A writer I follow is Joel Kotkin, who is based in the US and writes a lot about how cities and other human settlement patterns are changing. COVID-19 will accelerate changes in place, such as moves from big, crowded cities towards more roomy surburbs and the rural areas (this obviously comes up against issues such as zoning and planning controls). One thing that his article here does not say a lot about though is the future of the car. For the last few decades, the standard narrative from what might be loosely called “The Established Elite” is that cars are bad when the masses have them, because of congestion, pollution, not to mention how they encourage the plebs to go where they want. The whole idea of owning and caring about a car, of guys chatting about engine sizes, 0-60 speed performance and all that Jeremy Clarkson sort of stuff, drives our Established Elites nuts.
But if public transport struggles to win back the punters after the plague dies down, and people remember how valuable it was to have a car, where does this leave the anti-car agenda?
(As an aside, here is a playful article by a libertarian chap who connects up the experience of freedom with driving cars and riding motorbikes.
> where does this leave the anti-car agenda?
Getting on their bicycles.
Interesting how all these Greens are able-ist isn’t it?
They just assume everyone is young, fit and able enough to ride a bicycle.
It never occurs to them that they are blatantly discriminating against the old, the injured, or otherwise unable to ride or walk with a week’s groceries for the family.
To Ecks with them all.
I’m hoping the lockdown will focus the public’s minds on the no-cars-allowed agenda, outside the cities, we may see serious disobedience. If it’s that or starve, why not?
Joel Kotkin, like Angelo Codevilla and Glenn Reynolds, is somebody whom i consider a fellow traveler, because he seems to take approximately the same view of the ruling class and the establishment* as i do.
* the difference being that people like Thatcher, Reagan, and Trump were/are of the ruling class (obviously), but not of the establishment.
WRT cars vs public transportation: it is in large part a matter of population density. I should not think it possible for life to go on as usual in London, let alone Manhattan, if everybody who uses the Tube/Subway were to switch to using cars. But during an epidemic, it becomes imperative to reduce density in subways; therefore, life cannot go on as usual in cities like New York and London.
On a personal note, i have never had to drive to work, and do not think that i’d like to; but i do not presume to impose my preferences on others.
They just assume everyone is young, fit and able enough to ride a bicycle.
… or has children, or dogs, or needs to move big stuff around perhaps to the recycling centre, or those just wanting plain old independence.
Their old mate Che didn’t tour South America on a bus, did he now?
The worry about cars is like the old “we’ll be up our ears in horse sh*t if this continues” myth, eventually self-driving cars will happen and no-one will ever need to own a car and they’ll be so much more efficient overall (most cars spend 95%+ of their time parked).
The problem with green thinking is they say “if this goes on like it does”, which it never does, and has never done in the whole of human history, they think answers are found by going backwards, they think solutions are found through big government and regulation, they don’t realise, despite hundreds of years of recorded technological innovation, things always get sorted out on their own as people start using the tech to innovate further. More efficient ways mean more profit, and that is what will drive the future, not some pseudo-commie tree-hugging utopian dream led by Saint Greta.
How will it change the anti-car agenda?
It won’t. They know what’s good and true, and nobody can change their minds.
Self driving cars, eh?
They are, or can be, controlled from outside…some existing models already have proven to have hackable systems.
…which is to say they can either be told to drive you into the Government garage or can be hacked…a neat, convenient way to dispose of dissenters…or those with whom the hacker disagrees.
“What a shame, his autonomous car went off the road…”
I aim to misbehave…
Anything can be proven provided one starts with the right axioms.
How will it change the anti-car agenda?
About as much as the discovery that smoking tobacco creates resistance to Covid-19 will change the anti-smoking agenda. It won’t change it one jot, because the agenda-folk have too much invested in their yarns to let logic or truth ever get in the way.
When talking about personal preferences, I gave the car up about a decade ago, mostly because I was working abroad a lot and it was just costing me money and hassle parking, insuring the damn thing for an occasional use every third weekend when I returned to the UK.
I guess you get to a point where the convenience aspect of owning a car versus the cost and hassle no longer works, especially if you live in an urban conurbation with 24 hour taxis, trains and other transport available at the push of a button…even Uber.
So, yes, I gave up the car and about £2,500 a year in associated fixed and variable costs and haven’t looked back since.
However, that ain’t gonna work in the rural parts of the country where matters are different.
In the mid-1980s, I saw an interview by, iirc the BBC, of a South African ‘Indian’ businessman, who, rich though he was, said that the only time he felt free was when he was driving in his BMW as he could drive where he wanted. It struck me how liberating a car was, and that is why the Left hate them.
It has occurred to me that a form of social distancing has already been extensively trialled on this Earth, it was called ‘Separateness’, better known as ‘Apartheid’.
This debate is purely an urban versus non-urban one.
If we all chose to live as the urbanites do, then there might be some validity to the anti-auto argument.
But we don’t, so the loss of personal freedom and autonomy and utility makes the anti-auto position a nonstarter.
I have six ICE vehicles, working on a seventh. Each one has a use in my life, each one cannot be replaced simply by using a different one more.
Dang, they must hate people like me.
Yes. Then again, a large percentage of the population chooses to live in an urban environment and this increases year on year.
In terms of expressed versus revealed preferences, a lot of us would love to live in some rural idyll but most of us live in urban or at least suburban conurbations with multiple transport options from buses, taxis, trains et al.
Veblen goods – Why would private car ownership decline when they are self drivimg, car sharing works right up until the time someone has been sick in the backseat.
Even urban dwellers want the option to go and see their parents/kids/deal with an emergency 50 miles away, on a winter evening after you just got home from work.
IC cars sitting close by are the only omes that tick the emergency /typical British winter night box.
@Nessimmersion – That’s a high price to pay for luxury / convenience.
For starters the whole point of a Veblen good is how expensive it is – see Pelosi’s fridge for example.
As we get richer as a society, people like to show off.
Secondly although we are more urban and less rural, there are distinct age preferences in the type of urban, suburbia being the preference of the family raising age group.
Recent Covid19 episode will only reinforce the preference for non shared transport and accommodation.
Also the preference for non private transport amongst the wokerati, is very ableist, it assumes you can use public transport, walk distances, cycle, do not have multiple children to transport to different places, parents to check on at the drop of a hat or just awkwardly sized goods to get home
In short they rarely take account of all the other things family transport is used for as well as commuting.
Sure. My Inner Cynic wants to reply “so how’s that working for ya’all?” But that comes off more hostile to urban life than I really feel, so I won’t. Instead, it’s a matter of preference. I simply don’t care to live an urban life. Many people do. So why not come to a solution that maximizes everyone’s happiness?
I could see drawing a ring around every Greater Metropolitan Center and stamping on that map “here there be no cars.” But the complete ban on personal vehicles – the solution that is being pushed by many – is no solution for those few of us out in the sticks.
And if you want someone to deliver your food to you, we’re going to have to be able to function way out here.
Right now, the worst imprecation that I can think of to say to someone – the new version of “FOAD” – is “go ride a subway.” No, thanks.
For me the reason the car (or my bike, Harley-Davidson since you ask) beats public transport by most metrics is simple: it’s private. I control who my travelling companions are, where I travel and at what time. In short it affords me liberty of the kind that’s not possible with public transport. And liberty’s what we love, right?
As for the practicalities, well it ticks all the boxes here too. I live in the suburbs and have to commute 7 miles through a busy city, but despite a local authority that’s vehemently anti-car (except as a cash cow) I can do the journey by car in half the time it would take by bus (one third of the time if I use the bike). And at the weekend, or on a summer’s eve, I can get out into the countryside with ease. Since I passed my driving test (four decades ago; where’s the time gone?) there’s only been one six month period when I didn’t have a car, and I felt very very trapped. I don’t plan to repeat that experience any time soon.
What Ellen and Mudplugger said. Greenies are just like the Terminator: you can’t reason with them, you can’t argue with them, and they just won’t quit.
They will quit banging on when you string ’em up with piano wire from the nearest lamp post though.
“Greenies are just like the Terminator: you can’t reason with them, you can’t argue with them, and they just won’t quit.”
Nothing at all like a Death Cult?
@Mixmaster:
It’s known as “doing a Jorg Haider”.
I am a rural dweller so public transport is of little use to me. In any case, I hate riding on buses, If I couldn’t have a car, a bike or motorbike would be preferable. When I used to commute by bike in the summer I actually enjoyed the journey to and from work. Looking at the glum faces in the buses and cars used to make me feel slightly smug.
“Their old mate Che didn’t tour South America on a bus, did he now?”
Has anyone in the UK been watching “Race Around the World”? A bunch of two-person teams are (or rather, were) racing from Mexico City to the tip of Argentina, the question posed at the start of every episode being, “Can you travel the length of Latin America on land, using public transport, for the price of the air fare?”
The simple answer is, “No”. They’ve all had to stop periodically and take jobs to top up their allowance. Which is permitted in the rules, but it’s hardly doing the journey “for the price of the air fare”, is it? One team pulled out early, having run out of cash.
I do wonder whether it would be possible by car, though (to crowbar this comment back on-topic), since the real problem isn’t so much the raw price-per-mile of the transport itself as the fact that relying on buses and trains simply takes longer, so you have to eat and rest more (indeed, you’re forced to if you get the timing wrong and miss a connection). I suspect it still wouldn’t, but you’d get a lot closer.
“The problem with green thinking is they say ‘if this goes on like it does’, which it never does, and has never done in the whole of human history,”
That.
@ the sage.
where does this leave the anti-car agenda?
Getting on their bicycles
The cyclists already think they own the roads. This lockdown will only encourage them further.
Long ago, when we were freer, and dumber, a friend, let’s call him “Brian” since that was his name, and I rode into Mexico, Brian on a KZ900 (“bored out” to >1000!), me on my crappy little Yamaha 500. Guess which bike broke down? The KZ900. That’s the sad part. The good part: it broke down on the beach in Mazatlan. While Brian and a buddy rode the train to Tucson (~1000 miles), I camped with another buddy at a KOA with a daily beer truck stopping by, ice at the office, and a cooler full of fish from a boat we hired. Oh, and there was this Canadian girl…!
Thank God that Kawi broke down! 🙂
In case you’re wondering the year, the Kawi was nearly new.
I wonder if that trip could happen today? Certainly not four American youths going deep into Mexico.
Once the LD is recognised as the ruin over nothing that it is there will be millions of very angry people about. I don’t think any green scum will prosper and esp the anti-car brigade.
The only good thing about urban living is that it makes irradiation from space a quick and easy solution to the teeming urbanoids.
I’m a cyclist and consider the ability to share the roads equitably with other road users to be an essential skill. Just lately I have been owning the roads because they have been completely empty.
Thinking back to when I left school in the 1970s, all of us gave a high priority to passing our driving test and acquiring a car or motorbike. Today’s generation of school leavers give this a much lower priority.
I do not own a car – indeed I can not even drive. But it is clear that most people do not like mass transit.
There are endless efforts to get people to like mass transit -but they do not work.
For example, there was a big unofficial campaign to push New York City only a few months ago (just going Youtube I noted how “Woke” Big Business, in this case Google, was pushing New York City as a nice place to live) – endless stuff abut how “high density living” and “mass transit” was the way of the future – keeping down our “carbon footprint” and so on.
People who took the campaign of “Woke” Big Business seriously and moved to New York City are either now dead or, more likely, sitting with property they can not sell.
The property market in New York City and San Francisco is going to collapse – the only reason it is not yet obvious is because people are not even trying to sell their apartments.
“Come to my plague ridden city, where you are not allowed to go out – pay me lots of money for this apartment so that I can flee” is not a good selling line for real estate.
There is also another factor – New York City (unlike London) has much higher taxes than the rest of the country.
Why is any business there anyway? Or in San Francisco – another clusterf… of a place.
In London the argument is “well the taxes are much the same all over the United Kingdom – so we might as well be in the capital”, but that is NOT the case in the United States.
WHY are wealthy individuals and business enterprises in high tax places such as New York and San Francisco? Why?
We are constantly told that new technology means we can “work from home”.
O.K. then – let us “work from home” and make that home a very long way from a plague ridden place like High Tax New York City.
(Picking up on one of the points made by Paul Marks on April 25, 2020 at 9:53 am) one thing more people will be more accustomed to doing is working remotely. That may prompt changes.
An interesting side-aspect is how many will remember only their relief when the need to do so ends as against how many will discover how to make it effective, not exhausting. Back in the 1990s, I recruited a guy whose skills we needed but who was not going to move from his over 100-miles-distant location, so he visited every fortnight for 2 days (staying locally overnight between) and I gave headsets with boom mikes to him and all my site-located team (everyone but him back then), plus keyboard-screen-and-mouse-sharing software. That way, during working hours in his 8 working days off-site each fortnight, he could be phoned and start pair-programming with anyone at a minute’s notice.
Even more important than headsets with boom mikes was that the people on the call needed to be looking at their work, not each other. A recent BBC article titled ‘The reason Zoom calls drain your energy’ noticed the problem and recommended that
but we realised you need a positive take on that – not just “stop sharing video of each other” but “start sharing screen”: the code, the development site pictures, the article you’re jointly writing, the google earth virtual walk you are taking, … . Make the call about something and make that something be what everyone’s screen is showing most of the time.
The BBC article about how exhausting ‘zoom’ calls are is noticing something we noticed – and solved – decades ago. Whether others find the solution or not may influence whether and how this episode changes things.