Why We Americans Love Driving and Our Cars, and Shouldn't Feel Guilty about It

[CSXrules4eva]

Hey this sounds like an issue that could be raised in my envornmental class. Here is the down low on my opinion about this topic. I love trains and my truck. However, I don't take my truck everywere sometimes I'll get on mass transit if more convent. I do this for the sake of emiting less NOx, HyCx, and COx. I also don't drive my car 1/4 mile down the road to go to a seven 11 or something. It's a waste of fuel, money, and a contributor to the greenhoues effect which enhances global warming.

[Modelcar]

....I never feel guilty of driving a vehicle. If it's legal, no one should. If we're referring this to not riding trains...We'll ride trains when the service is attractive to do so. I've done just that at times already. In Florida and Pennsylvania. Rode the train because I wanted to....Referring to the vehicle, we use them at times because we want to and or need to....Side bar: In the last decade we've had to pay around the thousand dollar figure here in Indiana for a license plate on our auto....After doing that, it's easy to not feel guilty to drive that car. It's not near as bad now as the Excise Tax has been reduced from what it was.

[jeaton]

I don't know who feels guilty about driving a car.

Can you imagine what the feelings would be if, rather than hiding the gas tax in the price of the fuel, drivers received a monthly bill for the tax in the mail. Talk about an elevation of emotions-and it wouldn't be guilt.

Jay

[daveklepper]

The answer to the NY Times is that a dollar spent on transit improvements today does more to releave highway congestion that the dollar spent on hignway improvements, but of course I am talking about congested areas only, not rural areas. One tenth of Massachusetts' land is already devoted to highway transportation. Taking more land for additional highways is far more expensive than transit improvements. It is not only New York and Chicago and other big cities that can benefit from rail transportation, but in nearly every case (very few exceptions, Buffalo poossibly being one), new rail lines have permitted population growth without incease in highway congestion and in most cases have contributed to reduction in highway congestion. Typically, if ten percent of the drivers on a crowded stop and go freeway decide to take the train or bus or light railcar (but very few bus operations entice drivers to leave their cars at home or at the station parking lot and lots of rail operations to just that), then typically the congestion is reduced remarkably and the remaining drivers have a far better time commuting. So the reason cities like Portalnd Oregon and San Diego and Calgary and Salt Lake City are going for rail is not that they expect all the drivers to switch to public transit, but rather that the transit improvements benefit everyone, the transit rider and the car driver.

Anyone interested can add to this and pass on to The New York Times. I have not seen the article myself.

[MP57313]

Two comments:
1. I enjoy driving my car, and I also enjoy traveling by rail. It need not be an either/or proposition, though I do admit I'm in the minority in So Cal.
2. The housing comparison question is flawed. I live in the suburbs, and am walking distance from some shopping and transit. I live one block from a bus stop for MTA Route 444, which goes to LA Union Station!

[eastside]

There is a thought provoking article in the Sunday NY Times magazine on why the car is so integral to the typical American's idea of freedom, and why trying to control it by government fiat is so difficult and even wrong:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/magazine/26HIGHWAY.html
(BTW, registration is free.)

Some quotations:
"I've been converted by a renegade school of thinkers you might call the autonomists, because they extol the autonomy made possible by automobiles. Their school includes engineers and philosophers, political scientists like James Q. Wilson and number-crunching economists like Randal O'Toole, the author of the 540-page manifesto ''The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths.'' These thinkers acknowledge the social and environmental problems caused by the car but argue that these would not be solved -- in fact, would be mostly made worse -- by the proposals coming from the car's critics. They call smart growth a dumb idea, the result not of rational planning but of class snobbery and intellectual arrogance. They prefer to promote smart driving, which means more tolls, more roads and, yes, more cars....

"Mass transit is the cure for highway congestion (A prevailing belief) Commuter trains and subways make sense in New York, Chicago and a few other cities, and there are other forms of transit, like express buses, that can make a difference elsewhere.... But for most Americans, mass transit is impractical and irrelevant. Since 1970, transit systems have received more than $500 billion in subsidies (in today's dollars), but people have kept voting with their wheels. Transit has been losing market share to the car and now carries just 3 percent of urban commuters outside New York City. It's easy to see why from one statistic: the average commute by public transportation takes twice as long as the average commute by car.

"O'Toole and Wendell Cox, a transportation expert and visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, estimate that even if Congress miraculously tripled the annual subsidy for transit, the average driver's commute would be reduced by a grand total of 22 seconds....

"Suppose you have a choice between two similarly priced homes. One is an urban town house within walking distance of stores and mass transit; the other is in the suburbs and requires driving everywhere. Which one would you pick?

"If you chose the town house, you're in a distinct minority. Only 17 percent of Americans chose it in a national survey sponsored by the real-estate agents' and homebuilders' trade associations. The other 83 percent preferred the suburbs, which came as no surprise to the real-estate agents or others who spend time in subdivisions. For all the bad press that suburbs get in books like ''The Geography of Nowhere'' -- whose author, James Kunstler, calls America a ''national automobile slum'' -- polls repeatedly show that the vast majority of suburbanites are happy with their neighborhoods."