War on cars – Craig Medred

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We have met the enemy; he is us

Electric-powered cars and trucks are not the clean-world panacea many Americans thought they were, researchers for the National Bureau of Economic Research have concluded in an 82-page paper getting strangely little attention from a climate-change-obsessed mainstream media in the U.S.

NBER researchers are not the first to notice a problem with what are now popularly called electric vehicles or simply EVs either, despite a  widespread belief in the American environmental community that if Americans trade in their oversized, gas- or diesel-guzzling cars and trucks for equally oversized EVs the country will reach the halloed goal of “net zero emissions by 2050.”

Unfortunately, a U.S. Department of Transportation report to Congress in July warned that even if 80 percent of American vehicles are running on electricity by 2050 that goal is beyond reach unless Americans drive less than they are driving today.

And the report projected that just the opposite is likely to happen.

“Annual energy outlook (AE) projections show a steady increase in U.S. passenger vehicle-miles traveled, growing 23 percent between 2022 and 2050, ” the report said. It forecast a decline in greenhouse-gas emissions (GHG) “through the early 2040s as a result of fuel economy improvements and greater deployment of electric vehicles,….However,
the AEO reference case then shows transportation GHG emissions increasing until 2050 due to increasing vehicle miles traveled for both passengers and freight.”

The new Bureau of Economic Research study goes beyond the DOT report to Congress to examine not only the environmental costs of EVs in terms of greenhouse gas emissions but also the lifetime environmental and social costs of EVS compared to hydrocarbon-powered motor vehicles.

In that comparison, EVs come out only slightly better than the gas- and diesel-powered vehicles most Americans are driving today.

When Charles Komanoff, a national expert on congestion pricing and traffic modeling who writes for Streetsblog.com, simplified the Bureau’s data to chart form, it looked like this:

“Like it or not,” Komanoff wrote, “the fact is that electric vehicles, though endlessly touted as benign, impose immense harms. And the NBER cost figures exclude the tens of thousands of permanently disabling car injuries each year (they only include fatalities), the health and ecosystem damage from the heavier EVs’ extra tire wear, and car culture’s budget-busting, soul-breaking impacts on Americans.”

Streetsblog, a website focused on the topics of road safety and the environment, was moved to headline his analysis “EVs – What Are They Good For?”

Fundamental issues

The big problem here with EVs, not to mention traditional motor vehicles, is that few on the right or the left in the U.S. want to drive less.

Witness the environmentally inclined in Anchorage, as elsewhere, loading their bicycles onto to a rack on back of their sport-utility vehicle or tossing them into the bed of their pickup truck so they can drive to where they want to ride.

The DOT report recognized this and suggested a need for “strategies of increasing convenience and improving efficiency (to) enable households to meet their mobility needs while reducing vehicle miles traveled.

“Reforming zoning to allow for compact mixed-use development, investing in frequent and high-quality public transit service, and providing safe walking and biking routes means shorter, more efficient trips and lower greenhouse gas emissions. For instance, a study of three, high-growth U.S. metropolitan areas found that local zoning reforms to accommodate housing growth along public transportation corridors and on underutilized urban land closer to the core would reduce vehicle miles traveled by up to 13 percent and greenhouse gas emissions by up to 14 percent.”

These reforms, unfortunately, face both political and design hurdles in a country in which the machines long ago took over. Americans are now conditioned to expect the comforts and conveniences of their cars and trucks.

Public transit systems – “high-quality” or low – struggle almost everywhere because few other than those with little choice want to ride them. Nationwide, Streetsblog reported last month that “public transportation funds are on the chopping block, in cities large and small.

“Pandemic relief funds, which have kept many systems afloat for the past few years, are set to be drawn down in many cities by the end of this fiscal year. At the same time, ridership has gone down, while inflation and rising labor costs, pensions, and other operating costs have only gone up.”

Meanwhile, efforts to make cities friendly for walkers, bicyclists or the users of the many small, motorized devices the DOT now calls “electric micromobility” devices – e-bikes, e-scooters ” other small, lightweight, wheeled electric-powered conveyances” – regularly run into heavy opposition from motorists who see any alteration of the status quo as part of “the war on cars” that Car and Driver magazine declared to have begun in 2018.

That war erupted in Anchorage after the city this June decided to use a single traffic-lane on a couple of three-lane, one-way downtown streets to create a safe, summer-only bike route for the busy, Alaska tourist season. Motorists were outraged.

Jeff Lanfield, the editor of the left-leaning Alaska Landmine, took to X to declare that he”went downtown today for lunch. First time I’ve seen those stupid bike lanes. Didn’t see one biker. The whole thing is a nuisance and should be removed immediately!…These bike lanes are a dumb experiment!”

He did a nice job of illustrating the biggest problem in implementing the sorts of changes needed to get Americans moving more and sitting less behind the wheels of motor vehicles while underlining the fact that the desire to drive everywhere as quickly and as easily as possible is not a righty issue or a lefty issue, it is a motornormativity issue.

Scientists in the United Kingdom studying how people think about issues related to motor vehicles in 2022 discovered that the machines have driven “a cultural inability to think objectively and dispassionately,” leading to a group-think conclusion that those who don’t use cars must “accept the harms arising from other people’s motoring.”

The Landmine editor and the right-leaning MustReadAlaska.com seldom agree on anything, but the machines appear to have made them of one mind here.

While Lanfield was lamenting the bike lane slowing traffic in downtown Anchorage as a bad idea – as if slowing traffic in a crowded city center to save people from getting killed or maimed is actually a bad idea – MustRead was placing the blame for the city’s near-record number of pedestrians deaths this year on the victims.

“Another Anchorage pedestrian jaywalking collision makes 13 in one year, equaling state record,” MustRead headlined.

Irrational view of violence

This is motonormativity at its best, or worst.

It is a display of the conflicting standards with which Americans view potentially deadly weapons. While fretting over firearms homicides, which kill fewer than 20,000 people per year with most of the deaths involving people known to each other, Americans largely ignore motor vehicle collisions, which kill more than 43,000 people per year, most of them unknown to each other. 

The issue doesn’t, however, end there as the UK investigators from Swansea University noted.

“Here in the United Kingdom, like in many societies around the world,” they wrote, “we are in the midst of environmental degradation and no fewer than three parallel health epidemics thanks to the easy hypermobility afforded by private motor vehicles.

“We have an epidemic of collisions, with 1752 deaths and 25,945 serious injuries in 2019, the last year before the Covid pandemic; we have an epidemic of physical inactivity – responsible for 22-23% of coronary heart disease, 16-17% of colon cancer, 15% of diabetes, 12-13% of strokes and 11% of breast cancer – despite 24% of car trips being under two miles and so mostly amenable to walking or cycling; and we have an epidemic of pollution with vehicle exhaust fumes causing cancer, heart disease and diabetes at such levels that estimates (from the Royal College of Physicians) have put the UK air pollution death toll at 40,000 per year.

“Even a future switch to electric vehicles would address only one of these three epidemics. It is clear we must acknowledge a simple fact: transport issues are not just environmental issues: they are also inherently public health issues.”

It is interesting in that context that an environmental issue helped the Swansea researchers illustrate how “normal standards of judgment can be altered in the specific context of motoring. When they used a large, national opinion poll to ask Brits about air pollution, 75 percent agreed no one should smoke “in highly populated areas where other people have to breathe the cigarette fumes.”

But when they altered the question to ask about driving “in highly populated areas where other people have to breathe the car fumes,” only 17 percent agreed. Fifty-two percent, a majority, thought driving around adding to the air pollution in those areas was fine and 31 percent said they didn’t care one way or another.

“Didn’t care” one way or another would be a good description of American and Alaskan attitudes toward violent deaths on the country’s roadways. Though concerns have been raised about the record number of pedestrian deaths in Anchorage this year, not much was said about the motorists kill in three deadly accidents on Anchorage streets in the space of five days at the end of last week and the start of this one.

And then came the Friday collision that threatens to make the number of pedestrian deaths a new record with the Anchorage Police Department reporting a downtown hit and run that left a pedestrian with life-threatening injuries” on Friday.

The focus on pedestrians has, unfortunately, obscured the fact that most of those who die in collisions on Anchorage roads are motorists – people driving around in protective steel cages involved in collisions of such force that not even all the technology put into making the occupants of modern, American automobiles safe can save them.

And electric cars and trucks won’t change that. In fact, as the Bureau study makes clear, they are likely to make that problem worse because of their increased weight due to the batteries needed to power them.

The easy, life-saving solutions are to slow urban traffic, so the energy generated by collisions is less, and to get people out of motor vehicles and moving more under their own power, so traffic is less, but those are the very things against which motonormativity has generated huge political opposition.

Motonormativty is at the epicenter of the “war on cars” as if cars existed not as objects but as a living, breathing tribe that needs to be protected from changes in how people drive to make the roads safer.