to consider this sort of thing as like, groups of people responding to large-scale constraints and complex incentives rather than an issue of individual moral virtue and "life choices."
But now that you've pushed it yes absolutely I think making that choice in the face of currently happening climate change crisis is wicked. I don't like it or respect it and don't see why I would be expected to.
I fail to see how this is "the real issue" though. At least as big a problem is we've been encouraged to believe our personal choices have no effect on other people and so there is no particular weight, meaning or consequence to them. It's not true though. Your decision affects other people negatively and you suck for not caring about that.
Europe has lots of car companies and oil companies too, so that framing would seem to support the idea that they’re not the cause.
What’s different about Europe is virtually everything else. See my sibling post on this issue. In a nutshell, an immigrant nation with a long tradition of migration for opportunity and to get away from others places a higher value on unrestricted mobility. Culture is extremely sticky.
Additionally, Europe is very old and that affects patterns of development. Even rural Germany is dotted with towns that are hundreds of years old, and mid-sized cities that anchor regions, like Ulm, are over a thousand years old. Meanwhile, the vast majority of America was developed during the railroad age (leading to cities that are far apart) or the car age (leading to low-density residential development).
Then there’s population growth. Germany’s population only grew about 20% since 1939. That means that the housing areas for most of the population were already built up by the car age. The US population has increased by 150% since 1939. That’s 200 million more people that needed residential areas built for them during the car age.
Also, America has other, darker, undercurrents that occurred around the same time - the racial aspect of car culture can't be entirely dismissed (even if race is/was a proxy for "poor") - Europe seems much more comfortable with poor and rich living near each other (where rich is some variation of "middle to upper-middle class +").
(1) Most of Europe had less of a population boom during the time that the auto/highway build-out happened. Part of the reason, ironically, is that there was a lot of migration from Europe to the US. Many descendants of Europeans are stuck in car culture in the US, while their cousins who stayed home are not.
(2) There's a strong correlation between the ability of governments to "spend for the future" on things like transportation and the existence of decent transit infrastructure. It's no accident that Europe's infrastructure is better, Japan's and China's better still, while in hyper-individualist government-hating US it's the worst.
These two factors reinforce each other as well. Most of the "developed" world got out in front on this issue, while we veered off into insanity (thanks lobbyists!) and are now stuck with the near-impossible task of retrofitting The Right Thing onto a well entrenched Wrong Thing.
