I thought I’d share with you an op-ed I published on this occasion 13 years ago: History Shows Freedom Drives a Car. (The title was the newspaper editors’, not mine.)
I thought I’d share with you an op-ed I published on this occasion 13 years ago: History Shows Freedom Drives a Car. (The title was the newspaper editors’, not mine.)
Bryan Gividen says:
Interesting read. Thanks for the link.
January 18, 2010, 12:20 pmArthurKirkland says:
Interesting, although the pluses-versus-minuses (or, as some might prefer, pluses only) of the automobile pales in comparison with Dr. King, particularly on his
January 18, 2010, 12:39 pmbirthdayholiday.Benjamin Davis says:
One thing to note about the American “love affair” with the car. Visiting friends in Minneapolis a couple of years back, they told me of the concerted and successful effort by the car companies to have the excellent trolley system torn up in the 50′s – direct competition to the car – which of course spurred car sales.
Personally, I find the car (as compared to when I used public transportation when I lived in France) an enormous financial drain that I am constrained to bear because of the structure of transportation and the evolution of the American landscape.
Btw, the American Landscape was a fascinating course I took eons ago about rock walls in New England, and the development of the strip in response to trucking, etc.
Best,
January 18, 2010, 12:55 pmBen
Benjamin Hemric says:
I agree that the benefits of automobile usage and the negatives of public transportation haven’t been discussed as much as they should be. Furthermore, I think there are even more to be mentioned. Just for one instance, it seems to me that during the 2003 NYC blackout, autos (and, admittedly, public transportation in the form of buses, too) played a crucial, but largely uncommented upon, role in saving the city from the severe problems that were created by the loss of [all plugged into the same electric grid] subway, elevated and commuter rail services. Thus, I believe that the essay, “History Shows Freedom Drives A Car,” adds some important points to the discussion.
However, it seems to me that the essay (which I just noticed is from 1997) also misses some of the important larger points that have been made regarding these issues by, among others, Jane Jacobs [as long ago as 1961 in her book,"Death and Life of Great American Cities"], the current day blog, “Market Urbanism,” etc.: that the real problem isn’t autos, per se, but the GOVERNMENT’S FAVORING of private automobile usage over other forms of transportation. (For instance, Adam, the proprietor of the blog Market Urbanism, has a number of discussions about this under the term, “road socialism.”)
If one is opposed to government central planning and the government’s picking of “winners and losers,” why support these activities when it comes to private automobile usage?
January 18, 2010, 1:33 pmJon says:
But the automobile is a mixed-bag when it comes to civil liberties, because it effectively requires you to carry ID with you at all times, and gives the authorities more things to “get” you for. All the paperwork you have to show a cop feels almost like the “internal travel documents” that are a feature of totalitarian states.
January 18, 2010, 1:36 pmDave N. says:
Jon,
The key difference, of course, is that you are not required to drive.
January 18, 2010, 1:41 pmJMA says:
In so saying, Jon, are you suggesting that our government would not have found some alternative to such documents were they not so commonplace in American society? A sixteen year old gets a driver’s license. That’s just the way it’s done, it seems. If that were not the case, would we not have found some other means of requiring “papers”?
I would suggest that, more and more, “license and registration” just happens to be the American version, because of the way geography and history have shaped the country.
January 18, 2010, 1:42 pmJoe says:
The problem behind the bus boycott was segregation and second class citizenship for blacks.
We have private bus service these days. It is quite possible in various areas. A city wide bus service, including a service that subsidizes routes are too low density to carry a private company for a low price, would have certain benefits. Also, that alternate bus company very well might have been opened up a lot sooner, the city would have taxed it, and segregation might have been easier to uphold.
Mention is made of all the elderly who live in areas where the car is a necessity. Oh? A public service of vans to make trips when necessary, including when a car might not fit a small group or a group that needs a vehicle with special features not found in many cars, is not possible? Of course, planning that makes such cars necessary has been criticized.
We even get global warning doubter (“not yet demonstrated to have any observable effect in real-world measurement”) quoted. Has congestion, pollution, fuel consumption, and other problems with cars been “yet demonstrated” enough for the author?
“It’s the most effective transport system in history, and it offers personal freedom on an unprecedented scale.”
This depends on what sort of “transport” you are talking about. It is not the “most effective” to carry freight. It is not the “most effective” to carry people long distances. It is not the “most effective” to carry groups of people on various regular routes. I live in a major urban area. The subway and bus service is “most effective” in transporting millions of people in ways the automobile simply would not be able to do.
It does has its value though the “personal freedom” of a car can be exaggerated. The costs, including insurance and upkeep, for someone like me is not worth it. For others, including those who live in areas it must be noted were set up in part to be co-dependents of automobiles, the car is more of a necessity. This, however, is a mixed blessing.
January 18, 2010, 1:51 pmSuperSkeptic says:
I tire of this argument, seriously. If only all liberties were conditioned such…
“I guess, you’re right, Officer, I’m not ‘required’ to eat, but all I want to do is buy this orange…”
January 18, 2010, 1:57 pmMark B. says:
And all those elderly who are in areas poorly served (if at all) by public transport–how useful is the car to them, when the state of their health makes it impossible for them to drive safely?
Yes, the car is a great provider of mobility to them! So long as they hire a driver.
January 18, 2010, 2:01 pmED Maven says:
An interesting take, Sasha, but tying the automobile to the desegregation movement reminds me of the joke about the fellow who wanted to marry Marilyn Monroe for her cooking.
Ask any high school senior and he will tell you: the car is an instrumentality of personal liberation.
As for the broader question, when the government decided after WWII to subsidize suburban housing on a large scale, that pretty much elevated the car to its current status as a necessity, except maybe for some Birkenstock-clad Manhattan neo-luddites.
January 18, 2010, 2:40 pmptt says:
Ah, yes, the American automobile, freer of the black people!
An interesting spin on the history of the ENORMOUS subsidy given to the American automobile industry in the form of billions of dollars to expand to the suburbs — thus giving white a destination for the flight — and billions more to demolish inner city neighborhoods for highway interchanges.
Not to mention the pimp-mobile!
January 18, 2010, 3:19 pmCrunchy Frog says:
Ah yes, it would be so much better for all us proles if we were forced to live in 1000-unit tenement death traps, while our betters (who wouldn’t be caught dead in public transportation – it’s for the ‘public’, after all) get to enjoy their McMansions in the suburbs free from traffic congestion.
January 18, 2010, 4:37 pmTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Martin Luther King and the private automobile -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by csstone, Eugene Volokh. Eugene Volokh said: Martin Luther King and the private automobile: I thought I’d share with you an op-ed I published on this occasion … http://bit.ly/8VEyW4 [...]
January 18, 2010, 4:57 pmlgm says:
You write:
But each of the negatives is true. Cars cause congestion and pollution. Solutions involve paying for infrastructure — more roads and public transportation, and having drivers bear the externalities — pollution tax, carbon tax, etc.
January 18, 2010, 5:12 pmA. Zarkov says:
In densely populated areas like New York City public transportation makes sense because it’s generally nearby and you can get to your destination pretty quickly. Ditto for the Metro in Paris or The London Tubes. But a system like BART is a different story. The Bay Area is not as densely populated (although SF is) and going anywhere by BART is both time consuming and expensive. Here is really good map of the BART system. Note that BART doesn’t go very many places. Most of the time it’s better to drive. When BART opened up service to San Francisco Airport I was anxious to use it. But I found I had to spend $20 for a taxi ride to the station and $11 for BART fare. That’s $62 for the whole trip. That’s actually much more than it costs to drive and use a private lot near the airport. BART would be even more expensive if it were not subsidized by sales tax, property tax and bridge tolls.
I don’t think we can undo the urban sprawl and the automobile is not going away.
January 18, 2010, 6:02 pmLarryA says:
Back when I was a teenager I rode a San Antonio city bus to school. It meant walking a long block to the bus stop and waiting up to twenty minutes for a bus. On a nice day, that wasn’t too bad. When the temperature dropped down around freezing, or was up above a hundred, or it was raining, it wasn’t much fun at all. Luckily the junior high school on the other end was on the main bus route. When I started high school I quickly found I could cut across back streets and walk the distance faster than riding.
My cousin, who lives with us, is in her 70s and wears braces on her leg, among other health issues. She does quite well driving. Ride that bus? No way.
When she gets to where she can’t drive we have a private non-profit van system that picks up people for individual trips. Much more efficient than a true public mass transit system.
January 18, 2010, 6:42 pmArkady says:
Having grown up in LA when it did have an excellent electric trolley system and electric railway, I find this believable. See Pacific Electric Railway, for the rundown. When I was in Marines, I could take an electric train from Long Beach (Red Car), where I was stationed for a time, to downtown LA, grab a trolley to West LA–and get off two blocks from my home. Alas, no more. See Who Framed Roger Rabbit for another take on the demise to this wonderful rapid transit system. (See esp. the map in the section Decline of the Red Cars for the extent of the Red Car system.)
January 18, 2010, 7:18 pmyankee says:
A. Zarkov—I agree about BART. Like most American subway systems, the major function of BART is to get people from the suburbs to major centers of employment (in this case, downtown San Francisco and Oakland). Even the New York City subway is most useful for getting around Manhattan. In the outer boroughs, it’s more of a spoke and hub system that takes you to Manhattan and back. This is less true in Brooklyn, but if you look at the New York subway map you can see it doesn’t do much in terms of getting you from one part of Queens or the Bronx to another. Service is mostly inbound/outbound, there’s not much cross-Queens or cross-Bronx service.
As for that population density stuff, population density isn’t the result of the inexorable operation of the laws of nature, it has a vast amount to do with government policy. Suburban zoning regulations mandate large minimum lot sizes, single-family homes with yards, prohibit mixed development, and require retailers to provide large amounts of minimum parking. Combined with massive government subsidies for auto transit, the inevitable result is unwalkable communities in which a car is a necessity. Even if the government were inclined to do so, it’s very difficult to provide cross-suburban public transit because public transit only works if you can drop people somewhere were they can walk around, and there are very few places to walk around in the suburbs.
January 18, 2010, 7:26 pmpublic_defender says:
Go to your lowest level criminal court and see the HUGH numbers of people getting fined and going to jail for driving under suspension or without insurance. If freedom means jail time, then year, cars mean freedom for them. And you know all those people who lost their homes to foreclosures? You can bet that almost all of them stopped paying their car insurance first.
Poor people (including formerly middle class people) can get caught in nasty spiral. First, they can’t pay their insurance. Their license gets suspended. But then they need their car to get to work, but the license reinstatement fees (on top of the fines and court costs) are too high. But their kids need food, and you can’t get to work some places without a car (at least not in under a couple of hours), so they drive to work. They get caught. They get more fines. More fees. Eventually, they face jail. Many of these times, they are eligible for public defender services, so we are paying cops, prosecutors, judges and defense attorneys, and the poor slob is so far underwater that he or she can’t reasonably be expected to pay. So back to jail.
If MLK had tried to use private cars to fight the government today, he and everyone else driving would have spent a lot more time in jail, plus, they would have been subject to fines, court costs, and reinstatement fees that would have crippled their movement.
Yeah, the car means freedom for middle class people who keep their jobs (it can also make them a slave to earning money to keep a reliable car). But depending on private cars to get people from Point A to Point B literally means jail and prison for far too many.
January 18, 2010, 8:19 pmHarryEagar says:
The real advantage of cars and paved roads for the country overall is that it made it possible for every kid to go to high school.
Before World War II, if you didn’t live in town, and about a third of families didn’t, then you didn’t go to high school, unless your family moved to town for that purpose.
Public transportation is, as LarryA sez, almost useless unless you are alone and in almost perfect health. 90% of New York subway stations do not have elevators.
People who cannot climb four flights of stairs cannot use subways. And it is difficult, as I discovered with my 2-year-old grandson, last year, even if you can climb four flights of stairs. I can, but carrying a 25-pound boy, stroller, shopping bags etc. makes it a workout.
January 18, 2010, 8:26 pmDave Hardy says:
1) You should read some of the Congressional hearings that related to crime legislation in the 1933-34 period. The legislators were shocked that criminals in cars could rob a bank and flee a town before police were alerted. (No radios in squadcars then — every hour or half hour officers on patrol would stop at special telephones and call in for news). Proposals included a national driver’s license, bans on felons owning cars, and other such measures.
2) Comments: note that drivers wind up paying their way, by some impressive gasoline taxes (not to mention registration taxes in some jurisdictions). Mass transit, in contrast, is usually heavily subsidized by tax money. I forget the exact figures, but it’s something around a $1.50 bus ticket requires $5 of tax subsidy to pay the costs, locally. I suspect the figures are better in densely populated area, but it’s still not a break even.
January 18, 2010, 8:45 pmRandy says:
“Over three-fourths of elderly people, for example, live in low-density areas where the car is a practical necessity.”
This is most laughable comment. Many elderly people are either disabled or no longer are equipted to drive a car safely. Not being able to drive makes their home a prison — they can’t even get a carton of milk without driving a distance in most American suburbs.
I agree that an automobile means freedom, but only if you are in the following category: you are able bodied to a certain degree, you are over the age of 16, and you have enough cash flow to pay the ongoing costs of car ownership, which include gas, maintenence, insurance, repairs, and so on. If you don’t fit into this category, you have no alternative but to live in a place where public transportation is frequent and affordable. Few places in America have that.
My uncle can’t drive anymore, for instance, due to lack of peripheral vision. Otherwise, he’s fine. but he lives in the suburbs in a retirement home, and can’t go anywhere, because there is no public transportation of any sort. He must rely upon friends to take him for doctor’s visits, and no, he sees no freedom in this lifestyle.
January 18, 2010, 9:38 pmRicardo says:
Sure, the point of BART is not to be a comprehensive transit system for the Bay Area — even its boosters and planners will readily admit this. It is intended to ferry hundreds of thousands of people every day from the suburbs (mostly the East Bay as Caltrain dominates the Peninsula and Marin County is out of the picture completely) to the office buildings in the Embarcadero and further along Market St. in downtown San Francisco. This it does extremely well. The geography of the Bay Area means that the Bay Bridge will always be a major traffic bottleneck for people going between the East Bay and SF. It also connects downtown Oakland reasonably well but there are obviously fewer people working there than SF.
If BART didn’t exist, it could well take 2 or 3 hours to make the commute in the morning which would be unacceptable to most people. Sure, offices could relocate away from SF and in the suburbs: in that case traffic in the East Bay suburbs would then be even more clogged with commuters who would otherwise have been taking BART. Traffic is a major negative externality. I saw one estimate that the negative externality of taking a car into Manhattan during the day may be as much as $100 given the marginal increase in traffic and loss of time it causes.
That depends on how long your trip is. If it’s a two week vacation, it would obviously be better to take BART. Even taking a taxi round-trip might be cheaper depending on where you live. But airport lines are a bit more controversial as they are major moneylosers and suffer from poor ridership. They also tend to benefit tourists and business travelers more than locals even though the latter are the ones who wind up paying for them.
January 18, 2010, 9:40 pmRicardo says:
Of course, the only places where it is at all feasible to go through life without driving are big cities with good public transportation.
There is still a lot of opposition to the idea of a national ID system even in spite of the fact that the vast majority of adults in the U.S. have a driving license already. So I think the answer to your question is no, we wouldn’t have found another way of requiring identity papers. A lot of misdemeanor crimes are punishable with license suspension. As already pointed out, if you live in the car-dependent suburbs, getting your license suspended is practically the same as a sentence of home-confinement. You won’t be able to get to work, you will lose your job and you won’t have money to pay for taxi rides.
January 18, 2010, 9:52 pmDOuglas2 says:
Streetcars are romantic but excruciating to ride daily for journeys of more than a mile. It just takes too long with all of the stops and traffic delays. But it is much nicer to believe in a conspiracy against them than to think that they went the way of the dodo because of their inherent disadvantages.
January 18, 2010, 10:08 pmI know we are supposed to hate the suburbs and the car, but likewise I also find it hard to believe this meme about the rise of the suburbs being because of massive subsidy. There are reasons to build roads because they are a public good, and beyond that the federal and state taxes on motor fuel more than cover the costs of building and maintaining the highways that weren’t built with private money in the first place.
public_defender says:
Gas taxes pay for freeways and highways. Registration fees pay for some local roads. But a lot of local street maintenance comes from general tax revenues. Also, motorists leave leave carnage in their wake. We try to use punitive insurance rules to make up for some of that, but those impose a huge cost on the poor and unemployed (see my comment on people going to jail for uninsured driving and driving with a suspended license).
Basically, automobiles work because they are very efficient at externalizing costs. Many drivers can’t afford and don’t buy enough insurance to cover the risks they impose on others. (Even $100K liability isn’t enough to cover the costs of many serious accidents.) Motorists pay nothing extra for the wars we have to fight to keep gasoline flowing, and nothing for the destabilizing effect that huge oil prices have on regions where oil production is dominant. Motorists pay nothing for the costs the despotic regimes they fund inflict on their own people. Motorists pay nothing extra for the pollution they force non-motorists to breathe. How much taxpayer-paid police time in your community is spent with traffic accidents?
Again, automobiles work because they are very efficient cost externalizers.
January 18, 2010, 11:09 pmRandy says:
Douglas: “Streetcars are romantic but excruciating to ride daily for journeys of more than a mile. It just takes too long with all of the stops and traffic delays.”
As opposed to buses? Seems like every city I’ve seen in American has them all. By contrast, Toronto has had a mix of streetcars, buses and subway system for most of the 20th century and has survived quite nicely. Furthermore, many cities had beltway railroads, which were actually trains that moved large amounts of people quickly and had few stops. They were on dedicated railways that didn’t compete with regular traffic. Today, subway systems such as the one here in Washington make the ride far more preferable to regular car traffic.
” but likewise I also find it hard to believe this meme about the rise of the suburbs being because of massive subsidy.”
Believe it. Post war zoning typically requires low density building. When a new development comes in, its typically the state the ponies up the funds for building the new roads, both major and minor, sewer lines, utility lines, maintenence such as snow removal and so on. Then, states built highways to ease the way between the suburbs, where people lived, and the cities were same worked. Meanwhile, the same states often refused to keep up maintenence on the roads in inner cities, hastening their decline. Not to mention the federally backed mortgage insurance to encourage people to buy a single family detached suburban house, whereas rowhouses, typically in cities, were not eligible.
January 18, 2010, 11:20 pmAnother Steve says:
According to the Texas DOT, that isn’t true.
January 18, 2010, 11:49 pmA. Zarkov says:
They might say that now, but in the early days BART’s cheerleaders were less candid. Moreover it was the installation of BART itself that caused the development in the East Bay that led to the usage you describe. For example the prospect of trans bay service really stimulated construction in Walnut Creek. When I arrived before trans bay service opened up WC was full of empty apartments. So absent BART the Bay Area might have developed differently. In any case I have always thought a fleet of buses with special lanes across the Bay Bridge would have been much cheaper and provided better service.
January 19, 2010, 1:05 amRicardo says:
That’s certainly what transit advocates hope to be the case: to have development following the construction of transit routes. BART is quite explicit about this as its intent: there have been various proposals to “densify” areas around BART stations with more apartments and shopping areas near to the stations to cut down on car trips. The distances between the suburban stations are too far to ever have BART be as useful as the NYC subway, though.
It seems to me the two most likely alternative histories would be to either have a much more densely populated Peninsula (with much lesser developed East Bay — e.g. Walnut Creek and Half Moon Bay would swap places) or have SF be another poverty-ridden, has-been city like Detroit as all its jobs migrate east across the bay or south to San Jose.
There’s certainly a case to be made for that. On the other hand, unless you have special dedicated lines all throughout the bus routes, you will still have the problem of buses getting caught in traffic which makes it much less attractive. There’s also the apparent psychological fact that middle-class office workers are OK with riding the train or streetcar but despise riding buses.
January 19, 2010, 2:06 amRicardo says:
Excruciating for me is driving around in circles for a half-hour or 45 minutes looking for parking. You mileage may vary. Streetcars make much less sense in suburbs, naturally, and I agree with you about the conspiracy theories surrounding the destruction of streetcar lines. But they do have a big advantage in getting around densely populated cities. And if they run in a dedicated lane to bypass traffic, even better. Of course, nowadays, a bus with a dedicated lane will accomplish the same thing. Some cities even have ticket machines at bus stops to avoid the excruciating waste of time involved in collecting money from every passenger as he boards. But people still hate riding buses, apparently.
January 19, 2010, 2:12 amKirk Parker says:
Also, there’s another meaningful conclusion to the “but”: at least last time I was in London, the streets were quite congested, too. It takes both modes of transportation to get the goods and people in and out of large, dense cities like that.
And all you people claiming “massive government subsidies for auto transit”–ever looked at the combined federal and state motor-vehicle fuel taxes? I’m pretty sure here in WA we subsidize mass transit, rather than the reverse.
January 19, 2010, 2:35 amHarryEagar says:
‘Motorists pay nothing for the costs the despotic regimes they fund inflict on their own people’
And shoppers at Wal-Mart pay nothing for the despotism in China.
January 19, 2010, 1:23 pmv says:
前列腺光波治疗仪
January 19, 2010, 10:03 pmOmri says:
Driving is a privilege, not a right. Freedom, by definition, cannot “drive a car.”
January 20, 2010, 11:42 amGinger says:
Please find me a (reliable) source that shows that federal and state gas taxes “more than cover” the cost of building and maintaining highways. Because they don’t. At all. But thanks for throwing out fake information to support your views.
January 20, 2010, 12:21 pm