[Carfreeliving] War against the car

Mon Dec 12 12:31:08 MST 2005

I really can't even believe that the Wall Street Journal printed this
tripe. This nutcase is really on the editorial board? This is really just a
cariacture, a joke. This guy probalby doesn't even exist.
It's amazing how people can continue to trump the fantasy of everyone in
their cars whisking along untrafficked rural roads with the wind in their
hair, while a different reality greets them everyday. Someone ought to be
doing psychological studies on this mass delusion and effective automotive
advertising. And that Katrina bullshit -- what the fuck is he talking
about? A car doesn't do you any good when the entire population wants to
get on the road at the same time and roads are either impassable and
flodded or gridlocked.
-j

             "Brinkman,                                                    
             Cheryl"                                                       
             <Cheryl.Brinkman@                                          To 
             McKesson.com>             Carfreeliving at livablecity.org       
             Sent by:                                                   cc 
             Carfreeliving-bou                                             
             nces at livablecity.                                     Subject 
             org                       [Carfreeliving] War against the car 

             12/12/2005 10:55                                              
             AM                                                            

I know it's the Wall Street Journal, not really a bastion of progressivism,
but it's still shocking to know that a presumably intelligent person could
engage in such simplistic thinking.

I love the idea that New Orleans could have been evacuated if only everyone
had a car.  Houston tried that, it was called gridlock.  We saw friends
from Houston last week, they told us about their experience evacuating, 6
hours to go 30 miles, a total of 16 for a normally 3 hour trip-  the
kicker: they took both their cars.  Mom and son in one, Dad in the other.

Sounds like the second graders are smarter then this guy.

The War Against the Car

November 11, 2005 ; Page A10
Commentary - Wall Street Journal

A few years ago, I made a presentation to my second-grader's social studies
class, asking the kids what was the worst invention in history. I was
shocked when a number of them answered "the car." When I asked why, they
replied that cars destroy the environment. Distressed by the Green
indoctrination already visited upon seven-year-olds, I was at least
reassured in knowing that once these youngsters got their drivers'
licenses, their attitudes would change.

It's one thing for second-graders to hold such childish notions, but quite
another for presumably educated adults to argue that automobiles are
economically and environmentally unsustainable "axles of evil." But with
higher gas prices, as well as Malthusian-sounding warnings about
catastrophic global warming and the planet running out of oil, the tirade
has taken on a new plausibility. Maybe Al Gore had it right all along when
he warned that the car and the combustible engine are "a mortal threat . .
. more deadly than any military enemy."

* * *

Welcome to the modern-day Luddite movement, which once raged against the
machine, but now targets the automobile. Just last month, environmentalists
organized a "world car-free day," celebrated in more than 40 cities in the
U.S. and Europe. In the left's vision of utopia, cars have been banished --
replaced by bicycles and mass transit systems. There is no smog or road
congestion. And America has been liberated from those sociopathic,
gas-guzzling, greenhouse-gas-emitting SUVs and Hummers that Jesus would
never drive.

It all sounds idyllic, but in real life this fairy tale has a tragic
ending. As Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute,
reminds us, if the "no car garage" had been a reality in New Orleans in
August, we wouldn't have suffered 1,000 Katrina fatalities, but 10,000 or
more. The automobile, especially those dreaded all-terrain four-wheel drive
SUVs (ideal for driving through floodwaters) saved more lives during the
Katrina disaster than all the combined relief efforts of FEMA, local police
and fire squads, churches, the Salvation Army and the Red Cross. If every
poor family had had a car and not a transit token, few would have had to be
warehoused in the hellhole of the Superdome.

This month we paid honor to the heroism of Rosa Parks for fighting racism
through the bus boycott in Montgomery. What helped sustain that historic
freedom cause was that hundreds of blacks owned cars and trucks that they
used to carpool others around the city.

A strong argument could be made that the automobile is one of the two most
liberating inventions of the past century, ranking only behind the
microchip. The car allowed even the common working man total freedom of
mobility -- the means to go anywhere, anytime, for any reason. In many
ways, the automobile is the most egalitarian invention in history,
dramatically bridging the quality-of-life gap between rich and poor. The
car stands for individualism; mass transit for collectivism. Philosopher
Waldemar Hanasz, who grew up in communist Poland, noted in his 1999 essay
"Engines of Liberty" that Soviet leaders in the 1940s showed the movie "The
Grapes of Wrath" all over the country as propaganda against the evils of
U.S. capitalism and the oppression of farmers. The scheme backfired because
"far from being appalled, the Soviet viewers were envious; in America, it
seemed, even the poorest had cars and trucks."

It's not hard to imagine life in America without cars. If you travel to any
Third World Country today, cars are scarce and the city streets are crammed
with hundreds of thousands of bicycles, buses and scooters -- and peasant
workers all sharing the aspiration of someday owning a car. But in America
and other developed nations, the environmental elitists are intent on
flipping economic development on its head: Progress is being measured by
how many cars can be traded in for mass transit systems and bikes, not vice
versa. The recently passed highway bill establishes a first-ever office of
bicycle advocacy inside the Transportation Department. The bicycle
enthusiasts seem to believe that no one ever has far to go, that it never
rains, that families don't have three or more kids to transport, and that
mom never needs to bring home three bags of groceries.

Similarly, there is now a nearly maniacal obsession among policy makers and
the Greens to conserve energy rather than to produce it. Even many of the
oil companies are running ad campaigns on the virtues of using less energy
(do the shareholders know about this?) -- which would be like McDonald's
advising Americans to eat fewer hamburgers because a cow is a terrible
thing to lose. A perverse logic has taken hold among the intelligentsia
that progress can be measured by how much of the earth's fuels we save,
when in fact the history of human economic advancement, dating back to the
invention of the wheel, has been defined by our ability to substitute
technology and energy use for the planet's one truly finite resource: human
energy.

It is because we have continually found inventive ways to harness the
planet's energy sources at ever-declining costs -- through such sinister
inventions as the car -- that the average American today produces what 200
men could before the industrial revolution began. Studies confirm that the
more, not less, energy a nation uses and the more, not fewer, cars that it
has, the more productive the workers, the richer the society, and the
healthier the citizens as measured by life expectancy. When Albania
abolished cars, it quickly became one of the very poorest nations in
Europe.

The simplistic notion taught to our second-graders, that the car is an
environmental doomsday machine, reveals an ignorance of history. When Henry
Ford first started rolling his Black Model Ts off the assembly line at the
start of the 20th century, the auto was hailed as one of the greatest
environmental inventions of all time. That's because the horse, which it
replaced, was a prodigious polluter, dropping 40 pounds of waste a day.
Imagine what a city like St. Louis smelled like on a steamy summer
afternoon when the streets were congested with horses and piled with
manure.

The good news is that environmental groups and politicians aren't likely to
break Americans from their love affair with cars -- big, convenient, safe
cars -- no matter how guilty they try to make us feel for driving them.
Instead they are using more subtle forms of coercion. The left is now
pining for a $1-a-gallon gas tax to make driving unaffordable. Washington
has also wasted over $60 billion of federal gas tax money on mass transit
systems, yet fewer Americans ride them now than before the deluge of
subsidies began. When the voters in car-crazed Los Angeles opted to fund an
ill-fated subway system, most drivers who voted "yes" said they did so
because they hoped it would compel other people off the crowded highways.

To be sure, if the entire membership of the Sierra Club and Greenpeace
surrendered their cars, the world and the highways might very well be a
better place. But for the rest of us the car is indispensable -- it is our
exoskeleton. There's a perfectly good reason that the roads are crammed
with tens of millions of cars and that Americans drive eight billion miles
a year while spurning buses, trains, bicycles and subways. Americans are
rugged individualists who don't want to cram aboard buses and subways. We
want more open roads and highways, and we want energy policies that will
make gas cheaper, not more expensive. We want to travel down the road from
serfdom and the car is what will take us there.

Mr. Moore is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.

 _______________________________________________
Carfreeliving at livablecity.org mailing list
to facilitate and promote car-free living in SF
To unsubscribe:
mailto:Carfreeliving-request at livablecity.org?subject=unsubscribe
or, for all options, go to:
http://livablecity.org/mailman/listinfo/carfreeliving_livablecity.org