Today’s e-zine contains two essays, one penned by E M Risse and one by myself. In “What is the Problem with Cars?”, Ed argues that automobiles (he calls them “autonomobiles” to emphasize their distinctness from shared vehicle transportation systems) are economically and environmentally unsustainable. Cars are getting increasingly expensive to drive, they are aggravating traffic congestion, they kill thousands of people every year, they pollute, they engender dependency upon volatile sources of overseas petroleum, encouraging military adventurism overseas… (pant! pant! take a breath, there’s more)… they induce a change in human settlement patterns that uglify the built landscape, strain the fiscal resources of municipal governments, lengthen commutes and generally keep people Running as Hard as They Can.
In this column, the first of four parts, Ed also explores how we got ourselves into such a predicament. He points to three causes. First, by designing our communities around automobiles, we have effectively locked out transportation alternatives. The prevailing pattern of scattered, disconnected, low-density development is inimical to people reaching their destinations on foot, on bicycles, in buses or on rail. Short of tearing down trillions of dollars of real estate investment and public infrastructure and starting over, there is no way back. Second, auto-centric human settlement patterns are perpetuated in new development projects thanks to advertising by those who benefit from automobility. Third, the Mainstream Media has failed utterly in its Fourth Estate responsibilities to inform the public of the complex reality.
I might quibble with a few details and I might emphasize one thing over another, but by and large I subscribe to Ed’s understanding of the problem. There will always be a role for cars, but our society cannot afford to maintain its abject dependence upon the automobile. We simply must find transportation alternatives.
The most obvious alternative is mass transit. Intuitively, the public, the punditry and the politicians understand that fact — hence, Virginians who were once content to throw vast amounts of money blindly at highways, now are willing to throw huge amounts of cash blindly at mass transit, too. Witness the $5 billion Rail-to-Dulles project that came within a whisker of happening. Unfortunately, mass transit has problems all its own. The most obvious one is that mass transit requires certain levels of density and pedestrian connectivity to be financially sustainable — conditions that are rarely found in Virginia.
There is a less obvious problem as well, which I have spotlighted in my column, “The Innovation Gap.” One reason that people continue, despite all the reasons not to, to shift from shared ridership to driving solo in cars stems from the competitive structure of the automobile industry. The auto industry is continually reinventing itself, constantly innovating, and learning to move faster. By contrast, the mass transit industry sector (in the U.S. at least) has the metabolic dynamism of a flatworm.
The jumping off point for my column is a presentation that Jim Buczkowski, a senior executive with Ford Motor Company, made the other day in Richmond as part of the company’s launch of its Sync, voice-activated technology for hands-free driving. Young people today, said Buczkowski, are deeply attached to their devices — their cell phones, BlackBerries, iPods, whatever. They like to take their stuff with them. Ever attentive to changing tastes and trends, Ford is converting its cars into mobile computing platforms that can accommodate all those devices. Plus, it’s throwing in GPS technology to boot.
It gets better: According to Buczkowski, Ford hopes to mesh the rapid product-development cycle of consumer electronics with the slower product-development cycle of the automobile. Instead of buying a new car to acquire the latest new electronic gadgets, you’ll be able to drive to your dealership and download new applications — just like you do with your PC. That is serious change. That’s what happens when you have a globally competitive, private-sector industry.
Compare the commitment to innovation at Ford, an also-ran in the auto industry, to that of the mass transit sector in the Virginia and the rest of the U.S. Mass transit enterprises are owned by governments or quasi-government agencies. They enjoy monopoly protections. Relying upon public subsidies, they have few resources to invest in innovation — and no one is rewarded for risking taking anyway. Is it any surprise, then, that the mass transit experience of 2008 is pretty much the same as the mass transit experience of 1958?
(I don’t want to diminish the efforts of a few inspired leaders in Virginia who want to drag mass transit kicking and screaming into the 21st century. But they have to struggle against overwhelming forces of inertia.)
If we want to revitalize Virginia’s mass transit sector, we need to undertake two Herculean challenges: (1) Create balanced communities capable of supporting mass transit economically, and (2) Restructure the mass transit industry to make it more competitive, innovative and market driven. Unless we do both of those things, the cars will win…. Until things all fall apart, and then we all lose.