Transportation Talk

Monday 1 April 2024

20th Century Limited, Chicago 1938

The systemic problem that cars present to economies won’t be solved by a transition to electric vehicles. But make no mistake, the EV drivetrain does indeed solve both a severe emissions problem, and an energy inefficiency problem, endemic to the internal combustion engine. The recently popular foot-stomping about the natural resource needs to manufacture EV, therefore, can largely be dismissed as a case of whataboutery, or really, a failure to account for the natural resource needs to produce and run cars in the system as it currently exists.

And yet, this is true: the adoption of EV will not solve the aggregate spatial problem created by cars. Their domination has delivered losses to societies in how cities are designed, imposing large and ongoing costs through inefficiency, and an ever-rising maintenance burden to the state. In other words, organizing your transportation system to a point of extreme dependency on individual car ownership, rather than public transit, is one of the worst ideas ever. For example, while California has in recent years done an excellent job building out public rail transit in Los Angeles, the state is still locked in to the same transportation system that developed after WW2. In other words, highways and freeways. Transportation remains the second biggest state budget item, after health and human services, and at $33 billion is expected to account for at least 10% of the 2023-2024 budget of $310 billion. To put that into perspective, that’s equal to about 20% of the US Department of Transportation budget of $145 billion.

A 2015 research report produced in partnership with the London School of Economics, for example, estimated that sprawl—the self-populating, topographical mess that arises when cars are the preferred mode of transportation—may be costing the US economy as much as a 1$ trillion a year. Studies of this kind can of course come to a variety of conclusions, but a graph from that report (opens to PDF) is worth sharing, because its message is so stark: Atlanta produces 7 times the transport carbon emissions of Barcelona.

Another way to come at this question from a top-level view comes from academic disciplines that study growth itself, and the evolution of large systems as they grow and change over time. For example, in the early days Los Angeles much of the westside of L.A. and the San Fernando Valley were still sparsely populated as the city at that time was largely restricted to downtown, and the earliest developments like Pasadena. It’s quite understandable that with so much land to develop, L.A. embarked on a unique dream: the building of a new kind of city, one less composed of apartment blocks, but single family homes. At the time, with such a small population, that project was quite affordable to build, and cheap to run. But after you 10X that program several times the equations begin to change. The next step L.A. took was a fatal one: in trying to escape the looming morass of too many cars on surface streets, it overlaid a freeway system on top of the city hoping that would help. It did, for a while. And then that system too no longer solved the problem. It’s an old story.