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Greens wage war against the car
Gerard Jackson
What is it about cars that cause our social engineers, would-planners and environmentalists such anguish? After all, the car has been a great liberator for the masses, giving them the kind of freedom that was once the exclusive preserve of the wealthier classes. Mass production put America on wheels and then Europe, providing mass individualised transport as an alternative to collectivist transport systems.
Furthermore, it is forgotten what a great boon the car has been to urban environment. Before the car there was the horse. Great cities like London, New York and Paris suffered appalling pollution from horse transport. Streets were polluted by masses of dung and urine which fouled the air and contaminated the waters. (A horse produces about 20 kilos of dung per day so imagine the pollution problem, all too real before the car, that tens of thousands of horses could cause in a city.)
Moreover, disposing of dead horses was no easy matter and a considerable health problem. In the 1890s New York city had to dispose of about 15,000 dead horses a year, when they could be found. But now it is the car that has become the arch-villain, a technological plague posing a grave threat to the environment. Frank Fisher and Sharron Pfueller, lecturers in the Graduate School of Environmental Science, Monash University, Victoria., exemplify the greens’ loathing for the motor car, absurdly describing it as “the single most destructive device ever introduced into the urban context”. (Trish Caswell, another car-hating greenie, named Henry Ford as one of the “great villains” of the twentieth century for the heinous crime of producing affordable cars for the masses. [Australian 9-10 March 1996) She also bracketed him with Hitler and Stalin]).
Some years ago these academics made a number of accusations against the car. It is true, as they say, that people are killed and maimed in car accidents. But what do they think it was like when horses were the main source of urban transport? Of course, what they were really saying is that transport accidents would be far fewer if people were forced to abandon their cars in favour collectivist transport systems, state owned, of course. I doubt if there is anyway of knowing this giving the massive extent to which public transport would have to expand to become a serious substitute for the car.
Their view invariably ignores the fact that public transport is incapable of providing the kind of mobility and convenience that the car has so brilliantly supplied. But I suggest that “mobility and convenience” for the mass of people is not high on the agenda of middle class greenies. Not that they are unaware of the car’s considerable advantages. I suspect that it is these very advantages that greens particularly loathe and this comes out in their attacks on what they disparaging call “McMansions” and urban sprawl.
What these greenies do not seem to understand is that the alternative to urban sprawl is greater urban density. And yet I have heard so-called planners fervently argue against relaxing any laws that would raise urban density, and then rail against the evils of urban sprawl, blaming it on the “domination” of the car. Naturally, urban sprawl, “caused by privatised automobility”, caused “social isolation” and “innumerable” health problems. It is easy to expose the green hypocrisy in these statements. The only people who reluctantly move to the suburbs are those who have been priced out of the urban market. Thanks to anti-social planning laws that have created a wasteful use of land. This interference in the market has, in my opinion, contributed significantly the rise in rents and house prices.
What would have happened to these people if they had been denied the right to create suburbs? They would have been trapped in a vicious cycle of rising rents while trendy inner city greenies enjoyed, and do, the luxury of rising capital values. A great many also move to the suburbs because they like the space and the relative quiet, which is why I moved. And it is “privatised automobility” that made my move possible, thank God. I, and my neighbours, enjoy the comparative quiet, the wide neat avenues and the quiet walks, especially in the evening.
According to Fisher and Pfuellerr people like me are to be condemned because our low-density suburban style (greens also oppose high-density urban living) raises energy consumption. So what? There is a super-abundance of energy. What is scarce is the means, i.e., capital to transform it into useful work. Tony Harris is another one who does not like cars very much (Motorists don’t pay their way on the road, The Australian Financial Review, March 2000).
Given the huge amounts motorists pay in various taxes and charges one could be forgiven for being puzzled by Harris’s assertion. As expected, he brings in externalities: pollution, road deaths, congestion, etc. Ignored is the fact that cars are getting cleaner by the year. No mention of the fact that today’s cars produce 76 per cent less nitrogen oxide and 96 per cent carbon monoxide than those of 20 years ago — and they’re still getting cleaner. The British Vehicle Certification Agency recently pointed out that “it would take 50 new cars to produce the same emissions per kilometre as a vehicle made in 1970”.
We find a similar trend with accidents. In America car deaths were 18.9 per 100,000 in 1989, down from 30.8 per 100,000 in 1937. This decline occurred despite the enormous number of car miles travelled. Though I have no figures at hand for Australia, I should be surprised if we have not experienced a similar trend. Fatalities down massively. Pollution down massively. In fact, we have already seen how the car actually helped reduce pollution in big cities and eliminate a dangerous health hazard. But no trade offs for greens.
Now it is not true that car accidents are externalities. If that were so victims of car accidents would never be compensated. It should be self-evident that insurance is the means by which car accidents are internalised, i.e., paid for by car owners. It is also true that you cannot really internalise any fatality. But how many people, for example, are electrocuted each year? Does this mean the electricity generating industry should be penalised? Are these deaths even internalised by the industry? Of course not. But people consider the benefits of electricity outweigh any risk of a fatal accident. And they think the same way about cars. In short, the danger from cars is an acceptable risk, a risk that has been getting smaller. (The irony is that corporate average fuel efficiency policies have been foisted on the American public by greens has actually been killing people).
What about congestion? This is a peculiar one considering that it is motorists that usually bear its costs. That they choose to do so indicates that the costs are outweighed by the benefits of driving. It is also peculiar from another angle. One reason we have congestion is because parts of the road system are inadequate to the task of carrying a large number of vehicles simultaneously. Seeing that the roads are owned by the state, I think it is a bit rich to blame their shortcomings on motorists.
Any suggestion of expanding the road system is stridently attacked by greens. John Kirk, Executive Director of the high-sounding Australasian Railway Association, argued that road building induces more road use. The answer is, you’ve guessed it, restrict motor car usage. But the supply-demand argument is erroneous. Cars and roads are complementary goods, i.e., they go together. Does anyone really think, for instance, that if the Indian government criss-crossed the country with freeways hundreds of millions of peasants would rush to buy Volvos?
I do not know a single person who bought a car in response to any road building program. It’s the growth in cars that raises the demand for more and better roads, just as it raises the demand for oil. Australian motorists fully pay for their roads. Anyway, it is ludicrous to talk as if motorists and the community are separate entities. The same motorists who pay for roads also pay other taxes — and almost everyone in the community benefits in some way from the existence of cars.
I’m inclined to think that if cars were extremely expensive and thus confined to the very well-off instead of being enjoyed by the masses, there would be nothing resembling an anti-car movement. The rich would have their private transport (cars), near empty roads to enjoy them along with the kind of mobility that the masses had always been denied until the advent of the mass-produced car: the people's liberator. As Michael Lipton
pointed out, now that the roads are no longer reserved to the wealthier classes and tend to become occasionally congested by the slower-moving and badly maintained cars of the poorer members of society, the former complain. (Cited in Wilfred Beckerman’s Two Cheers for the Affluent Society, St. Martin’s Press 1975, p. 67).
Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 3 September 2007