Quick Note: Different Anti-Growth Green Advocacies
Jerusalem Demsas has been on a roll in the last two years, and her reporting on housing advocacy in Minneapolis (gift link) is a great example of how to combine original reporting with analysis coming from understanding of the issue at hand. In short, she talks to pro- and anti-development people in the area, both of which groups identify with environmentalism and environmental advocacy, and hears out their concerns. She has a long quote by Jake Anbinder, who wrote his thesis on postwar American left-NIMBYism and its origins, which are a lot more good-faith than mid-2010s YIMBYs assumed; he points out how they were reacting to postwar growth by embracing what today would be called degrowth ideology.
I bring this up because Germany is full of anti-growth left-NIMBYism, with similar ideology to what she describes from her reporting in Minneapolis, but it has different transportation politics, in ways that matter. The positioning of German left-NIMBYs is not pro-car; it has pro-car outcomes, but superficially they generally support transportation alternatives, and in some cases they do in substance as well.
In the US, the left-NIMBYs are drivers. Jerusalem cites them opposing bike lanes, complaining that bike lanes are only for young childless white gentrifiers, and saying that soon electric cars will solve all of the problems of decarbonizing transportation anyway. I saw some of this myself while advocating for rail improvements in certain quarters in New England: people who are every stereotype of traditional environmental left-NIMBYism were asking us about parking at train stations and were indifferent to any operating improvements, because they don’t even visit the city enough to think about train frequency and speed.
In Germany, many are drivers, especially outside the cities, but they don’t have pro-car politics. The Berlin Greens, a thoroughly NIMBY party, are best known in the city for supporting removal of parking and moving lanes to make room for bike lanes. This is not unique to Berlin or even to Germany – the same New Left urban mayors who do little to build more housing implement extensive road diets and dedicated lanes for buses, streetcars, and bikes.
These same European left-NIMBYs are not at all pro-public transportation in general. They generally oppose high-speed rail: the French greens, EELV, oppose the construction of new high-speed lines and call for reducing the speed on existing ones to 200 km/h, on the grounds that higher speeds require higher electricity consumption. In Germany, they usually also oppose the construction of new subway and S-Bahn tunnels. Their reasons include the embedded carbon emissions of tunneling, a belief that the public transport belongs on the street (where it also takes room away from cars) and not away from the street, and the undesirability (to them) of improving job access in city center in preference to the rest of the city. However, they usually consistently support more traditional forms of rail, especially the streetcar and improvements to regional rail outside major cities. For example, the NIMBYs in Munich who unsuccessfully fought the second S-Bahn trunk line, whence the expression Organisation vor Elektronic vor Beton (the Swiss original omits Organisation and also is very much “before” and not “instead of”), called for improvements in frequency on lines going around city center, in preference to more capacity toward city center.
I’m not sure why this difference works like this. I suspect it’s that American boomer middle-class environmental NIMBYism is rooted in people who suburbanized in the postwar era or grew up in postwar suburbs, and find the idea of driving natural. The same ideology in Europe centers urban neighborhood-scale activism more, perhaps because European cities retained the middle class much better than their American ones, perhaps because mass motorization came to Europe slightly later. It also centers small towns and cities, connected to one another by regional rail; the underlying quality of public transportation here is that environmentalists who can afford better do rely on it even when it’s not very good, which hourly regional trains are not, whereas in the United States it’s so far gone that public transportation ridership comprises New Yorkers, commuters bound for downtown jobs in various secondary cities, and paupers.
Pedestrian Observations 
Yes, I think you have it right. At this point, driving in the U.S. is such an assumed part of life that no one here thinks “I should drive less” is either pertinent to their situation (“some people fly private jets”) or possible at all.
Even here–in nominally progressive Metro Portland–MAX ridership has been flat except for COVID abnormalities, and the “left” position here is more anti-developer than it is pro-transit or density. This, in spite of the fact that driving is far and away the leading cause of carbon emissions here. In my scant conversations with people about this, there is a definite classist leaning to reasons why not to use transit more. When people object to using it by saying “it doesn’t go anywhere”, I like to point out that’s because for whatever reason, there’s not been much development around stations, and that the solution is to BUILD places: development.
Of course downtown is still a slow surface-level meander which should be a tunnel instead. I assume the Berlin greens’ objections to putting trains in a tunnel accounts for people not taking a train because it’s too slow (because it makes too many stops or has to worry about grade crossings).
Nonetheless, as a leftist before anything else, my definition of “good” is the most good for the most people. As we know from things like HS2 and the Shinkansen, at some point “more good for more people” means things like HSR…or taller buildings, etc. If the problem to solve is technological feasibility of X quality of life for X number of people, then we work on the technology. The alternatives of lesser quality of life or lesser number of people shouldn’t ultimately be acceptable on the left.
I’ve tried to make this point to lefty degrowthers, and the lack of imagination is…understandable, but also not really justified. No one knows what the future holds; why forego technological development if it may help us in the give more people a better life? Malthus has been wrong (in ways) many times before.
Yeah, unlike in the US, in Europe boomers can still remember, if not directly at least from stories told by their parents, a time when cars were rare not only in cities but also in small towns and rural areas. “There used to be a bus connecting this mountain village to Gap” (in the French Alps). And superficially it seems like you can look at the past to find a viable alternative to car dominance. But of course what’s not mentioned is that the bus did only 3 return trips per day and didn’t run at all on Sundays.
Technology moves on, people have higher standards nowadays. No one wants to ride a bike with non-pneumatic tires on cobblestones or ride an infrequent 25 km/h interurban deep into the countryside. As you say, at some point you do need to go for metro systems and high speed rail if you want to get high ridership.
@Diego
.. or a bike with pneumatic tyres, as I did in Paris for my first year there half a lifetime ago. Not just the cobblestones but negotiating the same space as hundreds of cars on those roundabouts (circuses) caused me to give it up. But indeed technology and things change and today, boomers thru to genZ make 187,000 trips just on the bike-share scheme. The era of e-bikes has barely begun and promises to extend the average trip length and range.
Sid, within cities like Paris (and many others around the world) these modes already match or exceed car transit times, especially when including parking times (as you must). I’m not sure about bus travel times in Paris but on the major boulevards they have bus lanes (shared with bikes) so, even with stops, it’s hard to think total transit times are worse than private vehicles. If the car fans get their way, EV or even more AV, this comparison will get even worse. In US cities travellers will have little to no choice. Some probably still believe building more roads will solve that problem. Meanwhile closing down some major roads, and reducing parking on many others, has not caused carmaggedon in Paris (or elsewhere).
Of course there is still a role for private cars but in much of the world it will be a reducing VMT scenario.
Yup, Paris nowadays has a wonderful network of cycle lanes, there’s bike sharing including e-bike. And that’s exactly what you need to do to get a high bike mode share today. You couldn’t get 1920s levels of cycling with 1920s infrastructure. Which is why it’s always good to temper the nostalgia.
(The reason I ramble so much about cobblestones is that here in the Low Countries we have lots of cobblestone fetishists, for their “historical value”. And my local cycling lobbying group likes to issue joint statements with them. Sigh)
The unfortunate thing about the Metro is that we don’t have any orgs that are able to effectively advocate on behalf of transit. The only sizable org is OPAL/Bus Riders Unite, and frankly I think they’ve completely lost the plot. The org is dominated by degrowthers, and it’s one guiding mission now seems to be yelling at Trimet’s Board every meeting to abolish fares. Even if they were pushing for the right things (which I don’t think they are), they have no good will left among Trimet’s leadership and staff.
I just recently joined AORTA, which while it too has crippling problems, it has the bones to be built up into a large and effective org. It’s gonna take quite a bit of work, but it can become the sort of org we’re missing.
In California, the anti-transit left seems more like a Bay Area thing, where BART has been such a disaster with regards to crime (pre-COVID it had quadruple the violent crime rate of DC Metro!), frequency (pre-COVID individual BART lines ran every 15 minutes, while individual Atlanta MARTA lines ran every 10 minutes!), and ridership recovery that even many progressives were calling to throw the baby out with the bathwater, i.e. defund BART, and conclude that “EVs will solve all our emissions problems anyways.” Is it any wonder that even Governor Newsom was trying to cut transit funding until the last minute?
Different story in San Diego though. The Trolley is blowing past pre-COVID ridership. The busiest line now runs more frequently than it did pre-COVID. And there’s Mission Valley, a non-downtown neighborhood so YIMBY with two under-construction, $4B infill TODs–one of them a golf course redevelopment!–on the same Trolley line with very broad consensus and shockingly little controversy.
With such an objectively optimistic future for San Diego transit, support for transit is therefore still strongly split along traditional party lines. There still are left-NIMBYs, but they’re still pro-transit, so long as said transit doens’t violate the fundamental tenet of CEQA: “protect my views!”
Currently, the transit planning/construction agency (SANDAG) is proposing an elevated people mover to connect Downtown with the airport. With its $600 M/mile price tag and 2-minute frequencies, this “people mover” is really a VAL-style automated metro. But Downtown NIMBYs and the transit operating agency (MTS) are in an unholy alliance opposing the automated metro. They instead are pushing for a light rail branch running at 15 minute frequencies. These Downtown NIMBYs (virtually all Democrats) live in 40-story condo towers sandwiched between the existing at-grade Trolley line and believe an elevated metro will ruin their bay views. The Chair of MTS and San Diego’s mayor (both Democrats) have echoed their “concerns.”
The left NIMBYs seem to oppose elevated metros and favor streetcars out of nostalgia and streetcar stations being able to be “more accessible and integrate better with the urban fabric” than an elevated rail station would.
San Diego’s right NIMBYs are exactly who you’d think they are–suburban Republicans/libertarian-leaning independents. Some of them are nominally pro-transit. Supervisor Jim Desmond said he’s “fine” with transit and supports building the airport Trolley branch. In the name of fiscal conservatism, other NIMBYs support the airport Trolley branch over the automated metro because the airport Trolley branch would cost $1.35B while the automated metro would cost $1.54B.
However, Desmond consistently opposes new taxes for transit–while paradoxically voting to expand free transit to everyone under the age of 24. His M.O. seems to be: “Keep transit crappy to suppress ridership growth–that way, people will think transit’s a failure and people will in the future vote against transit!”
Add to that the inability of some greens to trade off protecting a local habitat (this toad lives here) against saving the planet (building a train line to shift traffic away from cars), as exhibited by the opposition against the Hanover–Hamburg rail project or against renewables in the Swiss Alps. Might also just be covert NIMBYism, of course.
If you have access to an electric vehicle, using your local diesel commuter rail or bus doesn’t seem particularly better from an environmental perspective. BYD has an EV for $10000 and costs for solar are cheaper than other sources of electricity and declining. If you have an EV and solar roof the environmentalist case for transit is much weaker. And if price trends continue for EV and solar, adoption will be very widespread solely for economic reasons.
This is exactly why the following technologies exist:
Overhead line electrification of rail lines above some threshold of traffic density. (Third-rail for subways also counts here.)
BEMUs for rail lines below the traffic density threshold.
IMC (in-motion charging) for buses, i.e. giving trolleybuses a small battery pack, sufficient for 10-60 minutes of independent operation.
The commuter rail lines are low ridership where I live. At American electrification costs, it would be cheaper to give every daily rider a free Tesla. Electrification is unlikely to happen any time soon.BEMU’s are uneconomical.https://pedestrianobservations.com/2022/07/13/in-motion-charging-is-not-for-trains/At current and declining EV bus prices it’s cheaper to go with longer range electric buses rather than build IMC infrastructure for trolleybuses.
Buses are always slower than driving, it’s almost impossible for them to be otherwise.
Trains can go more than the 40mph average speed you can manage in a car however.
Generally commuter rail/S-bahn speeds average 30-35 mph , and subways manage 20-25 mph. NYC subway is 17.5 mph and Berlin S-Bahn is 24.8 mph on average. This is substantially slower than freeway speeds of 70 mph when there is no traffic. Where I am at taking the train isn’t ever faster, even when there is traffic. Buses can go at subway speeds with BRT. Only in places without freeways and/or with heavy traffic are trains going to be substantially faster. However, HSR does go faster than cars.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_S-Bahnhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subwayhttps://ggwash.org/view/4524/average-schedule-speed-how-does-metro-compare
My average car speed over the past 5000 or so miles is 36.7mph – and thats without living in a big city or driving slowly.
I quite believe that car speeds in the US are better than that – but for most people I doubt they are hugely better – no way is a car speed average 70mph or anywhere close for the vast vast majority of drivers.
The bus is slower than driving out in the hinterlands where there is little traffic and plenty of parking. It can be much different in places where traffic can gridlock and parking is rare and expensive.
“At current and declining EV bus prices it’s cheaper to go with longer range electric buses rather than build IMC infrastructure for trolleybuses.”
No, EV bus prices are an argument against full trolleybuses (wire for the whole route) but IMC (In-Motion Charging) for EV buses is the much better route
Compared to internal combustion, battery power has two disadvantages 1) Lower energy/weight ratio and 2) Energy/weight does not improve with scale. Regarding 1) it has been known forever that the energy contained in fuel is 100 times that of a battery (by weight or volume). Some of this is offset by better electric efficiency, but not all. Regarding 2) a 1000L fuel tank weighs less than 10x a 100L tank – the fuel weight is 10x but the weight of the metal tank is not because of the cube-square law. Also, IC engines have better power/weight as they get larger, reducing overall powertrain system weight (for example, the engine of a cargo ship is ~1/75th its weight, the engine of a car ~1/7th). By comparison, carrying 10x the energy of batteries means 10x weight.
Compared to EV cars, these problems affect busses more. While a car is generally driven short distances and then parks for a while, busses are constantly in motion for most of the day. They are also heavier to begin with. This means more batteries to provide enough range, which increases the weight, which means more batteries are needed…. You can stop the bus now and then to charge, but charging takes longer than fueling so now you have an expensive asset out of service, which would mean buying more busses to maintain headway.
IMC solves all these problems at a stroke. By charging under wire for part of the route, you no longer need battery power for the day but just enough to complete the part of route not wired (plus a safety factor, of course). This means cheaper, lighter busses with fewer batteries. Charging on the move means busses stay in service, so better utilization. As described by Alon, if you wire central stretches shared by several routes and use batteries on the individual tails, you can cut your wire infrastructure by 70-90% while maintaining these advantages.
There will be situations where EV only busses can be superior to IMC (low frequency circumferential busses that don’t share route, commuter busses that can park and charge in the middle of the day) but in general IMC is the way to go for fixed route transit. This applies to trains as well, Caltrain south of San Francisco is likely to institute an IMC setup for its unelectrified tail using part of the newly electrified route to charge BEMUs coming and going from San Jose before going off wire.
My impression was that the vast majority of American buses were “low frequency circumferential busses that don’t share route” and that most cities with rail transit have a bus system that is designed to be feeders to rail transit and/or a network that is very gridded. I also think it varies on how cold a city gets since electric buses are less reliable in cold weather, at least for now. But the 3 most populous states are all warm weather places.
The Sunbelt developed after World War II. Where the destinations are an island of buildings surrounded by a parking desert between highways. People who can drive will.
Buses do do the sort of low speed driving that is pretty efficient with a battery and pretty inefficient with a petrol/diesel engine.
Petrol and diesel engines are most efficient at 60mph – battery powered vehicles are most efficient at slow speeds.
Except that providing electric vehicles in sufficient quantities has its own substantial environmental cost (rare-earth mines are *not* friendly)–
and more importantly, the sprawling car-centric built environment is inherently much more environmentally costly than the transit-oriented one.
So, sure, all other things being equal, one electric car is probably better than a diesel bus. But the situation is not static–so all other things are not equal.
New electric vehicles made with LFP batteries don’t use rare earth minerals. LFP batteries have rapidly taken over the EV battery market.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery
Agreed Sid. If left-NIMBYs are “saying that soon electric cars will solve all of the problems of decarbonizing transportation anyway” they are correct. An electric vehicle fed from a renewable grid has the same emissions as electrified rail or trolleybusses fed from a renewable grid – they are all zero.
@Tiercelet, the copper used in those trolleybus motors and aluminum used in those EMU bodies come from mines with an environmental cost the same as mines supplying electric cars. And as Sid notes LFP battery growth is explosive (even though the batteries are not) even before the patent expires next year.
Note that technically Cobalt, Nickel and Manganese (the key elements in prior generation lithium batteries) are not rare earth (neither is Lithium, for that matter). I’m not sure if LFP batteries don’t actually use rare-earths somewhere in them (like other lithium battery types, or lots of electronics). But they do have a much lower mining impact that batteries using Co, Ni, or Mg.
If you think that a more compact urban layout with more transit feel free to make that argument, but most environmentalists are making car restrictive arguments (for congestion fees, taking car lanes for bike lanes, etc.) predicated on the threat of global warming from carbon dioxide emissions. Those environmentalists are going to face a huge backlash when everyone owns an electric car (ironically this will happen first in the most progressive areas which are also planning to ban sales of non-electric cars).
20 years ago it would have made sense to be skeptical of developing affordable EVs/renewables. Now it seems that most affluent suburban environmentalists already own a EV. If I were the person running Beijing, I would already consider banning or heavily taxing ICE vehicles to reduce pollution. There are plenty of good arguments for rail transit since it is enables density where people want to live, greater passenger capacity, and is safe. It also helps people who cannot drive cars. But car restrictionism to reduce emissions is not going to be persuasive.
This ignores the enormous environmental cost of car infrastructure. Particularly if EVs don’t end up dealing with their high weight (though there’s no reason to assume that they can’t), it requires high levels of maintenance and frequent replacement. Especially in areas where real estate demand is high enough that lots of surface parking is infeasible and so parking garages are prevalent, you then must consider the carbon impact of concrete production for those garages. The financial cost of car infrastructure is also quite high; at this point in time, there are at least a few groups in the U.S. (Strong Towns, Urban3) focused on illuminating the fact that at least with current tax structures, greater car dependency leads to more fragile municipal finances. Insofar as dense cities have existed as a means of efficient use public resources, sprawling car-dominated cities represent a luxury that many places cannot afford.
Then there’s the issue of safety: if we can expect VMT in countries that lean on vehicle electrification for emissions reductions to increase over time (as the cost of recharging is lower than refueling, and EVs require less maintenance per mile), that will inevitably mean levels of traffic accommodation like we see in the U.S., where traffic deaths have been increasing for years.
It also won’t be enough to replace private ICE cars entirely; construction vehicles must also be replaced with non-emitting alternatives. This is when I’d tend to think fuel cells have a role, but for heavy trucking, neither technology (battery or fuel cell) is has even the low level of proliferation that private EVs do. In the meanwhile, minimizing the quantity of construction required per transportation capacity still means walking, bikes, and transit, not cars.
I should add, too, that at least according to carboncounter.com, lifecycle carbon emissions are higher for large EVs than they are for large hybrid cars. EVs will only help with curtailment of overall consumption; when lots of environmentally-driven early buyers are spending money specifically so that they don’t have to curtail their consumption (they are often wealthy enough that they can afford higher-spec, higher-tech, newer models), reminding them that it’s still unsustainable (per future emissions benchmarks) to drive large SUVs, even if they have no direct emissions, is difficult. After all, in the U.S., we’re reluctant enough to frame driving as a problem; framing even electric driving as a problem is going to get backlash, and from those (the wealthy) most able to provide it.
From those less able to provide it–the poor–being required to buy the sort of expensive vehicles that car makers have no motivation to make anything other than, is unfair. Transportation expenses are already higher for car-owning households; even if the long-run costs of ownership are lower, and vehicle prices decline in time (which does seem likely), it is simply not a necessary burden to force car ownership on people. And that is what current American urban development patterns do: force an only indirectly productive investment in a depreciating asset (a private car) that there is no intrinsic need for, besides that which the added expense of luxuriant suburban living entails…which, of course, is often the only option in the U.S.
There are grounds from equity, the environment, and public finances to push for car-free/lite, transit-oriented redevelopment of American cities and suburbs. The only irrefutable argument against such a thing is status quo bias, and that’s just not a good argument.
I agree with most of both comments, but I’m confused about the claim that “there is a great demand for low-cost cars, but manufacturers have no incentive to make them”. Surely that’s not how markets work?
To make a parallel with housing, we know that what happened was that various low-cost forms (SROs, lodging houses, etc.) were administratively banned for being an indignity, and when today people/companies try to build some (e.g. microapartments) they get shouted at for “exploiting” the future residents. Clearly this is not what happened with cars — so, what <em>did</em> happen with them?
@Basil Marte
Well, for starters, there’s an increasing inventory of old but more or less drivable cars; the average age of cars in the U.S. is now 12.5 years. A car of that age will be very cheap to buy, and most are either durable enough, simple enough, or both, that they can be kept on the road for very low cost. There’s also the fact that, adjusting for inflation, cars are now very cheap for what you can get, and so relative to the increase in prices of other goods, even a more upmarket car will seem like a decent deal; dealers also are offering more or less usurious loans to move product (84-month terms, double-digit interest rates) so that the consumer ends up with eating the biggest chunk of depreciation, but people can get out the door with cars they can’t reasonably afford but have loans for, anyway.
Ultimately, the problem is that low-cost cars are low-margin cars, and yet stiff competition on the lower end of the market–even in as diminished a segment as compacts/mid-size cars in the U.S.–means that product which is markedly cheaper to produce must also be markedly inferior enough that it won’t sell. On the other end of the market, enormous amounts of money are made in brand recognition alone for luxury cars. Companies like BMW, Mercedes, and Porsche have very high profit margins because–again, barring obvious inferiority–people will pay more for a product that costs the same to produce. They’re status symbols, and while certainly more sophisticated than economy cars, the difference in production cost is shrinking over time as more and more electronics are involved.
There is an argument to be made–and people do make it–that very small, very cheap cars are, if not banned outright, made low-margin enough due to the expense of safety and emissions standards, and CAFE regulations on fuel consumption effectively penalize smaller vehicles by raising fuel economy standards for them while lowering them for larger, more expensive vehicles. Our backwards gas guzzler tax (light-duty trucks [minivans, SUVs, and pickups] are completely exempt from it) are a major hang-up for me because no one seems to talk about such an obvious loophole. In essence, however, it’s combination of regulatory and market pressures which have shrunken the market segments of the cheapest cars and broadened more luxurious segments. There are four new cars for sale in the U.S. with MSRPs <20K USD; there are 10 new luxury SUVs starting between 60-70k USD, excluding electric SUVs (for the record, the cheapest electric car, before tax rebates–not direct rebates–is 32k. It does make sense to have more options chasing after more money, but there’s no denying that our current incentive structures for car manufacturers and buyers alike produce some really perverse outcomes.
@Basil Marte
Back in 1970 if you got a car about to get 100,000 miles on it your would call your friends to go with you and see it happened. I was a kid so I didn’t go with but I remember my dad did this once – he put oil in the engine before he left, drove off in a cloud of blue smoke, and when he returned 15 minutes later (after crossing that 100k mark) he had to put more oil in. He scrapped the car soon afterwards when he went through a puddle and had to change his clothes.
In that 1970s world it made sense for someone who is cheap to buy a new car, with minimal features so that you could get a reliable car. Today though cars will last 20 years and 300k miles. Thus someone who is cheap today is no longer looking at a new car for something reliable. Instead they are buying a used car that costs about the some $$$, but has a lot more luxury features.
There are other car buyers. However it often seems that the people who want basic cars are buying from the likes of Ferrari which is even more expensive (I haven’t checked in 10+ years, but when I last did they were one of the few options if you didn’t want power windows) if you fall into a niche like that you can get (or have to settle for?) less features.
I took a look at https://www.carboncounter.com/ and EVs are still better for emissions for large cars and SUVs than hybrids. And car makers are motivated to make cheap EVs. BYD sells one for $10,000. The U.S. just has bad regulations and protectionism. And according to https://www.carboncounter.com/ the cheapest EVs have very similar total costs to to the cheapest ICE vehicles even in the U.S., since EVs get tax credits.
@Sid
Yes; they are lower one-for-one, but a smaller hybrid car is still better than a larger EV. Comparing a Rivian to a midsize Toyota/Hyundai/Honda hybrid sedan, lifecycle emissions of the former are about 150% that of the latter. Agreed; as I’d said, we have really messed up incentive structures, going so far as incentivizing manufacturers to make larger, less efficient vehicles so as to be measured against more lenient consumption standards. The issue is that those vehicles are also higher-profit; truck-based models, in particular, are much cheaper to manufacture per MSRP than small sedans/hatchbacks.
Americans are already used to buying large vehicles; if we’re already taking the step of pricing in the true cost of consumption for those vehicles, there will be political blowback. Framing not just that cost, but the actual forced cost of car ownership, as more or less coerced–because again, it is–is important, because there’s no real reason for it other than “that’s just how we live in this country”. Most Americans have not been asked if they wanted to need to drive everywhere; they had no choice. This is a potential point of alignment between the environmentally-driven left and the libertarian right, there’s no reason not to seize upon it.
And you shouldn’t count the tax credit, because they’re income tax rebates, not direct subsidies. If someone’s not paying >7500 in annual income tax, they’re not going to get the full benefit (another perverse incentive; the less you make, the less you benefit).
Since I’m not an environmentalist, I’m happy to offer alternative justifications (namely, the ones I prefer) in the hope of increasing their circulation.
To wit, I have no problem with cars being used in actual rural areas. When the dominant land use, setting the price of land, is agriculture, the land-cost of providing ample parking and uncongested travel lanes is low. (The cost of constructing and maintaining the roads may well be a different matter.) Unmotorized travel (mostly walking and biking) between villages is either of a very low volume, or by the same token, building a bike path separated from cars is cheap. Any localized nuisance (noise and air pollution) mostly affects nobody, since for most of the way, the cars are outside populated areas.
However, in cities — and just as a reminder, most parts of the world (including the one where I live) have a significant “installed base” of compact urbanism, with the attendant benefits — all three of these considerations reverse. Cars run over far too many people on foot or bike. It is an unconscionable misallocation of a scarce resource (urban land) to put car parking and (congested) car-travel lanes everywhere, in the process gunking up surface transit. There is a great number of people within the area that the nuisances affect.
It is thus entirely correct to attempt to correct this problem. Hence congestion charges, increasing parking fees (theoretically up to a market land price), or the non-market mechanism of “turning this car travel/parking lane into a transit/bike lane is obviously a better use of the land”.
“the United States it’s so far gone that public transportation ridership comprises New Yorkers, commuters bound for downtown jobs in various secondary cities, and paupers.”
As aa car-free by choice Bostonian, I resent this. 😛
How do anti-growth Green’s deal with growth? Phoenix AZ had a metro population of 220k in 1950 and now has a metro population of 4.7 million. With billions in federal subsidies, TSMC is building a chip fab there that will employ ~4000 people, and it is nowhere near where there is public transportation.
Don’t get me started about Detroit ….
In San Diego (if not in America generally), “EVs will reduce emissions and therefore we don’t need transit” is a right NIMBY talking point, likely because of Musk’s popularity among the right. The left is almost unanimously pro-transit. The problem, though, is that left-NIMBYs seemingly have a penchant for street-running light rail that costs orders of magnitude more than BRT while not running any faster than BRT. To them elevated rail violates the fundamental tenet of CEQA: view preservation. The right-NIMBYs also support street-running rail over elevated rail in the name of “fiscal responsibility,” but more cynically, they probably support street-running rail because they know that street running rail will be much slower than elevated rail, making new transit lines slower than driving, thus minimizing transit ridership, thus making sure further transit projects are canceled because “no one uses transit in our city.”
Using San Francisco as an example the percentage of car owning households is incredibly high considering it is the 2nd densest city in America and not much bigger than Paris or Barcelona. I would attribute this to a couple things:
the Bay Area is car oriented. If you live in the city and have any business being anywhere else in the bay driving is nearly always the best way to get there
the transit in SF has extensive coverage but mostly bus and street running light rail. BART notwithstanding most transit in San Francisco is painfully slow
San Francisco can’t build more rail at a reasonable cost full stop As a result the car mentality remains fairly strong in San Francisco (besides a few of the very densest neighborhoods) along with the idea that any new growth threatens the future of San Francisco.
Alon, You have noted before that the most cost effective transit systems have been build by the right wing, not the left or greens. Could you do a similar analysis as to what motivates the right wing to build transit.
Since I live in the US I only see the right wing that opposes transit. Most think nothing of supporting roads (there is a small group that opposes roads as well, but they are a tiny minority). How can we reach those people and get them to see that transit could be cost effective?
The US has had much wider car ownership for longer is one difference. A huge percentage had cars in the 1920s in America, but it was only the rich here.
I suspect driving speeds are a bit higher in the US too, so intercity trains that average 50mph are less competitive than they are here.
I’ve driven the no speed limit section of the autobahn. Traffic seemed to drive 120-130kmh – or 75-80mph. In Texas the speed limit on the rural freeways is 75mph, and traffic often is going 5 over: if you drive in Texas like most drive on the autobahn you will look just like local traffic. Most states the speed limit is a little slower, so driving like the autobahn will get your pulled over for speeding- though probably not very often.
On the autobahn you will always (every half hour) be passed someone doing significantly faster than normal – 200km/h or so. I’ve seen such speeds on US freeways, but it is rare – years between incidents.
The German autobahn is the extreme of public road high speed driving, but it is enough to say that US speeds are not the extreme. I don’t know what the rest of Europe has, but Germany isn’t the leader of high speed trains and they still get good train ridership. (I know other readers of this blog have good numbers so I won’t look up)
Either way though, your point that 50mph (90km/h) trains are not competitive in the US is correct. Not because of speeds so much as distance. The US does have a road trip culture where people regularly drive 1000+ miles (2000km) and then back. At those distances small differences in speed add up to significant time savings. 300km/h trains if there was a great network could really kill the road trip, but the network is what counts – one thing people do on road trip is stop in random places to see some weird thing some area has. Caves, waterfalls, art, historical sites, museums… And of course you eventually get to grandma’s house or Disney World.
In Europe though off the motorway/freeway network speeds are much slower. In rural Arizona I have still averaged 60mph – whereas in Europe you would probably manage <40mph.
Wikimedia: File:World Speed Limits.svg – Wikipedia
In text: in Europe, highway speed limits are mostly 120 or 130 km/h, whereas in the populated states of the US, the speed limit is mostly 70 mph = 113 km/h. Driving speeds are lower, not higher in the US.
Theres a lot of driving at less than the speed limit due to congestion, traffic lights, junctions, sharp bends etc 😀.
Rest stops…
Google is very optimistic when it estimates travel time for long trips. I have to make rest stops and in the Northeast there will be congestion somewhere. 50 miles per hour average is what I guesstimate.
In 1979, the US responded to the energy crisis by requiring that auto speedometers show a maximum of 85 mph and have an emphasis in the markings at 55 mph. Yes, including the DeLorean in BACK TO THE FUTURE. Ronald Reagan rescinded this law in 1981, but many vehicles kept the 85 mph maximum until the next model refresh.
At the time, I knew someone from Montana. When I asked them how fast they drove on the interstate, they said they didn’t know, because the needle was fully pegged.
I don’t know, have I? South Korea has built cheap subways under liberal governments as well as conservative ones; CHP-run cities in Turkey build cheaply; historically, Social Democrats-run Sweden built an incredibly low-cost metro system.
I could have sworn you made that observation about 5 years ago, but I don’t know how to search the archives to find it if you did…
Ether way though, the question remains: what motivates the right wing in places/times when they are building transit. I’m looking for right wing people in the US to inspire to support transit: who should I look for and what language should I use to reach them.
Rural America is going to take a much bigger lifestyle hit than almost any other developed region with the climate change mitigations we will all have to do.
Driving 1000 miles which is the split point between driving and flying in the US would be very painful in an EV.
Rural Americans rarely take 1,000 mile road trips. It’s one recharge at lunch on the first day and another recharge at lunch on the second day.
Despite all my bitching we are much closer to a Europe wide high speed rail network than we could be.
I think it’s pretty simple. Both groups are not very imaginative, so their pastoral fantasies are rooted in what is familiar, merely adjacent to the status quo. That’s US suburbia for one, and smaller low-growth low-rise European small cities for the other.
Some trailing comments on left NIMBYism. Bay Area Left NIMBYism in transportation is by no means confined to BART. Left NIMBYs were an important part of blocking AC Transit’s TEMPO BRT. They’ve fought against rail restoration in Santa Cruz. They’ve fought bike lanes in numerous cities. They probably wouldn’t like to think of themselves as pro-car, but that’s how their politics function.
I think the description of U.S. transit ridership is understandable but a little harsh. Another big group of riders is students—especially high school and college students. In terms of downtown commuters, a lot of transit agencies are trying to refocus their systems from an excessive downtown orientation. This is a lot easier with buses, but even BART has adjusted its schedules to run more off peak service. I’m not sure that “paupers” fairly describes the low income riders of American transit, many of whom have jobs.