Feel free to live in an apartment in an urban environment. I love my big suburban home(4200 sq ft) on a small lot. In the US we have freedom of choice even tho the powers that be are trying to steal that away.
Actually we don’t have much freedom of choice and suburbanites want to take that freedom away.
The vast majority of residential land is zoned single-family-only, even in major cities like Chicago and San Francisco. We need to free up the zoning regulations to allow a variety of housing options so Americans can have a choice.
But suburban homeowners want to enforce draconian land use laws and limit our choices.
It's not really suburban homeowners who control the zoning regulations in San Francisco... blame the NIMBYs on the board of supervisors, like Peskin and Preston!
I wish you had looked at safety over time and by car size.
It's one of the key features consumers consider when buying a car. And with good reason - car accidents have been one of our leading causes of death for decades, especially among groups not otherwise at risk. Indeed, the risk of death by car accident swamps any but the worst case estimates of what we may suffer as a result of climate change.
I wish you'd look into this, because the data is extremely clear that you are at less risk of death in a larger car. This is intuitive, of course; if you see a large truck in a collision with a subcompact, you know the likely result.
It means, however, that to the extent we have been encouraging folks to buy smaller cars, we have been encouraging them to buy less safe cars. The class implications of this get ugly quick.
“The key cause of death on the roads is human error, which includes factors such as driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, speeding, distracted driving, not wearing seat belts, and failing to obey traffic signals and signs. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for people aged 5-29 years old worldwide, and over 1.3 million people die on the world's roads each year.
In terms of how the USA compares to Europe, the USA has a higher road traffic mortality rate compared to most European countries. According to the WHO's Global Status Report on Road Safety 2018, the road traffic mortality rate in the USA is 12.4 per 100,000 population, while the average for the European Union is 6.9 per 100,000 population. However, it is important to note that there is significant variation within Europe, with some countries having higher rates than others. Overall, both the USA and Europe have made progress in reducing road traffic mortality rates over the past few decades, but there is still more work to be done to achieve the goal of zero road deaths.”
Mobility is a luxury but emissions and pollution is the price paid. Both can be cut with just a little effort ie new car design, lighter emission vehicals and changes in behaviour.
It will all come in time and some might like to encourage it faster.
Hannah’s article points out that we yanks drive almost two times further each year. Is it a surprise that we are two time more likely to be killed? The variation in countries is probably attributable to the relative miles driven. Non?
Interesting use of ChatGPT: I can't find the figure for the European Union in the quoted WHO report. In fact "European Union" does not appear in the text and "EU" only 3 times, none of the mentions being alongside the figure of 6.9, which itself does not appear at all. (This is using "find" in google chrome: past uses suggests it is pretty reliable). My daughter who has tried to use ChatGPT for literature searches says that it invents references. At least the WHO report above is real.
Anyhow, you need to make comparisons with countries with similar levels of economic development and to take into account miles driven per person per year, as Hannah does above. The WHO data of the United Kingdom is 3.1 people per 100,000, which given the higher rate of car use in the USA still gives a death rate double per passenger mile in that country. I made the comparison because I live in the UK. Germany might be a better option. There the WHO figure is 4.1 per 100,000 population. US drivers only drive 1.6 times as many miles as Germans, so the higher German death rate per 100,000 population still amounts to one half the rate per passenger mile of that of the USA.
Except that SUVs flip over more. You may have confused "less chance of death in a collision between vehicles" and "less chance of death in all accidents", including single-vehicle. Cars have recently exceeded SUVs in *overall* safety. But minivans are actually the safest ride, particularly for children.
This isn't about actual safety, but perceived power and dominance. And 500 kids have been killed by the own parents, who couldn't see the 3-foot kid in front of the giant, 5-foot-tall hood. Pedestrian fatalities are up and rising steadily. (And there's no point telling people to get a "big car" when the ubiquitous SUV and pickup truck are bigger still.)
You are describing an arms-race, in which the only safe people are the ones with the biggest weapons. But after everybody has big SUVs and big AR-15s, they are all back to the same safety condition as before.
The extra road wear, the cost to the public of cleaning up all those accidents, easily justify a per-pound tax on large vehicles.
Why would buyers not pay? The whole article is about how they could be saving half of their gasoline bill, which means they're paying an extra thousand a year, most of them - why not add $10/kg, that's $9000/ton to the cost of large vehicles that aren't licensed as commercial? If you're willing to pay $1000/year for a sense of safety, you'll pay another $10K up front. We can put the money into a victim's fund.
Also BEVs are heavier than the equivalent ICE especially long range ones so you would be offsetting the weight taxes with the extravagant EV subsidies just implemented.
No, I promise you I was not mistaken about the statistics. I'm well familiar with the rollover tendency of SUV's. That has not been nearly enough to equalize the death rates between them and sedans for a decades, much less between them and compacts or subcompacts.
I know it's comforting to think that those who behave differently than you are just dominance obsessed weirdos, but it's not the case.
How about buses which weigh about 5 times as much as a large SUV? And if riding in a large vehicle is dangerous why don’t US school buses have seat belts?
The US road accident deaths in 2019 (before the pandemic started) were 36,096. In the UK they were 1,752, one twentieth of those of the US. The US population is five times larger and the number of miles driven per passenger is twice that of the UK, so you would expect ten times the number of deaths, not 20 times. And we in the UK have our share of juggernauts and SUVs, as anyone who drives on our motorways can testify. Our motorways and non-urban roads are much more crowded than in the USA.
One factor omitted by Paul is that people tend to drive more carelessly and aggressively in a larger vehicle, as they "feel safer". I have noticed this in my own driving, when I have had the occasion to hire a van for moving furniture etc.
Worldwide, road accidents are reported to result in 1.3 million deaths. Quantifying climate change deaths is very hard, as there are so many causes of such deaths - starvation due to drought, increased plant diseases, pests and flooding, infectious diseases, like cholera and malaria, caused by flooding, landslides and dam bursts, forest fires, tornados, hurricanes, heatwaves and so forth. And then you have to add the casualties arising from wars over scarce resources, exacerbated by climate change. You could even attribute a certain proportion of the COVID pandemic deaths to climate change: the degradation of agricultural land forces ever more people into "wilderness" areas where they or their livestock come into contact with diseases carried by wild animals (especially bats and birds).
All of these pressure are likely to increase in the coming years and contribute to greater numbers of deaths, so even if they do not amount to 1.35 million, they could soon.
The paper below estimates 83 million excess deaths between now and 2100, but has this very, very important caveat:
".....the mortality damage function only represents temperature-related mortality; it leaves out potentially important climate-mortality pathways such as the effect of climate change on infectious disease, civil and interstate war, food supply, and flooding..."
I would say that these factors are just as important as deaths due to heat, if not more so.
Confounded by the driving population being much more than 5x UK’s. Dont know actual numbers but we have rural 15 yr olds with cars and everyone else with a car at 16. They are cheaper to run here than Uk. Scary to think that UK miles are only 50% of US’s when you consider gas prices to be 4x higher and free cash flow 30% less. Poor sods, but luckily it’s what was wanted and voted for.
Except that UK petrol prices are not 4x US ones. UK: $6.66 per (US) gallon, US: $3.77 per US gallon. Incomes are lower in the UK, though. Fuel costs seem to be price inelastic. I looked at this a few years ago when US prices doubled over a period of about a year, while fuel use hardly altered at all. The IEA publishes these data, which reflect the fact that people have very little practical and time efficient alternative to using their cars.
Using a figure of deaths deaths per 100,000 people takes account of the difference in population size. Adjusting that figure using the differences in number of miles driven effectively also takes account of possible differences in the proportion of the population that drives.
For a reasonably fuel-efficient sedan I pay more for car insurance than fuel, and of the car payment was 3-4x either one before it was paid off. Maintenance costs vary a lot, but a moderate repair can cost the same as 6 months’ worth of gas. I don’t enjoy higher fuel prices, but other costs dominate.
I don't understand your point about the UK vs US comparison. Are you saying that the US rate is higher, even on a per-mile traveled basis, because we drive larger cars which make us feel safe and thus inattentive? I apologize if I misunderstand your point.
It's really only a conjecture on my part and I probably expressed the idea too strongly. The only possible explanation I can think of is that some people who drive large cars may feel safer and that this encourages them to be a little more reckless. It is not a new argument, at least with regard to cycling. It is used by many cycling organisations to oppose a law requiring the use of cycle helmets.
When I was single I felt the same way. Why the heck are people wasting their money on cars. But it turns out large SUVs are pretty great if you have a few kids. Nowadays I appreciate my SUV enough that I can’t agree with any anti-SUV sentiment. But, I am happy to support environmentalism, electric cars and green energy and so on, as long as I can continue driving a conveniently large car.
Transit I completely agree. But do bike lanes make the road safer? I mean, I like bicycling. But I end up using bicycle trails and driving to the trailhead. That way I can safely bike somewhere that doesn't have any cars. The deaths per mile is a lot higher for bicycling than for driving, and anecdotally, in urban areas it seems a lot more dangerous to bicycle than to drive. So I see bicycles as a fun but dangerous means of transport, and I don't let my kids bike in places with a lot of car traffic.
If there were completely car-free places for bicycles to ride, that would be really great. Even like in Amsterdam where bicycles have a separated area where cars can't really hit them. But that seems so implausible, at least where I live. Just not on anyone's radar to build such things.
Kevin, cars and bikes can share the road safely, if bikes have buffered lanes and cars speeds are reduced. People want to commute on bikes, not just use them recreationally on trailheads. Car culture is strong in the US, and most see non-automobile usage of streets as a novelty, not as a normal feature of the roadway.
It sounds like you set up an ideal situation of perfect safety for bikes, which is complete absence of cars, declared it not practical, and concluded that nothing should be done to the current system. I’m in the camp that incrementally safer streets is possible, cars, electric scooters, pedestrians, and bikes can coexist safely, but that cars need to slow down to allow for the safety of other users.
People scoff at the idea of a 15 minute city. The US will always have unique transport needs sheerly because of its size. The 15 minute city is no different than supporting your community butcher, baker, grocer. It binds communities. This was a great article.
Sweden is more sparsely populated than the US and they have high-speed rail and walkable cities.
In the US the key is to build “urban infill” which is typically housing built over a parking lot. Our downtowns have so much parking we could convert plenty of it to housing and solve our housing shortage while reducing car dependency at the same time.
Who goes regularly to a butcher or baker or even grocer that’s not a supermarket? Not many people here. In America the most regular destinations are jobs in offices not close to the home, shopping at various big box stores (widely distributed) to get the best prices, favorite restaurants which are rarely nearby and medical appointments which are determined by your health insurance network. Even with a car my average daily trip is over 20 minutes and walking would take all day.
I do. I would go more often if there were more of them. I'm not a fan of big box stores as they tend to consolidate, limit choice and create food deserts in some areas. You have to instill into the American psyche of living where you work. Our family has done it for 25 years because we both hate commuting. Jobs like construction will always be the exception. We always tried to buy/rent within 25 minutes of work. I try and choose doctors, dentist and schools nearby. Long commutes unless there is exceptional transit are painful and make for bitchy people and crushing family lives. Its a way of re-imagining the future for livability. You see glimpses of it all over the place. Community gardens, walkable areas downtown, squares in suburban areas. It just takes a shift in consciousness. I'm not saying we're there by any stretch of the imagination but small steps in those directions will create desired outcomes.
Two parallels to explore - gas taxes and safety. My thesis is Europeans and Brit's drive smaller cars because the taxes on gasoline / petrol are exorbitant compared to US and therefore fuel efficiency is the number one factor in vehicle selection. Also, Britain is far more densely populated than the US - you can basically drive the whole north-to-south length of the country in 8 - 10 hours. In the US, you can't even get through some states in that amount of time.
The only time I enjoyed driving a small car is in Europe and Japan because of the narrow roads, tight parking, short distances and high gasoline taxes. In America and Australia a bigger vehicle makes sense.
There's another factor at play here, which is that the car manufacturers lobbied hard to carve out an exemption from the fuel efficiency standards for trucks. Truck SUVs are a category designed to fit into this exemption. They are also very profitable for the manufacturers, so are heavily advertized and marketed. They've also become badges of identity. In the eyes of their owners, a symbol of manhood, wealth, success, and, in some areas, adherence to certain political views including climate change denial. Thanks for the reminder of how crazy it looks from back across the pond.
EU regulation limiting CO2 emissions _per kilo of car weight_ didn't really help, especially given the technology required to comply with the regulation is more or less fixed price per car.
It really doesn't matter what the prices are, or the size of cars etc.
The one and only factor is that increasing the CO2 conc. of the atmosphere will raise the temp. of the atmos. and of the surface of the sea, therefore increasing the rainfall, storms, flooding and erosion. Most scientists, like me, think that this will be fatal for our technological world. Only the elimination of the use of fossil fuels will save us. But we cannot easily destroy all internal combustion engines, and all existing aircraft, electric power stations, most sea-going ships, etc, WORLD WIDE, in the next 10-15 yrs.
This means that we must have a substitute fuel, for transportation that is suitable for internal combustion engines, for power plants, for factories, for space heating and cooking, and everything else we use fossil fuels for. There are two fuels available, Ethyl Alcohol for liquids, and Methane gas for all stationary uses. Ethanol is 'easily' made from currant agricultural production, (think wine, beer, and whiskey, etc.), while Methane is currently being made from most human wastes in every garbage dump in the world. (We currently just let it all escape into the air).
If you have a different, possible, solution to the problem, please present it to the whole world, because you know something that nobody else knows......!!!
Cars are one of the leading causes of death in the United States. Our leading cause of death is heart disease, because Americans don’t get out of their car and walk enough.
Designing our cities around cars was a costly mistake.
Hi, would you be interested in hiring a part-timer who can create visualizations for your newsletter? I couldn't help but notice that these charts could be drawn better, and you might be busy to do it on your own, and I could help.
Look at it from the automotive engineer's point of view. In the 70s, saving gas was practically a patriotic fight back against an Arab attack on our way of life. Not only did people downsize vehicles (Nissan, then Datsun, actually ran ads about how this was a whole new generation that wasn't consumerist, didn't need big cars to show off: Yes - the anti-consumer Boomers), but also, the engineers really went to work.
And they worked really hard, and got ulcers, and lost marriages, and all that, and they had amazing success. And, year after year, customers went, 'Thanks; we'll take all that hard work, and put it to our own convenience and need to look big and powerful on the road. None for Mom Earth, sorry...in fact, we'll take a little extra and actually raise fuel consumption!'
So, instead of reducing America's dependence on Arab dictators, everybody had to go to war to protect them, and take 9/11 with shit-eating grins, and sell Saudi more weapons, because we just had to have that lovely lovely oil to feed the Beast in the driveway.
Roy, i do not share your perspective. ...”because we just had to have that lovely lovely oil to feed the Beast in the driveway”
Gas use in UK is just as inelastic as is is here. Prices go up by 100% and the usage remains stubborn. People need gas to get to work and to live generally. With $2+ per liter you’d think everyone would sell their car, but UK traffic jams are getting worse. If we want human efficiency to remain high (aka productivity) we need transportation that is available when needed. Why you need to write “...like America baaad!” Is beyond me. Your history is incomplete, we have a much higher number of towns that are designed around the vehicle but... UK being a bit ancient has far fewer, but just ask “of all the towns built in the UK in the last 60 yrs, how many were 15 minute cities?” Can someone spell Milton Keynes? Self denigration is one thing, national denigration is idiotic
My perspective runs on longer timelines than everybody somehow changing out a new car when gas went up for several months. It takes 20 years to change out a national vehicle fleet. From 1973 (oil went up 500%) to 1983, car size declined sharply.
Your comparison to the UK is very valuable: the UK runs an industrial civilization for 68 million people with 14.6GL/year, or 216 L/person. The USA, 334 million people, consume 135 billion gallons, or 1556 L/person/year, some five times as much as the Brits...who, again, are somehow able to run a civilization with that ration. Obviously, gasoline consumption is hugely elastic, given time for conversion.
“. who, again, are somehow able to run a civilization with that ration”
Is this the explanation for the difference in per capita usage? I live in a suburb of Houston and have no qualms to drive 25 miles to meet someone for lunch. A brit would consider that a long way but partly because the gas, the wear n tear, the parking etc etc is not conducive for a short lunch. Oops, copied the wrong part!
The climate problem is not the vehicles we drive, but the fuel we use. Fossil fuels MUST be eliminated in the next 10-15 years unless we WISH the world to get hotter, wetter and stormier. We MUST start burning fuels that are made from CURRENT biological production. Either that , or the total conversion of matter into energy--(if you know how to do it, do tell us!
There is no reason not to power transport with gasoline. No connection between co2 and weather. I agree that high density traffic should favor electric but that’s an emissions and noise thing in the city
This is why I’m a big believer in urbanism.
Building cities where we need cars as little as possible is the only solution; transportation is the leading cause of emissions in the US.
If you haven’t already, check out Strong Towns, Not Just Bikes, and the Congress for the New Urbanism.
Feel free to live in an apartment in an urban environment. I love my big suburban home(4200 sq ft) on a small lot. In the US we have freedom of choice even tho the powers that be are trying to steal that away.
Actually we don’t have much freedom of choice and suburbanites want to take that freedom away.
The vast majority of residential land is zoned single-family-only, even in major cities like Chicago and San Francisco. We need to free up the zoning regulations to allow a variety of housing options so Americans can have a choice.
But suburban homeowners want to enforce draconian land use laws and limit our choices.
It's not really suburban homeowners who control the zoning regulations in San Francisco... blame the NIMBYs on the board of supervisors, like Peskin and Preston!
I wish you had looked at safety over time and by car size.
It's one of the key features consumers consider when buying a car. And with good reason - car accidents have been one of our leading causes of death for decades, especially among groups not otherwise at risk. Indeed, the risk of death by car accident swamps any but the worst case estimates of what we may suffer as a result of climate change.
I wish you'd look into this, because the data is extremely clear that you are at less risk of death in a larger car. This is intuitive, of course; if you see a large truck in a collision with a subcompact, you know the likely result.
It means, however, that to the extent we have been encouraging folks to buy smaller cars, we have been encouraging them to buy less safe cars. The class implications of this get ugly quick.
Big cars are safer unless you are hit by one.
The size of the roads here warrant smaller cars.
Keep death off the road drive on the pavement.
ChatGPT tells us:
“The key cause of death on the roads is human error, which includes factors such as driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, speeding, distracted driving, not wearing seat belts, and failing to obey traffic signals and signs. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for people aged 5-29 years old worldwide, and over 1.3 million people die on the world's roads each year.
In terms of how the USA compares to Europe, the USA has a higher road traffic mortality rate compared to most European countries. According to the WHO's Global Status Report on Road Safety 2018, the road traffic mortality rate in the USA is 12.4 per 100,000 population, while the average for the European Union is 6.9 per 100,000 population. However, it is important to note that there is significant variation within Europe, with some countries having higher rates than others. Overall, both the USA and Europe have made progress in reducing road traffic mortality rates over the past few decades, but there is still more work to be done to achieve the goal of zero road deaths.”
Mobility is a luxury but emissions and pollution is the price paid. Both can be cut with just a little effort ie new car design, lighter emission vehicals and changes in behaviour.
It will all come in time and some might like to encourage it faster.
Keep safe.
Hannah’s article points out that we yanks drive almost two times further each year. Is it a surprise that we are two time more likely to be killed? The variation in countries is probably attributable to the relative miles driven. Non?
Yes, she mentioned the UK specifically and the area of Great Britain is less than that of Texas
Cognitive dissonance is never easy.
It the biggest hurdle to enlightenment.
Interesting use of ChatGPT: I can't find the figure for the European Union in the quoted WHO report. In fact "European Union" does not appear in the text and "EU" only 3 times, none of the mentions being alongside the figure of 6.9, which itself does not appear at all. (This is using "find" in google chrome: past uses suggests it is pretty reliable). My daughter who has tried to use ChatGPT for literature searches says that it invents references. At least the WHO report above is real.
Anyhow, you need to make comparisons with countries with similar levels of economic development and to take into account miles driven per person per year, as Hannah does above. The WHO data of the United Kingdom is 3.1 people per 100,000, which given the higher rate of car use in the USA still gives a death rate double per passenger mile in that country. I made the comparison because I live in the UK. Germany might be a better option. There the WHO figure is 4.1 per 100,000 population. US drivers only drive 1.6 times as many miles as Germans, so the higher German death rate per 100,000 population still amounts to one half the rate per passenger mile of that of the USA.
Why cite fatalities per capita instead of per distance traveled?
Except that SUVs flip over more. You may have confused "less chance of death in a collision between vehicles" and "less chance of death in all accidents", including single-vehicle. Cars have recently exceeded SUVs in *overall* safety. But minivans are actually the safest ride, particularly for children.
This isn't about actual safety, but perceived power and dominance. And 500 kids have been killed by the own parents, who couldn't see the 3-foot kid in front of the giant, 5-foot-tall hood. Pedestrian fatalities are up and rising steadily. (And there's no point telling people to get a "big car" when the ubiquitous SUV and pickup truck are bigger still.)
You are describing an arms-race, in which the only safe people are the ones with the biggest weapons. But after everybody has big SUVs and big AR-15s, they are all back to the same safety condition as before.
The extra road wear, the cost to the public of cleaning up all those accidents, easily justify a per-pound tax on large vehicles.
Why would buyers not pay? The whole article is about how they could be saving half of their gasoline bill, which means they're paying an extra thousand a year, most of them - why not add $10/kg, that's $9000/ton to the cost of large vehicles that aren't licensed as commercial? If you're willing to pay $1000/year for a sense of safety, you'll pay another $10K up front. We can put the money into a victim's fund.
Tax adder based on weight is not a bad idea. However, it’ll be booed on the safety aspect and will not make it in to law
Also BEVs are heavier than the equivalent ICE especially long range ones so you would be offsetting the weight taxes with the extravagant EV subsidies just implemented.
No, I promise you I was not mistaken about the statistics. I'm well familiar with the rollover tendency of SUV's. That has not been nearly enough to equalize the death rates between them and sedans for a decades, much less between them and compacts or subcompacts.
I know it's comforting to think that those who behave differently than you are just dominance obsessed weirdos, but it's not the case.
Big cars are more dangerous to everyone around them.
How about buses which weigh about 5 times as much as a large SUV? And if riding in a large vehicle is dangerous why don’t US school buses have seat belts?
The US road accident deaths in 2019 (before the pandemic started) were 36,096. In the UK they were 1,752, one twentieth of those of the US. The US population is five times larger and the number of miles driven per passenger is twice that of the UK, so you would expect ten times the number of deaths, not 20 times. And we in the UK have our share of juggernauts and SUVs, as anyone who drives on our motorways can testify. Our motorways and non-urban roads are much more crowded than in the USA.
One factor omitted by Paul is that people tend to drive more carelessly and aggressively in a larger vehicle, as they "feel safer". I have noticed this in my own driving, when I have had the occasion to hire a van for moving furniture etc.
Worldwide, road accidents are reported to result in 1.3 million deaths. Quantifying climate change deaths is very hard, as there are so many causes of such deaths - starvation due to drought, increased plant diseases, pests and flooding, infectious diseases, like cholera and malaria, caused by flooding, landslides and dam bursts, forest fires, tornados, hurricanes, heatwaves and so forth. And then you have to add the casualties arising from wars over scarce resources, exacerbated by climate change. You could even attribute a certain proportion of the COVID pandemic deaths to climate change: the degradation of agricultural land forces ever more people into "wilderness" areas where they or their livestock come into contact with diseases carried by wild animals (especially bats and birds).
All of these pressure are likely to increase in the coming years and contribute to greater numbers of deaths, so even if they do not amount to 1.35 million, they could soon.
The paper below estimates 83 million excess deaths between now and 2100, but has this very, very important caveat:
".....the mortality damage function only represents temperature-related mortality; it leaves out potentially important climate-mortality pathways such as the effect of climate change on infectious disease, civil and interstate war, food supply, and flooding..."
I would say that these factors are just as important as deaths due to heat, if not more so.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24487-w#:~:text=A%20Below%202%20%C2%B0C,deaths%20at%204%20%C2%B0C.
Confounded by the driving population being much more than 5x UK’s. Dont know actual numbers but we have rural 15 yr olds with cars and everyone else with a car at 16. They are cheaper to run here than Uk. Scary to think that UK miles are only 50% of US’s when you consider gas prices to be 4x higher and free cash flow 30% less. Poor sods, but luckily it’s what was wanted and voted for.
Except that UK petrol prices are not 4x US ones. UK: $6.66 per (US) gallon, US: $3.77 per US gallon. Incomes are lower in the UK, though. Fuel costs seem to be price inelastic. I looked at this a few years ago when US prices doubled over a period of about a year, while fuel use hardly altered at all. The IEA publishes these data, which reflect the fact that people have very little practical and time efficient alternative to using their cars.
Using a figure of deaths deaths per 100,000 people takes account of the difference in population size. Adjusting that figure using the differences in number of miles driven effectively also takes account of possible differences in the proportion of the population that drives.
For a reasonably fuel-efficient sedan I pay more for car insurance than fuel, and of the car payment was 3-4x either one before it was paid off. Maintenance costs vary a lot, but a moderate repair can cost the same as 6 months’ worth of gas. I don’t enjoy higher fuel prices, but other costs dominate.
I don't understand your point about the UK vs US comparison. Are you saying that the US rate is higher, even on a per-mile traveled basis, because we drive larger cars which make us feel safe and thus inattentive? I apologize if I misunderstand your point.
It's really only a conjecture on my part and I probably expressed the idea too strongly. The only possible explanation I can think of is that some people who drive large cars may feel safer and that this encourages them to be a little more reckless. It is not a new argument, at least with regard to cycling. It is used by many cycling organisations to oppose a law requiring the use of cycle helmets.
When I was single I felt the same way. Why the heck are people wasting their money on cars. But it turns out large SUVs are pretty great if you have a few kids. Nowadays I appreciate my SUV enough that I can’t agree with any anti-SUV sentiment. But, I am happy to support environmentalism, electric cars and green energy and so on, as long as I can continue driving a conveniently large car.
Now that I have children I’m a big supporter of bike lanes and transit because they make streets safer for all users of the road.
Transit I completely agree. But do bike lanes make the road safer? I mean, I like bicycling. But I end up using bicycle trails and driving to the trailhead. That way I can safely bike somewhere that doesn't have any cars. The deaths per mile is a lot higher for bicycling than for driving, and anecdotally, in urban areas it seems a lot more dangerous to bicycle than to drive. So I see bicycles as a fun but dangerous means of transport, and I don't let my kids bike in places with a lot of car traffic.
If there were completely car-free places for bicycles to ride, that would be really great. Even like in Amsterdam where bicycles have a separated area where cars can't really hit them. But that seems so implausible, at least where I live. Just not on anyone's radar to build such things.
Kevin, cars and bikes can share the road safely, if bikes have buffered lanes and cars speeds are reduced. People want to commute on bikes, not just use them recreationally on trailheads. Car culture is strong in the US, and most see non-automobile usage of streets as a novelty, not as a normal feature of the roadway.
It sounds like you set up an ideal situation of perfect safety for bikes, which is complete absence of cars, declared it not practical, and concluded that nothing should be done to the current system. I’m in the camp that incrementally safer streets is possible, cars, electric scooters, pedestrians, and bikes can coexist safely, but that cars need to slow down to allow for the safety of other users.
Studies have shown that bike lanes make roads safer for all users of the road.
Substack blocks external links but the study is easily found on the internet, and it looks at 12 American cities.
People scoff at the idea of a 15 minute city. The US will always have unique transport needs sheerly because of its size. The 15 minute city is no different than supporting your community butcher, baker, grocer. It binds communities. This was a great article.
Sweden is more sparsely populated than the US and they have high-speed rail and walkable cities.
In the US the key is to build “urban infill” which is typically housing built over a parking lot. Our downtowns have so much parking we could convert plenty of it to housing and solve our housing shortage while reducing car dependency at the same time.
Who goes regularly to a butcher or baker or even grocer that’s not a supermarket? Not many people here. In America the most regular destinations are jobs in offices not close to the home, shopping at various big box stores (widely distributed) to get the best prices, favorite restaurants which are rarely nearby and medical appointments which are determined by your health insurance network. Even with a car my average daily trip is over 20 minutes and walking would take all day.
I do. I would go more often if there were more of them. I'm not a fan of big box stores as they tend to consolidate, limit choice and create food deserts in some areas. You have to instill into the American psyche of living where you work. Our family has done it for 25 years because we both hate commuting. Jobs like construction will always be the exception. We always tried to buy/rent within 25 minutes of work. I try and choose doctors, dentist and schools nearby. Long commutes unless there is exceptional transit are painful and make for bitchy people and crushing family lives. Its a way of re-imagining the future for livability. You see glimpses of it all over the place. Community gardens, walkable areas downtown, squares in suburban areas. It just takes a shift in consciousness. I'm not saying we're there by any stretch of the imagination but small steps in those directions will create desired outcomes.
Two parallels to explore - gas taxes and safety. My thesis is Europeans and Brit's drive smaller cars because the taxes on gasoline / petrol are exorbitant compared to US and therefore fuel efficiency is the number one factor in vehicle selection. Also, Britain is far more densely populated than the US - you can basically drive the whole north-to-south length of the country in 8 - 10 hours. In the US, you can't even get through some states in that amount of time.
Europeans also have smaller roads because their cities were built before cars.
American roads actually have ridiculously wide lanes that encourage speeding and increase traffic fatalities.
The only time I enjoyed driving a small car is in Europe and Japan because of the narrow roads, tight parking, short distances and high gasoline taxes. In America and Australia a bigger vehicle makes sense.
There's another factor at play here, which is that the car manufacturers lobbied hard to carve out an exemption from the fuel efficiency standards for trucks. Truck SUVs are a category designed to fit into this exemption. They are also very profitable for the manufacturers, so are heavily advertized and marketed. They've also become badges of identity. In the eyes of their owners, a symbol of manhood, wealth, success, and, in some areas, adherence to certain political views including climate change denial. Thanks for the reminder of how crazy it looks from back across the pond.
EU regulation limiting CO2 emissions _per kilo of car weight_ didn't really help, especially given the technology required to comply with the regulation is more or less fixed price per car.
It really doesn't matter what the prices are, or the size of cars etc.
The one and only factor is that increasing the CO2 conc. of the atmosphere will raise the temp. of the atmos. and of the surface of the sea, therefore increasing the rainfall, storms, flooding and erosion. Most scientists, like me, think that this will be fatal for our technological world. Only the elimination of the use of fossil fuels will save us. But we cannot easily destroy all internal combustion engines, and all existing aircraft, electric power stations, most sea-going ships, etc, WORLD WIDE, in the next 10-15 yrs.
This means that we must have a substitute fuel, for transportation that is suitable for internal combustion engines, for power plants, for factories, for space heating and cooking, and everything else we use fossil fuels for. There are two fuels available, Ethyl Alcohol for liquids, and Methane gas for all stationary uses. Ethanol is 'easily' made from currant agricultural production, (think wine, beer, and whiskey, etc.), while Methane is currently being made from most human wastes in every garbage dump in the world. (We currently just let it all escape into the air).
If you have a different, possible, solution to the problem, please present it to the whole world, because you know something that nobody else knows......!!!
Thanks for the more sober analysis
Cars are one of the leading causes of death in the United States. Our leading cause of death is heart disease, because Americans don’t get out of their car and walk enough.
Designing our cities around cars was a costly mistake.
Hi, would you be interested in hiring a part-timer who can create visualizations for your newsletter? I couldn't help but notice that these charts could be drawn better, and you might be busy to do it on your own, and I could help.
I love my inky dinky light car. (Kia Soul 2010.) I should still drive less.
Look at it from the automotive engineer's point of view. In the 70s, saving gas was practically a patriotic fight back against an Arab attack on our way of life. Not only did people downsize vehicles (Nissan, then Datsun, actually ran ads about how this was a whole new generation that wasn't consumerist, didn't need big cars to show off: Yes - the anti-consumer Boomers), but also, the engineers really went to work.
And they worked really hard, and got ulcers, and lost marriages, and all that, and they had amazing success. And, year after year, customers went, 'Thanks; we'll take all that hard work, and put it to our own convenience and need to look big and powerful on the road. None for Mom Earth, sorry...in fact, we'll take a little extra and actually raise fuel consumption!'
So, instead of reducing America's dependence on Arab dictators, everybody had to go to war to protect them, and take 9/11 with shit-eating grins, and sell Saudi more weapons, because we just had to have that lovely lovely oil to feed the Beast in the driveway.
Roy, i do not share your perspective. ...”because we just had to have that lovely lovely oil to feed the Beast in the driveway”
Gas use in UK is just as inelastic as is is here. Prices go up by 100% and the usage remains stubborn. People need gas to get to work and to live generally. With $2+ per liter you’d think everyone would sell their car, but UK traffic jams are getting worse. If we want human efficiency to remain high (aka productivity) we need transportation that is available when needed. Why you need to write “...like America baaad!” Is beyond me. Your history is incomplete, we have a much higher number of towns that are designed around the vehicle but... UK being a bit ancient has far fewer, but just ask “of all the towns built in the UK in the last 60 yrs, how many were 15 minute cities?” Can someone spell Milton Keynes? Self denigration is one thing, national denigration is idiotic
My perspective runs on longer timelines than everybody somehow changing out a new car when gas went up for several months. It takes 20 years to change out a national vehicle fleet. From 1973 (oil went up 500%) to 1983, car size declined sharply.
Your comparison to the UK is very valuable: the UK runs an industrial civilization for 68 million people with 14.6GL/year, or 216 L/person. The USA, 334 million people, consume 135 billion gallons, or 1556 L/person/year, some five times as much as the Brits...who, again, are somehow able to run a civilization with that ration. Obviously, gasoline consumption is hugely elastic, given time for conversion.
“. who, again, are somehow able to run a civilization with that ration”
Is this the explanation for the difference in per capita usage? I live in a suburb of Houston and have no qualms to drive 25 miles to meet someone for lunch. A brit would consider that a long way but partly because the gas, the wear n tear, the parking etc etc is not conducive for a short lunch. Oops, copied the wrong part!
The climate problem is not the vehicles we drive, but the fuel we use. Fossil fuels MUST be eliminated in the next 10-15 years unless we WISH the world to get hotter, wetter and stormier. We MUST start burning fuels that are made from CURRENT biological production. Either that , or the total conversion of matter into energy--(if you know how to do it, do tell us!
There is no reason not to power transport with gasoline. No connection between co2 and weather. I agree that high density traffic should favor electric but that’s an emissions and noise thing in the city
I ride a nuclear powered scooter
See
- https://www.torquenews.com/1083/other-side-import-duties-and-quick-history-auto-tariffs-and-us-presidents
- https://www.hagerty.com/media/opinion/how-regulations-made-the-small-pickup-segment-a-dinosaur-park/
- https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/suvs-trucks-killing-pedestrians-cyclists/621102/
Also see https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-anti-consumer-25-chicken-tax-on-imported-trucks-has-insulated-the-big-3-from-foreign-competition-for-50-years/
LORGE CAR