'Strapping us in our cars'

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sun, 02 Dec 2001 10:44:14 GMT
FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED NOV. 20, 2001
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
'Strapping us in our cars'

The professionally goofy Sierra Club has has released yet another report (Do they actually print these things on paper? Don't they know trees have souls?) -- this time claiming to "grade" America's largest cities on how they're doing when it comes to transportation planning.

Since the way most people and goods get transported -- anywhere in America, but particularly here in the sprawling west -- is via motor vehicle, you might think the report would focus primarily on roads and highways, giving high marks to cities that are working hard to get their residents out of smog-inducing traffic jams by building more (and better designed) roads.

But if you thought that, it would be because you weren't payting attention. We're talking here about the Sierra Club.

Actually, in its report released Nov. 13, the Club decided to rank cities by how much money they spent (in 1998) on mass transit as a proportion of how much they spent on highways, awarding low grades of D or F to all but eight of the 50 American cities studied.

(This way, you see, a city gets penalized for every $100 it spends on road improvements to get its residents out of smog-inducing traffic jams, unless it spends a whopping $40 at the same time, building or improving boondoggle "light rail" transit systems, trolleys, monorails, dirigible hangars, or whatever else the alphabet soup "transportation planners" have dreamed up.)

Actually, Las Vegas came close to meeting the Sierra Club's "passing" grade, spending $36.10 on "improving public transportation" for every $100 spent on something the vast majority of residents actually want and need -- namely, better roads. (The actual percentage of Valley residents who resort to "public transportation" -- the popular bureaucratic euphemism for money-losing subsidized buses which actually generate far more pollution per passenger mile than private cars, given that they run mostly empty anywhere but on the downtown Las Vegas Strip -- is way lower than 36 percent. So shouldn't our elected officials be working diligently to reduce that figure at least by half?)

Even the econuts were obliged to give Las Vegas a passing grade of "C," ranking it among the least polluted when it comes to smog emissions per capita. (The only city receiving a better grade was New York City, which has had a comprehensive 24-hour subway system for more than a century, and where it can cost as much to garage a car for a month as many a Las Vegan pays for the living quarters of an entire family. Earth to Sierra Club: No subways in Vegas.)

"The main message that we have been preaching in Las Vegas is giving us a choice, not strapping us in our cars," chirped Jane Feldman, conservation co-chairwoman of the Sierra Club's Southern Nevada Group.

In fact, of course, Ms. Feldman has the coercion coefficient exactly backwards. What upsets folks like the Sierra Club is the fact that -- left to signal their own free choices either with their wallets or in the voting booth -- the vast majority of Americans reject mass transit boondoggles, instead doing anything they can to buy a car, along with a free-standing home far enough out of the center of town to make that car useful.

Ensuring them the freedom to go anywhere they want, any time they want. Grrrrr.

So it's the green extreme that must instead turn to coercion enforced by the central state, arranging for non-elected bureaucracies like the EPA to threaten a cut-off of highway funds the people want (and which actually came out of drivers' pockets in the first place, when we paid our far-from-optional tire and gasoline taxes) unless local officials reluctantly agree to breach the public trust by wasting a huge percentage of those "dedicated" funds on deadly but pork-rich mass transit boondoggles.

(Deadly? Why, yes. The Reason Public Policy Institute reported in April of this year that a new study suggests public transit vehicles actually have higher vehicle-mile fatality rates than private automobiles, just one more reason urban mass transit ridership has declined from 30 percent to 3 percent since 1945, despite all this collectivist arm-twisting.)

"Strapping us to our cars," Ms. Feldman? Good one. In fact, a genuine knee-slapper, given that bike-riding was still legal the last time we looked. And would you also say the government "herds us into churches and synagogues against our will" ... when what you really mean is that it doesn't spend as much tax money as you'd like, erecting public temples to Gaia the earth goddess?

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Subscribe to his monthly newsletter by sending $72 to Privacy Alert, 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684, Reno, NV 89503 -- or dialing 775-348-8591. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at 1-800-244-2224, or via web site www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.

Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

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Re: 'Strapping us in our cars'

Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 24 May 2006 05:15:28 GMT

Americans would be a lot more likely to support, utilize and appreciate public transportation if the true costs of driving were reflected in such things as the gasoline tax, which in theory is supposed to help mitigate the costs of such things as roadway construction and maintenance. As it stands, our massive dependence on petrol has created popular pressure to keep the immediate costs to the driver down, but that doesn't mean the money doesn't have to come from somewhere. If you're going to tout the virtues of the free marketplace, these costs ought to be reflected at the pump, where they will be noticed in the same way a bus fare is noticed.

Incidentally, when citing such figures as fatalities per vehicle mile traveled, it helps to use your brain. If 1,000 suburbanites commute 40 miles to their jobs in the city in 800 cars (a reasonable assumption given the number of passengerless cars spotted on almost any highway), those 800 cars have traveled
32,000 vehicle miles. Meanwhile, 1,000 Bronxites commute, say, 13 miles to downntown Manhattan on one subway train. In this case, this train, transporting 1,000 people, has traveled -- wait for it, wait for it -- *13* vehicle miles. Assume that in each case 5% of commuters, 50 people, somehow meet with fatality. The vehicle-mile fatality rate for those cars becomes 50/32000, or about .00156% fatalities per vehicle mile traveled. Meanwhile the vehicle-mile fatality rate for the subway train is 50/13, or about 3.84 fatalities for every vehicle mile traveled. So, if vehicle-mile fatality rates are an effective means of determining the relative safety of transportation modes, then in this scenario it is almost 2462 times safer to drive to work than to take the subway, even though the same percentage of commuters died in the process of both methods. Something isn't right here. This is an extreme case: 40 miles is a fairly long commute, and New York City is an exceptional case in North American mass transit, but this example clearly shows that vehicle-mile fatality rates are a useless indicator of relative safety of transportation modes. If you want to start talking about passenger miles, that's a different story: in 2000, the passenger death rate in automobiles was 0.80 per 100 million passenger-miles. The rates for buses, trains, and airlines were 0.05, 0.03, and 0.02, respectively.

I'll agree that the Sierra Club's methods for the survey you are so vexed by are flawed -- merely measuring public transit spending as a percentage of roadway spending fails to take effective planning into consideration. Many a public transit system, such as the buses in Las Vegas that you cite, has been doomed to disuse and ineffectiveness due to poor planning and land-use considerations. However, to state that cities should continue to pump billions of dollars into modes of transportation that are unsustainable is asinine. It has been well-proven that roadway construction and traffic mitigation efforts have the effect of increasing traffic, as decreased congestion makes it more convenient to drive, leading to the necessary construction of more roads, the widening of existing roads, the replacement of roads that are no longer adequate, etc.

As a resident of both New York City and its outlying suburbs, I understand the freedom, convenience and self-sufficiency that driving instills, as well as the freedom, convenience and economic and environmental sustainability that a well-designed transit infrastructure allows. In talking about freedom, you are missing a vital point: in sprawling, transit-deficient cities, you are only free to drive, and then only if you have access to a car. To hold up bicycling as an alternative for commuters in cities such as Las Vegas or Atlanta is patently ridiculous (Do you feel like pedaling dozens of miles on a highway shoulder? I don't), and to imply that such an admonishment to "hop on your bicycle" is a solution to sprawl and its attendant transit woes simply lacks vision.

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