Re: Innovation and the Gas Tax
Ryan Avent has posted a response to my argument that the example of sustained gas taxes of several dollars per gallon several major Western European countries undercuts the assumption that any politically-feasible carbon price in the U.S. would induce technical innovation that could materially de-link economic growth from carbon dioxide emissions. I presented two arguments for this:
1. Europe is a huge, advanced market that has had these taxes for decades while internal combustion has remained a very stable technology, and people have continued to make choices from among broadly pre-existing technologies such as mass transit, bicycles, walking and so forth.
2. Even if other conditions mean that we can now create qualitatively different technical innovation in the near future, Europe provides a big enough market to induce this, and there is no obvious reason why the incremental market that would be provided by the U.S. would make much difference.
In response, Ryan argues:
In general, Europeans do drive different automobiles, which tend to be smaller and more efficient. Some of these have been innovative enough in their design to generate raised eyebrows from American tourists (see: the Smart car). In Europe, the scooter is far more popular and differentiated (the scooter with roof is a common sight). Bicycles are also more common and differentiated, and the institutional supports for cyclists are more highly developed (cycle superhighways are old news in Europe).
And then there’s public transport. From buses to trams to trains to high-speed rail, Europe is well ahead of America. When American transit systems go shopping for vehicles, they generally look to European manufacturers. When the District sought a technology that would allow the city to run streetcars without using overhead wires, it looked to France’s Alstom and Canada’s Bombardier (Canadian gas tax rates are considerably higher than those in America). And transit innovation goes beyond vehicle technologies. It includes fare-gathering methods, scheduling, system design and maintenance, and so on.
Brad Delong’s blog has picked this up, and several commenters on my blog post have made the same basic point.
This strikes me as, at best, a word game. I understand that innovation is not identical to invention. But this is like saying that in response to an increase in the price of peanut butter, I “innovated” by making smaller sandwiches and eating ham-and-cheese more often (while noting that I designed these new sandwiches very well, and am probably healthier anyway with less peanut butter in my diet). If by “innovation” in response to higher gas prices, we mean switching to smaller cars and taking the bus and riding bicycles more often, then I agree entirely that higher gas prices in the U.S. will induce innovation.
It seems to me that what you describe catches the exact response to costs: people make choices based on the new cost (to them) versus benefit (to them) ratio. Expecting fundamental technical change from the market seems unrealistic: when we raise the minimum wage, we expect employers will find efficiencies and possibly automate certain tasks; we don’t expect them to produce Lt. Cmdr. Data. The cost of gasoline has caused exactly the kind of adaptation that we should expect from pricing. No cost can induce the kind of vision that leads to new ways to solve problems. Tim Berners-Lee didn’t invent the web because the cost of Gopher had gone up, he did it because he could envision something better. But solutions take the form of intelligent trade-offs and steady, incremental changes at least as often as they take the form of brilliant technological leaps. If a carbon tax takes a thousand commuters off the freeway and puts them onto bicycle-compatible mass transit, that will elegantly solve several problems (pollution, congestion, and public health). It hardly matters that all the elements of the solution have existed for a century.
Put broadly, science and technology will evolve much more quickly if we accept backing out of a blind alley as a creative act. It takes vision and courage to see, and describe, a solution that might work; it also takes vision and courage to look at an existing technology and say: the existing solution does not work, and we have to go back.
— John Spragge · Aug 2, 11:30 AM · #
John,
Thanks for the thoughtful comment.
You say that:
As I ended the post:
The question I was trying to address was a narrower one than “would such a change, on balance, be desirable?” I was trying to question the often-asserted belief that raising the price of carbon any politically conceivable amount would induce the creation of enough new technology to materially address climate change for decades. While I wouldn’t state it as strongly as you do when you say that “No cost can induce the kind of vision that leads to new ways to solve problems”, I laid out a couple of reasons why I believe a rational observer ought to be very skeptical that adding $5 to a gallon of gas in the U.S. would do it in this case.
— Jim Manzi · Aug 2, 11:43 AM · #
Yikes. I’m all for a netzero carbon tax, but not if it takes vision, courage, and a creative act. We had more than enough of that in the 20th century.
— The Reticulator · Aug 2, 12:15 PM · #
“They want to tax the working class off the roads. They taxed us to build the roads, now they’re taxing us off.”
My commute is 35 minutes. It’ll be 100 degrees today at lunch. No restaurants exist within a mile and a half. The existing infrastructure is inadequate; busing then training then busing would kill my productivity. Atlanta’s elegant solution to decreasing revenue was to roll back MARTA, so I’m not even sure I could do it if I wanted to. I can’t afford to live in the city. I need my car to go back and forth to court/jail at a moments notice. Court is fifteen minutes away. Jail is twenty.
There’ll be no elegant solution for me. I will have to eat a gas tax. I read Thomas Frank’s book.
Fuck the Polar Bears and Bangladeshis. I’m Joe Voter, and I will destroy you.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Aug 2, 01:12 PM · #
There is a real distinction between technical innovation and the practical innovations of changed living patterns and conservation. If we invent a new kind of car, we can sell that to other countries and decrease oil consumption/carbon emissions everywhere. If we all start riding the bus, that lowers demand here, but not anywhere else.
That said, if we’re talking about transportation specifically, wouldn’t technical innovation be kind of a foregone conclusion at this point? We’ve already got electric cars and plug-in hybrids heading to the mass market. Telecommuting is still growing. Cities are experimenting with smart buses. For transportation, the fundamental technologies already all exist, making those technologies more viable is just a matter of engineering and infrastructure.
The story is probably different for electricity generation—we might need new science there.
— Consumatopia · Aug 2, 02:41 PM · #
It’s likely that a freer, more competitive environment, sans stringent regulations on energy and protection of oil companies, would have set the stage for something like a hydrogen solution, but then I’m no expert in this area. I do believe, though, that a free market generates innovation, not government departments, energy commissions, regulations and taxes.
— Mike Farmer · Aug 2, 02:44 PM · #
Polar bears and Bangladeshis aren’t the reason for a gas tax. Our demand for oil is going to be pretty much unstoppable until we run out. Besides, a car burning gasoline emits less carbon than an electric car powered by a coal plant. Preventing climate change would have more to do with generation and conservation of electricity than transportation fuel.
The reason for a higher gas tax is stability. Oil has unstable supply and ever increasing demand. Price spikes like 2008 could happen again. The painful thing about that time was the difference between short-run and long-run price elasticity—if people knew in advance that gasoline was going to get much more expensive, then many of them could purchase a different car or live in a different place. Cities could plan transportation networks differently, developers could build in different patterns. Even if you personally didn’t make any changes, you would benefit from other people making changes—there would be less traffic congestion, and lower demand for gasoline.
If the price of gas rose $5 tomorrow, there would be rioting, rebellion, and probably coup d‘état. But if there were tax on gasoline that rose one penny every week for the next ten years, that’s something we, as individuals, might be able to adjust to—and it might make the sudden price spike less likely.
— Consumatopia · Aug 2, 02:51 PM · #
No, leaving my car at home and taking the bus instead would not be an “elegant solution.” It would be a terrible solution. The bus takes more twice as long as driving (optimistically assuming the bus actually arrives on schedule). It’s dirty and noisy and uncomfortable. If the weather’s bad, walking to the bus stop and waiting for the bus to arrive is miserable. I can’t run errands at lunch or on my way home, like I can with my car. There’s nothing “innovative” about it.
— Joey L · Aug 2, 04:46 PM · #
It seems like too much weight is being placed on the word “innovation.” Really the best word is “adapt.” If gas prices go up, people will buy smaller cars/walk/bike/scoot/pogo stick. Just because they don’t invent a jet pack overnight doesn’t mean that they aren’t reacting positively (from a carbon-emitting perspective) to the tax.
Also, since you think that governments artificially incresing prices is bad, what about governments artifically decreasing prices? Certainly you must support the elimination of oil, coal, and gas subsidies?
— Max B. · Aug 2, 07:19 PM · #
Mike makes an interesting point that extra regulation and taxes are inhibiting new inventions that are alternatives to hydrocarbon fuels. The extra cost of these taxes and regulations reduces economic activity and therefore reduces the amount of resources invested in inventive activities. The regulations also make it more expensive and time consuming to introduce new technologies to the market. For instance, a hydrogen assisted gas car (there have been several prototypes) would have to pass multiple regulations costing millions of dollars, which inhibits this technology from being introduced to the market.
By the way, water vapor is the biggest green house gas. It is much larger than CO2. So the “Global Warming” crowd is unlikely to accept hydrogen cars, since they will increase the amount of water vapor. The GW crowd also believes that water vapor is positive feedback mechanism. However, they have no explanation why this positive feedback mechanism did not result in run away temperatures millions of years ago.
— Dale B. Halling · Aug 2, 09:01 PM · #
Please, Dale. If you’re going to try to invent clever quips about the points of views of people you disagree with, at least do something that is coherent and worthy of the word clever.
Climate science 101: CO2 persists in the atmosphere on a much larger timescale than water vapor. Within a month you can expect any water vapor you’ve emitted by burning hydrogen (or gasoline or whatever) to have returned to its equilibrium state. Which is to say, of the water on the Earth, there’s some set proportion that the proportions tend to on a short timescale. This happens through various mechanisms (climate conspirators have invented a term, “rain,” for one of them).
CO2 is different—(1) it persists for much longer than water vapor and (2) we’re introducing a forcing exogenous to the active carbon cycle (the burning of fossil fuels, which are bound up in the crust and not available). The main mechanism for moving toward the equilibrium state is very slow, relating to how carbon interacts with the ocean. So on our time span, when we put CO2 into the atmosphere, it stays there (with some relatively small proportion incorporated into mechanisms such as increased plant growth).
So when climatologists talk about water vapor as a positive feedback mechanism, it’s not referring to water vapor evaporating, increasing temperatures, and causing more water to evaporate. It’s referring to a change in the water cycle equilibrium, such that more vapor is in the atmosphere in that equilibrium state due to the effects of CO2. This (arguably) increases the temperature effects of CO2 per unit beyond what you would predict otherwise. Arguably because, although water vapor is a greenhouse gas, it’s also snow and clouds and other things, which act against that.
Seriously, this is basic stuff. And I know the modus operandi of the crass denialist crowd is to throw as many lies out as possible before truth can get out the gate, so you’re probably pretty proud of yourself and your purposely maintained ignorance, but still… do you not have any shame?
— Zephyrus · Aug 3, 01:13 AM · #
@Reticulator: It takes courage, vision and a creative act to accept that a technology has reached a dead end. After that, it merely takes intelligent pragmatism to adjust the tax structure to remove the incentives for keeping that failed technology alive.
@Kristoffer V. Sargent: Your scenario actually suggests a useful starting point for innovation to reduce unnecessary energy use. You write you “need” the car to go to the court or jail, and you need the car because you have inadequate bus service. But in all these cases, the needs come out, more or less, of other people’s choices. You need to go to court of jail at a moment’s notice because the procedures in place do not allow you to attend by video-conference. Except for trial proceedings, which as I understand it generally get scheduled months in advance, no constitutional provision I know of bars proceedings by teleconference, so unless you actually have to do something physical, this job requirement comes out of someone’s choice, and if given effective inducements, they can choose differently. The same thing applies to choices such as the elimination of bus services. Perhaps the federal government should start small, and tie highway grants to a rigorous audit of the public decisions that impose energy-intensive and unhealthy lifestyles on the citizenry.
— John Spragge · Aug 3, 02:34 AM · #
On the subject of mass transit, specifically the bus, Joey L wrote:
> It’s dirty and noisy and uncomfortable.
Actually, I’d like to bet you’ve never swabbed the seats of your car and the seats of the bus and compared them. If you have kids and don’t pay to have your car detailed about once a month, I’d call the odds about even that you’ll find more dirt on your car seats then you will on the average bus seat.
> If the weather’s bad, walking to the bus stop and waiting
> for the bus to arrive is miserable.
Driving promotes an inactive lifestyle strongly correlated with many uncomfortable, unpleasant, and debilitating conditions. Most of those will make you at least as miserable as waiting (or cycling) in the rain. And good wet weather gear will cost you much less than repairs to a car.
> I can’t run errands at lunch or on my way home, like I
> can with my car.
If so, that has to do with either a traditional fare structure that doesn’t allow for stop-offs, the failure of the mass transit system to allow for bicycles, or both. In any case, that reflects a choice you or someone else has made— and you can choose differently.
> There’s nothing “innovative” about it.
Again, that depends of what you call innovative. It provides a simple, and elegant solution to several transportation problems.
— John Spragge · Aug 3, 03:15 AM · #
Buses will never be as fast, comfortable, convenient, or flexible as cars. Buses will always be slow and inconvenient because they follow fixed routes on fixed schedules with fixed stops. That’s why mass transit is a technological dead end, and why cars have become the overwhelmingly dominant form of transportation in both Europe and the US.
— Jerry · Aug 3, 03:22 AM · #
Sorry, but virtually every transit bus I’ve been on has been filthy. The seats are small and uncomfortable (if you can even get a seat). The engines are noisy. The ride is bumpy and jerky. And the other passengers are frequently noisy too, especially kids and teens. If it’s a busy route at rush hour, you may be packed in like sardines. And you have to walk to and from the bus stop and wait for the thing to arrive, which is a miserable experience if the weather is bad, as it often is in much of the country. Ever waited for a bus in a Chicago winter or a Phoenix summer?
Sitting on a bus isn’t any better for you than sitting in a car. Since the bus is so much slower, because it has to stop every quarter or half mile along its route, you’ll spend a lot more time sitting on the bus than you would in a car. And you can use the time you save by driving to work out at the gym or on some other form of physical activity.
No, it has to do with the fact that an errand that would take 10 or 15 minutes by car would take 45 minutes or an hour by bus, because of all the walking and waiting and stopping involved in using the bus. There goes my lunch hour. It’s not literally impossible. It’s just completely impractical.
If “elegant” means slow, inconvenient, uncomfortable and inflexible, I agree.
— Joey L · Aug 3, 03:45 AM · #
Joey L exhibits classic signs of PTMTS, Post-Traumatic-Mass-Transit-Syndrome, the precise nature of which requires speculation. Was he inappropriately touched in the driving sleet of a Chicago bus stop? Was he forced to listen to poor people’s children singing on a bus in the stifling heat of Phoenix? Did he have to walk a few blocks in the wrong in-soles? Did he sweat through his collar? It could be any— or judging from his unusually thorough experience of the miseries of bus travel— all of those things. Please, Spragge, be sensitive. Joey is soft. He needs your help, not your criticism.
— Patrick Bateman · Aug 3, 01:38 PM · #
For a moment, Joey L’s recital of bus woes turned Guthrie-esque (that is, if Guthrie had been a whiny princess):
“From the sticky seats of Tampa to the smoggy glass of Oakland, this route was made for you and me. . .”
— B Line Transfer · Aug 3, 02:10 PM · #
Zephyrus,
Climate science 101 is that the sun is the major factor affecting the temperature here on earth. In addition, there is no evidence the CO2 causes increases in temperature on earth. There is evidence that CO2 increase after, not before, the temperature increase. This is likely because CO2 is released (less soluble) from the ocean as it heats up.
As for the water vapor issue, many climate scientist state that water vapor is a positive feedback mechanism. Perhaps you do not know what a positive feedback system, but it is an unstable system – it does not return to its equilibrium state. So don’t “please” me. It’s not my fault that Global Warming advocates do not understand basic science.
— Dale B. Halling · Aug 3, 02:13 PM · #
Mr. Halling,
Don’t get hot, crabby and grossly misinformed with Zephyrus. It’s not his/her fault your parents stuck you with “Dale.” (What the B. stands for I can only dread: Bannon? Beatrice? Billy?)
— Thomas H. Thomas · Aug 3, 03:04 PM · #
Patrick Bateman,
If you like riding the bus, good for you. We all have our eccentricities.
— Joey L · Aug 3, 05:09 PM · #
@Jerry: Sorry, no sale. For one thing, I don’t know about where you live, but in Toronto, a much more North American than European city, about half the population uses cars to get to work; that hardly works out to “overwhelming dominance”.
As a “solution”, I’d call the private automobile a triumph of brute force over elegance: strap a half-tonne engine to everyone, add “crumple zones” to keep the death toll from accidents down to an “acceptable” four-fifths of the Vietnam death toll every year, and make expressways catering to single-occupant cars the largest single land use in your cities. We can do much better. Cars offer only one advantage: they can, in theory, take you directly to your destination. In practice, of course, they require space to park, which you may have to go half a kilometer to find, and they cause frequent traffic jams which result in considerable delays. But a well designed mass transit system can cancel out even the theoretical advantage of the car by providing space for bicycles (electrically assisted for the infirm) that will take riders right to their destinations, and which require very little parking space.
@Joey L: Sorry, it doesn’t help to repeat your subjective responses to the bus. To start with, of course, some cities do run bus systems with infrequent or inconvenient schedules; that constitutes a choice, and with appropriate prompting from the senior levels of government, they can make a different one. The same thing goes for uncomfortable seating and even the frequency with which cities clean their buses, although I have yet to see a scientific comparison the cleanliness of mass transit and private vehicles.
Finally, one more time: the solution I propose does not simply involve mass transit. It involves a combination of mass transit and active transportation. A bus that runs three times an hour and takes you all over the city, then drops you beside a high speed road to walk a kilometer to your destination in high heat or serious cold has many defects as a solution; a bus or train that comes every ten minutes and takes you to an active transportation hub from which bike lanes and walkable routes (including indoor routes such as Toronto’s downtown PATH system) fan out provides a much better set of alternatives. To cite the current problems with mass transit does not mean that we cannot solve these problems with a very little effort, or that we should not try.
— John Spragge · Aug 3, 07:17 PM · #
John,
You are seriously misinformed. First, only about 15% of travel is commuting. Even if EVERYONE commuted by mass transit, it would still be only a small fraction of total travel. But in fact, only a small fraction of people even use mass transit for commuting. The most recent US Census found that only 5.3% of workers used public transportation to get to their jobs. 86.5% commuted by car, truck or van. So yes, mass transit is just a tiny component of our transportation system. Use of mass transit is slightly higher in Canada, but private automobiles are the overwhelmingly dominant mode of transportation in Canada too.
If you seriously think you can sell people on mass transit by calling it “elegant” and ignoring all its disadvantages — it’s slow, it’s uncomfortable, it’s inconvenient, it’s inflexible, and so on — then I think you’re going to be disappointed. An unlimited-use monthly transit pass typically costs $50-100. The costs of owning and operating even a modest car are $500 or more a month. People don’t choose to pay hundreds of dollars more to have a car because they like throwing money away. They spend it because cars are a vastly superior technology for getting around.
— Jerry · Aug 3, 08:20 PM · #
Jim, with a stroke of your keyboard, you’ve written social, economic, and behavioral innovation — that is, finding new ways to structure our affairs — out of existence. You have artificially narrowed our choices to “doing things the way we do them now, only less” and “build a new widget.”
To my mind that reflects a paucity of imagination. I see people doing new things with financing, land use, and car sharing (to pick a few out of a hat) and they look plenty innovative to me.
More here:
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-02-17-why-bill-gates-is-wrong-on-energy-and-climate
— David Roberts · Aug 3, 09:26 PM · #
Baloney. There’s nothing “innovative” about using mass transit or bicycles or walking. Those were the primary methods of getting around urban areas a century ago. We have gradually abandoned them as we have become richer, so that more of us could afford to buy cars, and as cars themselves have become more comfortable and reliable and useful. It is automobiles themselves that are the innovation, not the old ways of getting around that you want to bring back. What’s next, the “innovation” of horse-drawn carriages?
— Joey L · Aug 3, 10:22 PM · #
Joey Lumbago,
If you’re going to reply, at least read the article to which Roberts linked. It wasn’t about riding bikes instead of driving trucks. It proposed that technological innovation alone is only part of the picture. Real progress in getting the biggest energy bang for our resources burn, it suggests, also requires innovative proposals about how we socialize, acquire information, etc. . . Maybe you disagree. Perhaps you think technological innovation tends to be the main protagonist, and changes to social patterns flow from there. If that’s your take, please tell us more.
Your endless crabbing about the horrors of walking and cycling, however, wore out their welcome at least five posts ago.
— Patrick Bateman · Aug 4, 12:20 AM · #
@Jerry: it would help if you actually addressed my argument, rather than inventing a straw man for me. For the third time, I do NOT propose what you suggest: keep the gargantuan subsidies going into motoring culture at all levels, keep the massive propaganda for motor vehicles, keep the slow and inadequate schedules of most mass transit systems, and try to persuade people to convert from cars as they now exist to mass transit as it now exists.
I propose, rather, to first eliminate most of the artificial subsidies to drivers, starting with the relative impunity for various driving offences and going through to economics: charging motorists the full rate for the carnage automobiles and their drivers cause, for the environmental damage they do, and for the opportunity costs of the space they take up. Then I would make mass transit over into express carriers of small scale vehicles: bikes, HPVs, and electric scooters. That would, at a stroke, eliminate what you identify as the major disadvantage of mass transit: its putative slowness and inflexibility.
As an aside, though, drivers do not make rational assessments about the efficiency of their cars. In fact, drivers regularly and massively overestimate the speed they can expect to attain in urban or exurban areas. The idea that cars offer any real speed advantage in urban areas over either a bicycle or over urban transit, belongs in the realm of car advertising fantasy.
— John Spragge · Aug 4, 01:24 AM · #
@Joey L: I’ll refer you to a web log post I made a bit less than a year ago on why applying a temporal label does not provide a substitute for a coherent argument.
Your implied arguments have two fatal defects: first, you say nothing about the actual topic of this discussion, namely the increasingly unacceptable externalities of the energy-intensive lifestyle the private car exemplifies. As Dr. Who remarked in “Pirate Planet”, any brute force solution can appear to work for a certain amount of time, but you eventually run out of resources to throw at it. Peak oil or global warming or peak oil: take your pick, one or the other will almost certainly force major changes on North American transportation. You can welcome them, as I do, or you can resent them, but they will almost certainly come. And secondly, you fail to accept of even acknowledge the innovation implicit in synergies. Navies knew about aircraft before the nineteen twenties, and we have had ships for twenty-five centuries, but the invention of the aircraft carrier still created a revolution in sea warfare. We have had bicycles and mass transit for some time, but the conversion of mass transit to carry smaller human powered vehicles could also lead to major changes.
— John Spragge · Aug 4, 01:59 AM · #
Patrick Busrider,
Manzi was responding to Ryan Avent. Avent explicitly cited mass transit as an example of supposed “innovation.” Roberts doesn’t refer to mass transit explicitly as a form of “innovation”. But that’s probably because he doesn’t really refer to anything. The closest he comes to describing what he means by “innovation” in his article is “innovations in the way we think, interact, and structure our lives,” which is so vague and vacuous it’s hard to know what it’s supposed to mean.
In his comment here, Roberts does refer to a concrete example of innovation: car sharing. But that example supports rather than undermines Manzi’s point about the importance of technology. Car sharing only became feasible thanks to the technological advances of the internet and wireless communication technology.
As for your last paragraph, I’ll keep pointing out the disadvantages of walking and cycling compared to driving as long as promoters of those ways of getting around keep ignoring them.
— Joey L · Aug 4, 03:41 AM · #
I expect the market price of oil will continue to rise gradually over the long-term (with plenty of short-term volatility), but we’re already starting to adapt to that with new automobile technologies (hybrids, plugin-in hybrids, battery electric vehicles, fuel-cell vehicles) and fuels (biofuels, CNG), as well as incremental advances in the efficiency of conventional internal combustion engines. I think that by the middle of the century, and perhaps well before, virtually all new cars will probably be electric.
No remotely plausible degree of substitution of mass transit for driving could produce anything more than trivial savings in energy consumption or pollution. The only realistic way of making our transportation system significantly greener is through cleaner and more energy-efficient automobiles.
— Joey L · Aug 4, 05:19 AM · #
It’s good to see all the comments in Jim Manzi’s recent articles about how people in Europe DO make adjustments in response to price increases fossil fuels. It’s good to see, because over the past 15-20 years, whenever I pointed out that CAFE standards (or idiotic programs like cash for clunkers) were the wrong way to go, and that instead we should have higher fuel taxes, the leftier persons I was talking to would say we could never raise prices high enough to have an effect; therefore we need CAFE. (My fellow conservatives never responded, presumably because their heads are stuck firmly in the sand.)
I don’t know if those are left-learning people who have been making those excellent points about the way Europeans have responded to gas taxes, but whether right or left, there is one way to know if they really mean what they say: Did they oppose CAFE and cash for clunkers?
— The Reticulator · Aug 4, 05:29 AM · #
@Joey L: What disadvantages? Walking and cycling, as well as mass transit use, certainly take less space, emit less pollution, and cause fewer deaths. Do you have any objective evidence, backed up by an actual studies, that in urban areas, cycling or using mass transit takes more time? I ask this because of my own experience as a resident in an inner suburb of a large city. I can get to most places in the center of the city from my house at least as quickly on my bicycle as quickly as I can in my car. If I want to shave off another ten minutes, I take the subway. My own experience and observations also tell me that most drivers grossly overestimate the time advantage the car gives them.
So I’ll ask again: what actual studies or objective data can you provide? Not arguments about what you feel, which we know, or what many motorists feel, which we also know. Give us a source for actual travel time comparisons, if you have one. Otherwise, I don’t see what you have to point out, except that you have an emotional objection to any policy that would encourage you to walk, cycle, or take the bus. We know that by now.
As for spurring innovation, I can think of three alternatives to the gas tax, all of which I suggest you could defend in the current American political climate:
1) Allocate highway funds only to states that apply strict scrutiny to forced sales for the purpose of road projects. The political slogan would go: the federal government won’t give your state or city money to take your house away. In practice, of course, this would spike most attempts to expand expressway networks.
2) Promote a fair tax policy on roads: stop forcing non-drivers to subsidize drivers. If you want the convenience you seem to think comes with a car, I assume you also agree to pay for it? And before you mention it, the gas tax does not pay for urban roads.
3) Get tough on criminal behaviour by motorists. Again, any politician worth their salt can sell this as a measure to get tough on crime and reduce road fatalities.
— John Spragge · Aug 4, 05:36 AM · #
this information is really useful and definately is comment worthy! hehe. I’ll see if I can try to use some of this information for my own blog. Thanks!
— clothes online · Aug 4, 08:11 AM · #
I’m not sure why you think anyone would conduct a study to confirm the obvious. Human walking speed is around 4 mph. Average cycling speed is maybe 10-15 mph. Cars are much, much faster than both.
Google Maps and other other online tools now provide travel times for walking and driving for virtually any randomly-selected journey in the United States. For many metropolitan areas, these tools also provide travel times by public transportation and bicycle. If you seriously believe that walking, bicycling and mass transit take no more time in urban areas than driving, please give us some examples to support this preposterous claim.
— Joey L · Aug 4, 05:15 PM · #
John Spragge
Academic research on the time costs of driving vs using public transportation. From the paper Sprawl and Urban Growth, by Edward Glaeser and Matthew Kahn, Harvard Institute of Economic Research:
— Joey L · Aug 4, 05:24 PM · #
@Joey L The idea of bicycles outrunning cars may appear counter-intuitive to you, but the idea that heavy and light objects fall at the same rate appeared counter-intuitive as well. Intuitive does not mean true, and in fact cars operate at severely constrained speeds in urban environments. In every empirical test of door to door car efficiency in urban environments I know of, cars have come in last. Even in exurban areas where cars should in theory have a decisive advantage, experience has shown me that the need for traffic signals severely constrains the realized speed of vehicles.
On the road, the behaviour by drivers I routinely observe and document, in particular passing behaviour, indicates quite clearly that many motorists do not or will not internalize this reality. Motorists persist in using the theoretical speed of their cars to achieve realized time gains, even when in practice this means they race from light to light, where I routinely catch up with them on my bicycle. Given this, the reliance by Glaeser and Kahn on the National Personal Transportation Survey, which in turn relied on self-reporting or second hand data from a household member renders their estimates highly suspect, since driving behaviour suggests that motorists routinely overestimate their potential speed. The Google and other estimates have no basis I know of except an estimate of speeds based on the posted speed limit, also a gross over-estimate of the speed that an automobile will generally attain in practice.
The only truly empirical basis for a convincing survey would involve making a random selection of cars, bicycles, and other vehicles, attaching a clock and a GPS unit, and recording actual travel times from engine start to shutdown, then asking operators to log their actual destination so as to estimate the time spent walking from the parking place. Even that would only indicate the current performance of cars, not the potential for innovation and evolution beyond the brute-force technology the car represents to something more elegant. But right now, unless you know of an actual empirical survey not dependent on self-reporting by motorists, we have only anecdote (albeit recorded anecdote) to go on.
As for your full-circle belief in the technological change: insofar as I understand him, I agree with Jim Manzi: governments cannot bring about technological change by either fiat, industrial policy, or taxation. The plug-in car appears to solve the emissions problem, but it may well not scale well: to power the currently induced appetite for brute-force personal mobility via the car would take about 10,000 windmills for one large city, as well as major upgrades to the electrical grid, even assuming we can obtain the necessary metals to make that many batteries.
To provide effective personal mobility with a reduced carbon footprint, we may well have to devise a more elegant, human-scale solution to our mobility problems. Frankly, I find myself at something of a loss to understand the emotional hostility many people evidently have to this reality.
— John Spragge · Aug 4, 07:45 PM · #
You asked for evidence and I gave it to you. If you seriously think that walking, bicycling or taking mass transit is faster than driving, except for a tiny fraction of urban trips, then produce your evidence to that effect. If you seriously think most people will believe you when you tell them that driving has no time savings over walking or biking or taking the bus you are living in a fantasy world.
— Joey L · Aug 4, 08:28 PM · #
@Joey L: before you decide where the burden of proof here lies, let’s consider the actual topic of this discussion: whether or not governmental measures can lead to solutions to the problem of greenhouse gas emissions. I happen to think that no government initiative, whether a tax or an industrial policy, can lead to a real technological breakthrough, because no government policy can stimulate thought or inspiration. But I do believe that government policy can stimulate the adoption of modest steps using existing technology.
It seems to me pretty evident that the level of use of the current automotive technology has led to significant environmental problems, including a significant contribution to global warming, significant public health problems, and significant economic problems. Thus, it seems equally evident that a viable alternative to routine car usage would contribute significantly to a solution to these problems. You reject any possibility of a solution based on mass transit. You have that right, but you cannot claim to have evidence for the assertion that no possible solution based on mass transit can exist. If you make an open ended claim about not only what exists but what can exist you cannot, except in a very limited sense, base it on empirical reality. If you make your claim based primarily on what you expect people will choose, you can never claim to have facts to back up your assertions.
— John Spragge · Aug 5, 05:48 AM · #
You claim that driving is no faster than walking, cycling or using mass transit. I think that claim is obviously false. I cited a study that concluded that your claim is not merely false, but overwhelmingly false. The study found that driving is twice as fast as mass transit even for commuting, when mass transit is at its most competitive. You haven’t produced a shred of evidence to suggest that your claim is true.
As for global warming, if you seriously believe that a shift from driving to using mass transit (with or without your “active transportation” enhancement, or whatever other enhancements to current mass transit you have in mind) is a realistic way of achieving significant reductions in carbon emissions, then please describe how you think this is possible in clear quantitative terms. We travel about 100 miles by car for every 1 mile we travel by mass transit. Even if mass transit produced ZERO carbon emissions, and even if you could somehow induce a tripling or quadrupling of transit’s share of total travel, it would produce only a NEGLIGIBLE reduction in total carbon emissions. As I said before, cars are so overwhelmingly dominant in our national transportation system that the only feasible way of producing significant reductions in carbon emissions from the transportation sector is through cleaner automobiles.
— Joey L · Aug 5, 06:23 AM · #
@Joey L: The “Glaeser Kahn” study appears to depend primarily on self-reports by motorists. As I have already pointed out, driver behaviour strongly suggests that motorists have a highly unrealistic picture of the actual speeds possible with automotive travel. If you have a study that actually uses empirical measurements, actual GPS devices, or motorists logging in their trip starts and finishes, please post it. Otherwise, I’ll continue to believe my own experiences in the inner suburbs and core of a major Canadian city.
As for the solution, I have already provided a general picture: integrate high speed “trunk line” mass transit with support for carry-on personal mobility devices (traditional bicycles, green wheels and robo-scooters with mobility on demand vehicle sharing systems. Doing so would provide an elegant solution to the multiple defects of the personal automobile.
— John Spragge · Aug 5, 08:44 AM · #
It takes courage, vision and a creative act to accept that a technology has reached a dead end.
No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t take any one of those three.
— The Reticulator · Aug 8, 03:04 AM · #