The signs are all around us, even in Southern California, home to some of the world’s most auto centric infrastructure.
Here in San Diego, communities are increasingly incorporating mini-roundabouts, reducing speeding and collisions. The advent of a downtown promenade on Fifth Avenue, where traffic is blocked from noon to 2 am by movable bollards, has made the area more pedestrian friendly and increased business for many restaurants.
The federal government is now funding development of a Slow Streets program for the city.
Like it or not, the era of the car as master of urban environments –and the environment in general– is waning. Omnipresent ribbons of asphalt and concrete are being repurposed to include other modes of travel.
It’s a slow process because of cultural concerns, one that will speed up as our habitat becomes intolerant of human existence, thanks to a couple of centuries of using the atmosphere as a clean up for pollution.
Scientists and sensible politicians speak of various deadlines for reversing degradation of our environs. Every five years starting in 2025, we’re told, there are thresholds to be met to keep the world habitable. At the rate we’re going, none of them will be met.
San Diego’s latest version of a Climate Action Plan says we’re aiming for 2025 to reach net-zero emissions, but gets squishy when it comes to the hard political realities involving encouraging people to change their habits, technological innovations that have yet to pan out, and funding.
Mayor Todd Gloria has responded to criticisms of the plan by pointing out that course corrections and revisions will be necessary in the future. The thing everybody agrees on is delaying actions will end up costing more.
SANDAG, the regional agency which would be responsible for leading the country’s transportation infrastructure, is only capable of nibbling around the edges of what should be done because of short-sighted officials –like El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells– whose belief system is tethered by a tailpipe.
The last eight years have been the world's eight hottest on record - reflecting the longer-term warming trend driven by greenhouse gas emissions. This year and next year likely will be even hotter as the weather phenomenon known as El Nino develops.
Wet bulb (air + humidity) temperatures above what humans can live through are in the cards, with a swath of Pakistan, India, and China a likely locale for a heat wave disaster killing tens of millions of people..
The first chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future describes what it would be like to (barely) survive such an event. It’s stomach churning, describing the heat affecting all the senses and people dying for days on end.
Transportation is responsible for 29% of all greenhouse gas emissions, with cars and trucks amounting to 81% of that category. The sector presents the greatest opportunity for reducing greenhouse gas.
So the automobile powered by a combustion engine is dangerous to our health. A marketplace shift to electricity-powered vehicles is underway in the U.S., but it likely won’t be fast enough to achieve needed reductions in pollution.
My journey down today’s internet rathole started by reading an article in Slate (by Alexander Sammon) about his experiences during the annual convention of the National Automobile Dealers Association.
Most people have no idea just how powerful car dealers are.
Now car dealers are one of the most important secular forces in American conservatism, having taken a huge swath of the political system hostage. They spent a record $7 million on federal lobbying in 2022, far more than the National Rifle Association, and $25 million in 2020 just on federal elections, mostly to Republicans. The NADA PAC kicked in another $5 million. That’s a small percentage of the operation:
Dealers mainline money to state- and local-level GOPs as well. They often play an outsize role in communities, buying up local ad space, sponsoring local sports teams, and strengthening a social network that can be very useful to political campaigns. “There’s a dealer in every district, which is why their power is so diffuse. They’re not concentrated in any one place; they’re spread out everywhere, all over the country,” Crane said.
Although dealers are maligned as parasites, their relationship to the GOP is pure symbiosis: Republicans need their money and networks, and dealers need politicians to protect them from repealing the laws that keep the money coming in.
Conventional car dealers are threatened by the EV trend, first by Tesla and others direct marketing, and secondly because even if they sell Detroit’s EV’s, they represent a loss of 40% of their income based on after-sale purchases, like maintenance. (Teslas, whose autopilots might kill their passengers, get software updates instead of oil changes.)
At the NADA convention, talk about EV’s was scorned. Special guest Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld got his biggest response when making Prius the but of his joke. Typical of right wing fear mongering, the biggest blowhards were sharing thoughts of what they would do top keep the gubment from seizing their guzzlers.
Then, of course, there’s Big Oil, whose political influence is sufficient to make a very profitable industry in line for more that $20 billion in annual taxpayer subsidies.
So major forces in the nation’s industrial complex are aligned against phasing out or even decreasing vehicles powered by internal combustion. Climate change denial is their rock, though these days it’s gussied up with a lot of frilly double-talk.
Apologists for gas burning vehicles are calling changes via bike- and bus-lanes, traffic speed reductions and new parking fees a "war on cars." These claims are chock full of false equivalencies and outright lies.
Todd Litman’s essay in Planetizen covers all this territory and takes on the basic premise offered up by the battlefield rhetoric.
Framing this as a "war" implies that motorists are victims of violent assaults. Should motorists really fear ferocious pedestrians, berserk bicyclists, and armed buses? Of course not. Their complaints are unfounded, like the grousing of drunks at a late night bar, but their claims have been widely circulated on the internet and published in newspapers, and if left unchallenged may discourage efforts to make our transportation system more diverse, efficient and equitable.
Complaints about a "war on cars" demonstrate that automobiles make people selfish. The majority of transportation investments and road space are devoted to automobile travel, yet motorists are not satisfied, they want even more.
One of the ideas provoking the most hair on fire responses from status-quo transportation types is making car owners pay for using roads, either through a mileage tax or congestion pricing. Gas taxes, the current method of what’s supposed to fund highways cover about half the actual costs, and any reduction in the market share of internal combustion powered vehicles is going to make things worse.
From today’s Los Angeles Times:
The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority is expected by the summer to release a long-awaited study that will offer a blueprint for a congestion pricing scheme similar to ones in cities such as London, Stockholm and Singapore, where commuters pay to drive in city centers.
The transit agency has zeroed in on three locations for a possible test program: a nearly 16-mile stretch of the 10 Freeway between downtown and Santa Monica, arterial streets and freeways around downtown and the canyon streets and freeways that connect the San Fernando Valley to the L.A. Basin.
It’s possible to predict a reaction to such thinking in San Diego by merely looking at the once-upon-a-time mileage tax mentioned in SANDAG planning documents.
All mentions of the dreaded levy have been excised from planning documents, following the absolutely panic-inducing responses from small thinkers in local politics. However, there are still local politicians who are campaigning against a mileage tax, hoping to drum up outrage at any kind of future transportation thinking not involving Ford F-150s.
There are places where new approaches to transportation are being tried, and by and large they’re succeeding. Severely restricting car use in Paris’ urban center has led to a better quality of life for residents.
Norway, owner of some of the world’s largest carbon-based energy reserves, has led the way in EV usage.
(Remember how ridiculous we all thought the sight of Scandinavians walking around staring at their phones was?)
From the New York Times:
Last year, 80 percent of new-car sales in Norway were electric, putting the country at the vanguard of the shift to battery-powered mobility. It has also turned Norway into an observatory for figuring out what the electric vehicle revolution might mean for the environment, workers and life in general. The country will end the sales of internal combustion engine cars in 2025.
Norway’s experience suggests that electric vehicles bring benefits without the dire consequences predicted by some critics. There are problems, of course, including unreliable chargers and long waits during periods of high demand. Auto dealers and retailers have had to adapt. The switch has reordered the auto industry, making Tesla the best-selling brand and marginalizing established carmakers like Renault and Fiat.
But the air in Oslo, Norway’s capital, is measurably cleaner. The city is also quieter as noisier gasoline and diesel vehicles are scrapped. Oslo’s greenhouse gas emissions have fallen 30 percent since 2009, yet there has not been mass unemployment among gas station workers and the electrical grid has not collapsed.
And there may be even more radical changes to personal transportation in the near future, provided that we don’t go to war with China.
From CBS News:
Geely, the Chinese automotive giant that owns Volvo, has the U.S. market squarely in its sights with a whole new concept and brand.
Alain Visser, CEO of the new Geely subsidiary Lynk, told CBS News the plan is to change not only the vehicles Americans drive, but how they get them.
Lynk is hoping to become, he said, "like a Netflix of the car industry."
For a flat fee of about $600 per month, drivers can lease a Lynk vehicle. That subscription fee covers maintenance and insurance, and users back out of the contract any time they want.
The Lynk app also enables drivers to share the use of their vehicles when they're not using them, and get cashback for doing so.
(Take this with a grain of salt, though. Recall predictions that Uber & Lyft would make owning a vehicle unnecessary?)
I’ll save a dive into calming streets, the true cost of parking, and reducing traffic speeds for the future. My point is that, while the future is unknowable, it’s highly unlikely it will be simply a projection of what exists today.
Our priorities should not be replacing every car with its electric equivalent, but rather to rethink mobility in general.
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Morning Newsletter Snippets
A.I., TikTok And The Moral Panic Trap Via Oliver Willis Explains
I’m not a utopian. Every advancement is never a dream scenario and the upsides can be an utter mess verging on disaster. But that is life and that is humanity.
We were dumb long before the machines were smart enough to fool us. Maybe we will be fine.
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Banning book bans Via Judd Legum’s Popular Information
While book bans are frequently described as efforts to defend "parents' rights," the overwhelming majority of parents reject book bans. A 2022 poll found 74% of parents "have quite a lot or a great deal of confidence in public libraries in their local school district to make good decisions about what books to include in their collections."
Further, 72% of parents agree with this statement: "Individual parents can set rules for their own children, but they do not have the right to decide for other parents what books are available to their children." Only 28% of parents hold the opposite view: "Parents have a right not to have their children exposed to objectionable books at the library, and should be able to join with other parents in having those books removed."
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An encouraging study: Fox News viewers can change their minds By Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse
Trump’s standard issue during his presidency and continuing after is a spew of invective, with something to offend and outrage everyone who actually listens. When you strip away the myths that conservative media and Trump himself have perpetuated around him and replace them with facts, it’s no real surprise that a study like the one professors Broockman and Kalla have conducted would show that exposure to the truth makes a difference. Be strategic and deliberate as you plan your conversations. Follow up.
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