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.
Your question deserves a longer and more comprehensive treatment than I can give it right now but I’ll give it a beginning here.
One. Cars are wasteful. Unless you’re hauling people or stuff, it doesn’t make sense to push around a >1000kg object everywhere you go. You’re really transporting your car more than you’re transporting yourself. When I commute to work, most of the cars contain one person each. I think the transportation method should match the purpose. That is, it doesn’t make sense to use a vehicle with the fuel consumption and capabilities that a car has if you’re just driving yourself to work or going to the mall.
Two. Cars don’t scale to the world’s billions. The ecological footprint taken up by an automobile and the infrastructure required to support it is too great for more than a few hundred million people to have cars. Otherwise, land that is currently used for agriculture, human habitation, or nature is used to support cars. I’m not saying this out of an aesthetic concern for pretty birds and flowers. My concern for maintaining the ecological acreage devoted to nature stems from a worry that we will endanger the earth’s regenerative biocapacity. See the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report for more detail.
http://www.panda.org/news_facts/publications/general/livingplanet/index.cfm
Three. Suburban sprawl is a natural outgrowth of the automobile and car culture. This may be one on which we’ll just have to agree to disagree. I maintain that suburban sprawl wouldn’t exist without car culture and that car culture promotes its existence.
If my plan were really good, it wouldn’t be so easy to find holes in it. I agree with you and others who have pointed out weaknesses; I intend to keep on coming back to it and revising it as appropriate. If my plan were truly robust (and I intend to make it so, eventually), it would show the transition away from the private automobile to be as natural as that from the IBM 360 to the Apple II to the latest Powerbook to whatever fingernail sized device we’ll be using twenty years from now. But I agree, I’m not there yet.
Comment by John Markos O'Neill — November 17, 2005 @ 5:10 pm
Sorry, I edited your post to fix the formatting, John.
Also, I’m generally with you on points 1 and 2. I try to cycle to work most days when I haven’t been deprived of sleep by my 7 month old. I have the smallest car that is sensible for my families needs. Harvey the Maz-ota will be registered as a classic car and used only for limited events.
Finally, and this is very, very brief — I might concede that cars (car-culture is something else entirely to me) make possible the worst of urban sprawl but they do not cause it. Not saying that one follows the other but that they are locked together might be better. Also, I will dispute that technology is on a deterministic path of “progress”. But that’s an argument for another time, and possibly another blog
Comment by Ben — November 17, 2005 @ 10:19 pm
“. . . 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. . .”
I read a book recently about our (the world’s) energy use and how it is increasing exponentionally. One of the most shocking statements this book made is that in the year 1900, more land was devoted to transportation than is today. The 1900 figure included grazing land for the horses, while today’s figure included all paved roadways and automotive manufacturing facilities and oil refineries, etc.
Comment by Dorri Williams — November 18, 2005 @ 12:19 am
Hey, best wishes from one new father to another (I have a five month old).
Perhaps “natural” wasn’t the correct word for technological progress. Obviously this “progress” takes the form of incremental improvements that individuals work on over time. Nonetheless, in the long run, these improvement look like gradual progress (in efficiency, capabilities, power consumption) over time.
What follows is a bit of a digression from the idea of eliminating the private automobile. I’m still working on that problem but if cars are to stay (which they almost certainly are, for now), I have some complaints about the way we make them now.
In the case of automobiles, I think progress is stalled because of all the consolidation that has been going on in the auto industry over the past few decades. The U.S. “big 2 and a half” automakers have basically given up on doing anything innovative and rely on other countries for new technology.
Why does a country (the U.S.) with a population of 300,000,000 and a GDP greater than $10 trillion (10^12 USD) have only two and a half automakers? This oligopoly alone is an impediment to innovation. Don’t you have about as many in Australia (with a population an order of magnitude smaller)?
I’m sure both nations have plenty of people in universities or working in other industries who would love to tackle the problem of improving transportation. So what we’re stuck with in the automobile is basically a highly refined version of a 19th century aristocrat’s toy. If the automobile were redesigned from the top down by 21st century minds, I think it would be a much different sort of beast.
Comment by John Markos O'Neill — November 18, 2005 @ 1:12 am