The Problem With Cars

At Slate Andrew Small has lurched uncontrollably towards a conclusion I arrived at 40 years ago:

With 75 percent of Americans still driving to work by themselves, changing over to electric cars looks like a promising step for reducing emissions. But a host of timing and technical challenges stand in the way. Electric vehicles accounted for just 2 percent of the 5.3 million cars sold last year, and Americans are holding onto their cars longer than ever; at current rates, it would take about 15 years for the current 263-million-vehicle fleet to turn over. Ramping up EV sales would require radically ambitious incentives. Many EV skeptics note that the vehicles themselves are resource-intensive to manufacture, and electric cars take about twice as much energy to build as a traditional internal combustion car. And before mass electrification of cars and decarbonizing the grid, Americans will need to reckon with two big facts: The population is growing, and people are driving more.

Just look at California, which has been battling the Trump administration over raising fuel economy standards. On Thursday, the federal government revoked California’s waiver to require auto fleets to get to 51 miles per gallon by 2025. And on Friday, California and 22 other states, along with D.C. and the cities of Los Angeles and New York City, sued the Trump administration over their right to set pollution limits, as the administration eyes freezing federal fuel standards to 37 miles per gallon. In California, 41 percent of the state’s greenhouse emissions are transportation-related.

Even with increased fuel efficiency, climate targets prove difficult to reach. Since 1990, the state’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards have helped reduced tailpipe emissions by 5 million metric tons, and fuel efficiency has grown by 35 percent from 1990 to 2016. But emissions still rose by 21 percent over that period. Why? Because driving—as measured in vehicle miles traveled, or VMT—increased by 50 percent, more than canceling out the technological gains.

The problem with cars isn’t just whether they’re powered by batteries or internal combustion engines. It’s how much we drive. There are multiple reasons for that.

One of them is the Jevons paradox: the greater the efficiency with which a resource is consumed the more of it tends to be consumed. Another is despite technology’s making less commuting possible most of us still commute to work and, despite stated desires to reduce traffic on urban expressways commuting is decreasingly practical. Contributing factors to that are sprawl, fewer routes, and fewer times per route.

The irony of this is that we’re actually subsidizing longer commutes. The ways in which we’re doing that include the home mortgage deduction and subsidizing new road construction. If you’ve ever wondered why we keep building new roads even though we struggle to maintain our present roads the reason for that is who pays. The federal government pays most of the bill for new highway construction; state and local governments are mostly responsible for paying for the maintenance of existing roads.

Even if we were to stop subsidizing longer commutes many of us commute to work because of the freedom and flexibility it affords. That’s where ride-sharing services created new possibilities but, as has been seen in California, a lot of that was based on extremely low wages for drivers. I doubt that Americans will be weened from their cars for the foreseeable future.