The Eleven Point Plan — My Overview
T’other day, John Markos O’Neill posted his ambitious eleven point plan to eliminate the private car. This provoked Jalopnik to dismiss him out of hand and other bloggers, particularly, J G Halmayr from Ride (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) to take the time to carefully consider each point of the plan.
I might weigh in on specific points of the plan a bit later, but here’s some quick big picture views I have of it:
The plan, and the peak oil forum discussions that promoted it, assume that all cars polute, now and in the future. I am guessing, though it is not explicit that the view is also that cars take up land that could be otherwise used for housing, parks, etc. This is true, but that argument can also be applied to horses, bicycles, trains, busses, taxis, etc.
The plan makes the tacit assumption that everyone lives in a densly populated city. Croak from The Barvarian Falcon has already pointed this out. Public transport would not work for my in-laws who live only 10 minutes from a medium-sized rural town. Nor would self-propelled transport. Steep hills, stinking hot weather (this is Australia and it was about 30 degrees celcius when I was at their place recently and it’s late Spring here) and they’re both 60+ years old — remarkably fit for 60+ but, still.
The plan assumes everyone is white collar and disregards blue collar workers who, you know, make stuff in factories and must travel to where their work is. This point of mine specifically relates to the idea of telework which I will elaborate on later.
The plan attempts to solve an unstated problem. Why are cars so bad?
The plan tacitly assumes that all cars are equal and equally bad. A Toyota Yaris (that’s a Scion xA, I think) is the same as a Hummer is the same as a Prius is the same as a 65 Mustang in this plan.
Finally, and this is my biggest criticism, the plan assumes that cars are the problem. This is, I think, shortsighted. The problem is urban sprawl. The problem is dormitory suburbs. The problem is that cities have grown to be so big that people can’t live close to where they work or that places of work are undesirable as places to live near (it has ever been thus — no-one wants to live near a tannery). The “problem” is that some people don’t like to live in big cities (where things like car-sharing or home-delivery for groceries scale properly) for a whole bunch of reasons. Cars are a symptom.
