I don't know if I've ever read a single op-ed saturated with clunkier thinking than Fred Barnes' recent peck at progress, "The Way We Drive Now: There’s a reason Washington can’t get Americans out of their cars".
For most Americans—make that most of mankind—the car is an instrument of mobility, flexibility, and speed. Yet officials in Washington, transportation experts, state and local functionaries, planners, and transit officials are puzzled why their efforts to lure people from their cars continue to fail.
The Obama administration is only the latest to be bewildered.
Let's find out who's really bewildered.
First of all, "most of mankind" does not own a car. In 2002, there were 130 vehicles per 1,000 people worldwide. There are more people at risk from car-influenced climate change than there are car owners, much less those who idolize their cars as "instruments of mobility, flexibility, and speed". With the trajectory of gas prices, there may be a fair amount who instead are once again begrudging their cars as vacuums of household income.
Much like when Barney Frank famously asked the crazed constituent at his town hall meeting, "On what planet do you spend most of your time?", we might also ask Fred Barnes, "In what decade do you spend most of your time?" In this day and age, teenagers are driving less, and more are putting off car ownership. Per capita vehicle miles traveled have dropped since 2007. Car sharing has enjoyed a steady rise in recent years. Bike sharing has taken off in several cities. Walking and cycling have increased nationally. In 2008, transit ridership was at its highest level in 52 years, before the recession hit and knocked down all travel -- a recession, Christopher Leinberger would add, caused primarily by a structural shift in housing demand away from the very car-oriented development patterns Barnes archaically defends.
Is it really the Obama administration that is bewildered?
In an astounding show of thick-headedness, Barnes cites the supposed prevalence of "passive" "punitive policies" of parking space limits and "[r]efusal to ease traffic congestion by building more roads". Would someone please tell me which country he is talking about here? Certainly not the United States, where faulty local ordinances mandated an oversupply of parking and where highway expansion was practically the only policy for easing congestion for several decades. Over the last half-century, the federal government has spent $400 billion on the Interstate Highway System alone, which is just a fraction of total road mileage. Contrary to Barnes' fuzzy logic, cities across the country are beginning to implement road diets -- or reducing vehicle lanes on roads that have much more capacity than their traffic volumes demand. Road diets often add bike lanes and center turn lanes, increasing cyclist use and decreasing crash incidence while having little to no negative effect on traffic.
Fred Barnes just hasn't been paying attention.
So he reverts to criticizing Obama's ambitious high-speed rail plans. They haven't worked, Barnes says, forgetting that Obama came to the White House in 2009 and has moved just about as fast as politically possible on his administration's HSR vision. A national system of efficient, interconnected rail lines takes time to build, especially when you have to deal with powerful freight companies, meticulous planning, and the transportation dinosaurs currently misgoverning Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida -- and when our last 65 years of passenger rail policy has been flippant at best and antagonistic at worst, abetting a ridership freefall, from 800 million in 1946 to 29 million today.
Barnes does have a point: cars are convenient, at least in the immediate sense, to many people. I am not going to go into the several situations in today's society that demand cars, or the many virtues of car travel. What's annoying is that, for one, he doesn't hesitate to inflate this short-term convenience into an all-encompassing, and unjustified, devotional to the automobile.
The simple fact is most people prefer to travel by car because it’s convenient, which mass transit rarely is. They can go from place to place directly, choosing their own route and schedule. They can do so day and night. They can stop as frequently as they wish for any reason (do errands, drop off kids, etc.). This phenomenon has a name: freedom.
If this sounds familiar, you may have read George Will's recent pseudo-McCarthyist Newsweek "expose" on how HSR is a progressive ("collectivist") conspiracy. In it, Will fawned over cars the way a 1950s paperback writer might describe stallions in a bucolic pasture.
Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates.
The more annoying part is that Barnes and Will actually seem to believe their climactic declarations, despite how laughably distant they are from reality. The oil dependence/freedom juxtaposition is so gaping that it needs no further comment. Freedom really means transportation choices. But Barnes nonetheless rails on (no pun intended) every alternative mode, from transit to -- God forbid -- "walking paths". "Hither" really means a government-funded street, and "yon" really means a government-funded interstate highway. But Will nonetheless exempts auto travel from the fact that it also does not pay for itself.
The outdated notions that these two buffoons exhume were left behind by most planners and transportation professionals years ago. Cities are returning to a model of centrally-located housing and employment. The decentralized model touted by Barnes, as I mentioned before, was a main driver of the housing crisis. We sprawled, but we are beginning to learn our lesson. We are beginning to respond to that "structural shift" in housing demand: people want to live where they can walk and bike to places. (Contrary to what Barnes claims, cities like San Francisco have actually increased their transit mode split, and less than half of San Francisco commuters take a car to work.)
In a 2006 diary, I explored the extent to which today's conservatism is based on cheap oil. I believe the question is emerging again today, threatening to make conservative views on transportation a death-knell for their popularity just months after the mid-terms. Like the Walker/Kasich/Scott bias against rail investment, conservatives' autocentric mindset will look dumber and dumber by the month.
In the meantime, the country is passing pundits like Fred Barnes and George Will by. Their auto-utopian views will win less and less converts at $4.00 a gallon. They are tailor-made for retiring Baby Boomers but not too many people in younger generations. Fortunately, the most enterprising urban areas will eschew them, opting instead for complete streets, efficient transit, and giving folks the real freedom to choose how they go "hither and yon".