Why Cars Suck
What to do about it and why
Note: any and all opinions are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Cleveland Fed, the FOMC, or any other person or entity within the Federal Reserve System. I am speaking exclusively for myself in this post (as well as in all other posts, comments, and other related materials). No content whatsoever should be seen to represent the views of the Federal Reserve System.
I’ve recently come around on something: the NUMTOTs are right about cars. They suck. I used to be passive about them. Obviously they aren’t that great for the environment, but electric cars show promise, right? Traffic sucks, but how else are many of us supposed to get to work, especially outside of cities with large public transportation systems? It turns out that cars, already known to be bad, are actually really horrible. We should get going on discouraging them and designing a world in which cars are not the necessity.
What’s wrong with cars?
I. They’re horrible for our health
Cars are (and contain) engines of destruction. From personal health to the environment, cars have a remarkable ability to harm both us and our surroundings.
Cars emit three main physical pollutants: PM 2.5, NO2, and benzene. The level of these pollutants is dependent on the number of polluting vehicles; more vehicles, more pollution. Many are aware of the health consequences of being around these air pollutants (i.e. asthma and other respiratory illnesses), but they have cognitive effects as well. Even when controlling for other relevant factors, children who go to school near highways perform less well on standardized testing and have higher incidences of neurobehavioral dysfunction (see this, this, and this). At least one study even found that transitory exposure to PM 2.5 does not just stunt exam performance but can even reduce earnings and educational attainment many years down the line. Air pollution from cars also can also lead to behavioral issues in children.
A non-chemical pollutant emits from cars, too: noise. Noise pollution can have just as severe effects as chemical or physical pollutants. This is an issue more prominent in urban areas than suburbs, though suburban areas are still not free from it. Higher levels of noise pollution are associated with increased incidences of ADHD symptoms in children and can cause “cardiovascular disease, social handicaps, reduced productivity, negative social behaviour, annoyance reactions, absenteeism and accidents”. Noise in combination with air pollution reduces child memory spans and slows reaction times.
Not all of these issues are fixed by electric cars either. PM 2.5 is emitted by brake usage and tire contact with the street, two unavoidable aspects of driving.
II. They’re horrible for the environment
The transportation sector is the largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. The biggest subcomponent is passenger cars. Who is at fault for this?
The issue is not necessarily in cities, but in their surrounding areas. Cars encourage horizontally designed suburban communities, which use space ridiculously inefficiently and require more roads to connect a smaller number of people compared to if suburbs had built up instead of out. Horizontal community design works (and may be necessary or only make sense) in rural communities, hence why the far left side of the map above is as green as the cities. However, horizontal design in the immediate suburbs of these areas is an environmental disaster. It not just encourages car usage (an endless cycle), as people live too far from places they need to go, but also creates more roads. Roads themselves can begin emitting PM 2.5 pollution on hot days and radiate heat back into the atmosphere.
Horizontal communities also require more electricity, use more materials in their construction, lead to energy inefficiencies, and alter natural weather patterns, such as stormwater runoff and forest fires.
Electric vehicles are nice, but not perfect. Mining cobalt and lithium, both critical for electric vehicle batteries, is a dangerous, unhealthy, and environmentally unsound practice. Further, electric vehicles emit only 3% less PM 2.5 (electric equivalents of diesel vehicles emit only 1% less), and their added weight leads to marginally more PM 10 emissions per mile.
III. They encourage bad land use
I touched on this above: cars enable and encourage horizontal community development. This is not bad only due to their effect on the climate. Horizontal communities also encourage spacial misallocations of labor due to high living costs. They price out potential residents. Bedroom communities spring up, in which one lives outside of the city to commute (typically by car) to work, and over time these bedroom communities have become safe havens of NIMBYism. Cars have enabled these kinds of communities to exist, and now incentivize further development of more.
It would be a different thing if these communities had been built with public transit in mind. They clearly were not. The two neighborhoods below have similar demographic characteristics, including population. However, the one on the right is more than four times the size of the left, with convenient access to the Road to Hell (aka, a highway). The neighborhood on the left makes sense when developers expect residents to walk to some form of public transportation and take that to work (if they do not already work within walking distance). The neighborhood on the right makes sense if the developer expects you to have a PM 2.5 machine that you destroy the minds of you and your neighbor’s children with on your way to the supermarket. Over time, more and more developments like the one on the right have popped up, with the remaining ones like the one on the left becoming increasingly NIMBYstic.
Encouraging horizontal sprawling developments has large economic effects due to how is lowers job density. Density brings clusters, and clusters are great due to how they attract bright minds and let them interact. Job density has continued to climb in the United States, but a Brookings study found that 90% of the increase in American job density is thanks to New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle alone. Only 48 out of the 94 large metro areas they studied actually experienced an increase in job density between 2004 and 2015. Outside of cities, job density is slowing, if not declining. Far from the only contributor to this, cars have regardless enabled and encouraged work to spread out.
What should we do about it?
Somewhat literally, your mileage may vary depending on where you live. Some communities cannot live without cars, particularly those that are neither urban nor suburban. Urban communities have easier options. Cars should be discouraged as much as possible in cities. Tolls and parking fees should be increased to better reflect the externalities and costs of cars within city limits. More housing should be built within cities to allow workers to live closer to their workplace. The high cost of living in most cities explained 22% of the college wage premium in 2000; we can only imagine how much it would explain now, but we do know that it is pricing many out of living closer to work, particularly those without college degrees.
Urban streets should encourage pedestrian use, by foot and by bicycle. Bicycles extend the length of a reasonable commute by human energy and avoid the pollutant problems of cars. Public transportation should be improved and expanded. All of these in combination with denser housing (and mixed-use development) would go a long way toward not only making our cities better and more livable places, but also toward rendering cars pointless. No longer would one need to drive to the train station to go to work, school, or shopping. Long rides on public transit may discourage many from using it, but if they could reasonably move several stops down the line they might find the shorter journey more tolerable.
In essence: city designers should still be reading Jane Jacobs and The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
What about the suburbs?
The suburbs pose a different and more difficult challenge. Public transportation has broadly been forgotten about in many suburban communities. Some suburbs have bus routes, but they often stop at inconvenient places and bring people around commercial centers or into a city more than they provide reasonable car-free transportation around town. Buses are also air and noise polluters, of course.
The reality is that most suburban design has been a great mistake, and a mistake enabled by the car. Here is my town from above:
This is a place built for cars. It is impossible to live here and not own a car. Almost every building seen here is residential. I can walk to a supermarket only by making a 40 minute round trip and crossing a major local road. Next to nobody lives within walking distance of work — and that’s assuming they work here and not out of town, as many if not most do. (For reference, this is in the red zone of southern New Jersey, east of Philadelphia: a red/orange zone in the Brookings map above.) It would be impossible to discourage cars here in as nearly an effective way as in cities. But what can be done?
If cities were to allow sufficient housing to be built for rents to fall, many suburban residents might consider moving. Many around here drive to work in Philadelphia (a roughly 25 minute drive, depending on where you start and end), and one can only guess how many would live in the city or closer to it if it were only more affordable.
Recent research has shown that the extreme costs premiums of city residences varies with distance to the city center. For example, X and Y found that in Philadelphia, restrictive zoning regulations added $236,815 in value per square acre of land within 15 minutes of the city, on average. However, from 15 to 30 miles away the extra land value added from regulations is only $32,771 per acre, on average. My town, shown above, is on the border of the 15 mile radius around Philadelphia. If Philadelphia were to ease restrictions and shift that $236,000 number down, housing would become more affordable and many might relocate closer to the city and drive less.
Better public transportation is always welcome, but a train line direct to Center City Philadelphia already runs through here, but many wind up either driving to the train station as they live too far away or they drive into the city anyway. More housing in Philadelphia would help alleviate that pressure, but land use reform would help too.
Mixed-use development should be encouraged to the maximum. If people can live near where they work, shop, and socialize, cars are not needed as much. More high density housing should be built in suburban communities (a challenge here as in many other places due to NIMBYs), but not only high density housing. Building lots of high density housing in the suburbs with nothing else only brings in more car users. Business must also be allowed and encouraged to come into suburban areas and intertwine with high density housing communities.
This does not change the fact that the design of many relatively newer suburbs, like my own, was a mistake. There is no perfect solution, but zoning reform in urban communities and their suburban satellites is a good place to start. The mistake must also not be allowed to be repeated. New developments and neighborhoods should be built with mixed-use development in mind with the ultimate goal being to deter cars as much as possible.
Basically, this is what our benchmark should be, what us citizens of suburbs and cities ought to strive for:
This should be the future liberals want if we care about the environment, our health, our minds, our children, our society, our economy, and our communities.