08/22/2019 | Bern Grush | 1 Comment Some journalists understand far more than others. Henry Mance, Financial Times, just wrote a brilliant piece “Can you channel Kerouac in an electric car?” Mance explains why America has the transportation system we paid for… “In 1956 … Congress mandated that all the proceeds from federal fuel taxes go towards building and maintaining highways. That ensured funding for roads to the new sprawling suburbs; public transport, often in the hands of private operators, was left stranded.” I just picked that comment from many. His piece is wonderfully funny, but I ended up crying more than laughing. The fact that we get what we pay for is trite and marks our past, but that we are also stuck with what we paid for is telling of our future. Promises that the autonomous vehicle will rescue us ring hollower to me each day we wait to be saved. Sure, the potential sounds like it might be there, but without understanding how we got here, our habits, our way of seeing mobility and access, our entrenched entitlements, our distrust of modalities other than the one we specifically prefer, and our focus on every change through a lens of loss-aversion mean that making a shift from private household vehicle ownership to using robotic mobility services in, say, the mid 2030s, will not come naturally – or easily. America and market follower Canada are likely to make this shift more slowly than other wealthy countries – not because they are without technology innovators (in that both countries are surely blessed), but because of how America markets and consumes. We will keep oversized private vehicles for the same reasons we cannot curb our appetite for the wrong foods. And we will become relatively the worse for this. Why? Because transportation accounts for about 1/3 of global GDP and a similar, and apparently growing portion of GHGs. Reducing these impacts and finding optimizations in costs and time, as well as in infrastructure and environment also means economic gains. Those gains will go to the mass adopters of whatever is more efficient. A decade after this change begins in earnest, the economic comparisons between America and many other countries will favor us less or not at all. Of course, we may catch up to a degree, but we will have lost a massive and critical economic lead to those countries better able to adopt, adapt and leverage. I am not talking about a lead in innovation, patents or vehicle brands I am talking about a lead in deployment, in addressing congestion, mobility, livability, social equity, and all the other things that matter to access, place, people, and urban health. The shift to automated passenger and goods movement is only 5% about technology. The real issue – the other 95% – is about deployment. Right now, we are focused on the wrong things.
While not disagreeing with Bern’s analysis here of the deeply embedded status of private automobility, I have to disagree with referenced journalist Henry Mance’s implication in Financial Times that there was a big U.S. government policy judgment that made it all happen. He writes, “The rise of the automobile was not inevitable,” hinting that we could still be living in an urban streetcar dominated world if only government hadn’t given up support of urban streetcars and poured all the gas tax money into highways. Hogwash! In pointing to U.S. federal highway funding from gas taxes, Mance doesn’t include the fact that “the December 1982 highway bill that created the Mass Transit Account [as part of the Highway Trust Fund] gave the account 20 percent of the gasoline and diesel tax increase levied by that law, and the subsequent 1990 and 1993 gas and diesel tax increases also saw 20 percent of those increases dedicated to transit.” {Quote from the Eno Transportation Weekly of April 8, 2019 at https://www.enotrans.org/article/why-is-the-mass-transit-account-less-solvent-than-the-highway-account/} Mass transit has been generously funded since the 1980s by U.S. Federal, state, and local governments, with generally falling ridership nevertheless. What’s more, around the world the human preference for motorized personal mobility is evident, including in urban areas with massive mass transit. Note the description of European mode preferences in “Passenger Travel in Europe and the US: More Similar than Different” at http://www.newgeography.com/content/006375-passenger-travel-europe-and-us-more-similar-different which illustrates the dominant preference for automobile travel in today’s European countries despite a lot of urban buses, streetcars, and subways. The rise of automobility in the USA since the Great Depression of the 1930s is documented in Cliff Slater’s classic essay “General Motors and the Demise of Streetcars” posted at http://www.honolulutraffic.com/GM_Demise.htm . What’s needed on planet Earth as a mitigation to this preference, in addition to future CAFI HOV robotaxis described by Bern and me in our textbook, are personal vehicles with smaller physical and ecological footprints. Examples are popping up everywhere, including small. electric two, three, and four wheeled personal mobility vehicles. A four wheeled example is the Uniti developed in Sweden, https://thedriven.io/2019/07/04/first-come-first-served-uniti-offers-exclusive-founders-series-electric-car/ And don’t forget billions of dollars are now being poured into urban, electric aviation, which might (or might not) bring future generations a flying car mode: https://www.aviationtoday.com/2019/08/22/will-global-urban-air-mobility-market-justify-investment/ Also note: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-20/silicon-beach-elites-fly-private-jets-for-fun There is a possibility for personal, on-demand mobility going into a new dimension.