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The War on Cars Is a War on Workers and the Poor – Article by Gary M. Galles

The War on Cars Is a War on Workers and the Poor – Article by Gary M. Galles

The New Renaissance Hat
Gary M. Galles
November 6, 2015
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A just-released poll of Los Angeles residents found that 55 percent of respondents indicated their greatest concern was “traffic and congestion,” far ahead of “personal safety” — the next highest area of concern — at 35 percent. So if their city government was working in their best interests, it would be doing something about automobile congestion.

It is. Unfortunately, it will make things worse.

Los Angeles’s recently adopted Mobility Plan 2035 would replace auto lanes in America’s congestion capital with bus and protected bike lanes, as well as pedestrian enhancements, despite heightening congestion for the vast majority who will continue to drive. Even the City’s Environmental Impact Report admitted “unavoidable significant adverse impacts” on congestion, doubling the number of heavily congested (graded F) intersections to 36 percent during evening rush hours.

Driving Saves Time and Offers More Opportunity

Such an effort to ration driving by worsening gridlock purgatory begs asking a central, but largely ignored, question. Why do planners’ attempts to force residents into walking, cycling, and mass transit — supposedly improving their quality of life — attract so few away from driving?

The reason it takes a coercive crowbar to get most people out of their cars is that automobile users have concluded cars are vastly superior to the alternatives.

Why is automobile use so desirable:

  • Automobiles have far greater and more flexible passenger — and cargo-carrying capacities.
  • They allow direct, point-to-point service.
  • They allow self-scheduling rather than requiring advance planning.
  • They save time.
  • They have far better multi-stop trip capability (this is why restrictions on auto use punish working mothers most).
  • They offer a safer, more comfortable, more controllable environment, from the seats to the temperature to the music to the company.

Those massive advantages explain why even substantial new restrictions on automobiles or improvements in alternatives leave driving the dominant choice. However, they also reveal that a policy that will punish the vast majority who will continue to drive cannot serve residents effectively.

How Restrictions on Automobiles Punish the Working Poor the Most

The superiority of automobiles doesn’t stop at the obvious, either. They expand workers’ access to jobs, increasing productivity and incomes, improve purchasing choices, lower consumer prices and widen social options. Reducing roads’ car-carrying capacity undermines those major benefits.

Cars offer a decrease in commuting times (if not hamstrung by city-government planning), providing workers access to many more potential employers and job markets. This improves worker-employer matches, with expanded productivity both benefiting employers and raising workers’ incomes.

One study found that a 10-percent improvement in travel time raised worker productivity 3 percent. And increasing from a 3 mph walking speed to 30 mph driving speed is a 900-percent increase. In a similar vein, a Harvard analysis found that for those lacking high-school diplomas, owning a car increased monthly earnings by $1,100.

Cars are also the only means of assembling enough customers to sustain large stores with highly diverse offerings. Similarly, “automobility” dramatically expands the menu of social opportunities that are accessible.

Supporters like Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti may dismiss the serious adverse effects of the “road diets” they propose (a term whose negative implications were too obvious, getting it benched in favor of the better-sounding “complete streets”). But by demeaning cars as “the old model” and insisting “we have to have neighborhoods that are more self-contained,” the opponents of auto use do nothing to lessen the huge costs or increase the very limited benefits they plan to impose on those they supposedly represent.

Further, the “new model” of curtailing road capacity to force people out of cars is really a recycled old far-inferior model. As urban policy expert Randal O’Toole noted in The Best-Laid Plans:

Anyone who prefers not to drive can find neighborhood … where they can walk to stores that offer a limited selection of high-priced goods, enjoy limited recreation and social opportunities, and take slow public transit vehicles to some but not all regional employment centers, the same as many Americans did in 1920. But the automobile provides people with far more benefits and opportunities than they could ever have without it.

Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. He is the author of The Apostle of Peace: The Radical Mind of Leonard Read. Send him mail. See Gary Galles’s article archives.

This article was published on Mises.org and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Mr. Stolyarov Quoted in Heartlander Magazine Article on Hawaii’s Plastic-Bag Ban

Mr. Stolyarov Quoted in Heartlander Magazine Article on Hawaii’s Plastic-Bag Ban

The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
July 4, 2012
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I have again been quoted in Heartlander Magazine, this time in “Aloha! Leave Your Plastic Grocery Bags at Home” by Kenneth Artz. I encourage you to read my comments there. Here are some of my further thoughts on this subject.

The recent banning of plastic bags in Los Angeles and Hawaii is a gross infringement on individual rights and free enterprise. Entirely harmless and consensual exchanges between stores and their customers are being prohibited, and in Los Angeles customers are being forced by the local government to pay for paper bags that stores would have preferred to give for free. This is a frightening infringement on consumer sovereignty, as it makes artificially scarce those goods which businesses would have preferred to make abundant and accessible for consumers’ benefit.

Freely available plastic and paper bags offer a superb convenience to consumers who may be making unplanned shopping trips – perhaps as a result of emergency needs.  Furthermore, store-provided bags are helpful even to consumers who have brought their own bags – just in case those consumers purchase more items than would fit into the bags they brought. The governments in Hawaii and Los Angeles are forcing such consumers to pay an extra fee because of their unforeseen, and sometimes very personal, needs. The ban and fee are hardest on the least economically advantaged consumers, for whom every penny counts. The inconvenience of the ban and the cumulative cost of the paper-bag fees can make the difference between financial sustainability and severe strain on personal and family budgets.

As my comments in the article make clear, the ban is also repugnant from the standpoint of morality and limited government. The only morally praiseworthy acts of environmental responsibility are those initiated and voluntarily sustained by private individuals and businesses.

This tax on convenience is an unacceptable exercise of arbitrary power. If a government can arrogate to itself the power to prevent mutually beneficial arrangements such as the free availability of plastic and paper bags – then what can it not do? What kinds of petty micromanagement are off limits to cities and counties? What room is left for creativity and innovation among individuals and businesses if the smallest things in life are subject to crippling prohibitions and controls?