Small Car Comeback in US
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 10. 1.05
The Washington Post has an article on the changing automotive market. "We are seeing people who are driving $40,000 Suburbans trading them in on $15,000 Corollas," said Mathews, who manages a dealership in a state where big trucks and sport-utility vehicles rule the roads. "The last 30 days have been unlike anything I've ever seen in the automotive industry." Civics, Focuses and Corollas are flying off the lots - in certain cases they are being bought straight off the shipping trucks - and unsold full size SUVs are piling up (despite all the incentives and discounts).
All that in a market where consumers don't even have all that many small cars to choose from, so it's not far-fetched to predict that the small japanese cars that are coming to North-America soon will be quite successful and that more will come from all automakers.
Hybrids are very hot too (August was a record-breaking month), but sales are limited by the supply side for now. We've also read on many cyclist blogs that there are more bikes on the roads. All of this is far from being enough, of course, but it's nice to finally see some mainstream movement in the right direction after over a decade of things getting worse.
I hope people now realize that all the guilt-tripping and fabulous arguments about efficiency, national security, climate change, etc, do very little compared to simple economics.
The 90s made that crystal clear to me, but it's good to see more people finally coming to terms with that often dispiriting reality.
"I hope people now realize that all the guilt-tripping and fabulous arguments about efficiency, national security, climate change, etc, do very little compared to simple economics."
In the current context, yes.
If we had better governments, it would have an impact on policy.
Once a problem is identified, we shouldn't have to wait for economics to react (because who know when that will be? the dollar value of something often has little relation with its real value in nature). Oil prices have been too low for decades because most of its real costs (including environmental costs) have been externalized and subsidized.
You can bypass the blogs and read about increased bicycle sales on Yahoo:
Bicycle sales boom in US amid rising gas prices
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051001/ts_alt_afp/usstormenergyenvironmentbicycles_051001131528
Indeed, the more we can internalize the costs to the environment, to national security, to climate change, etc., the more "simple economics" will dovetail with those interests as well. That's part of the reasoning behind pollution credits.
It'd be even better if some way could be had to get the cost of a bus ticket to be noticably lower than the cost of using a car. Assuming an existing car owner is having this conundrum...me for instance: my '89 camry gets 33 mpg, my commute is 30 miles each way along a regular bus route (no parking or bridge costs), gas costs $3, bus costs > $5. Economics keeps me in the gasser.
Sam,
Most people don't have a 16-17 years old car and they spend a lot more money on their car than they would on public transportation.
But in your case, yeah, it probably makes sense.
I'm curious to know where you are, though. Bus tickets that cost more than $5 seem like a lot to me.
Live in Sonoma County California, and work in Marin County; both along hwy 101. The sole available bus company is Goldengate Transit...work on teh SMART train is still bogged down.
Double checking their website, I was wrong, my fare for one-way adult is $3.95 each way, still noticably more expensive than driving the Cam'. (the next fare zone is a hop-skip-anna-jump away though...that would make for an odd commute method)
If it's any consolation I do carpool a coworker along the way...and if I can secure a proper raise I will upgrade to a smaller VW TDI to run biodiesel.
Sam,
People tend to overlook alot of the costs of owning and running a car.
You're probably a busy guy, but sometime you should sit down and add up everything you spend on ownership of your car.
A coworker of mine, who lived very close to the train, said that it was cheaper to take his car the 20 blocks to work than the train because the gas was cheaper than the fare. I replied that, sure, the gas might be, but what about the annual auto insurance, the licensing/registration fees, inspection fees, parking, tickets, and the $2,000 he had just spent repairing his 9 year-old car?
You should factor all those thing in, when you calculate the cost of commuting.
BTW, if I lived in a region where the weather was warm year-round, I would highly consider a mid-size motorcycle - fast, fun, slips through gridlock, and gets high mpg.
carl,
if you read my first post right, I was deliberately leaving out such considerations. Most car owners aren't going to suddenly just choose to not have and support a car. But if buses suddenly become cheap enough, many whose commutes share those with buses would likely choose to leave the car at home for a while. If this keeps up, then bus routes will expand (instead of shrink like they have so far) and even more people will take the bus...and sometime thereafter many more will not bother with supporting a car.
If I did choose to not have a car, yes I could get to work for about the same money...but then I couldn't go regularly visit friends and relatives without spending a whole day on iffy frustrating public transit, instead of the hour it takes me now. For that I need insurance and a cheap usable car.
Until puplic transit and other alternatives become much more ubiquitous, supporting a car 'just because' will still be the reality for most Americans. So were back to trying to make the alternatives we have now 'day-to-day cheaper' than the 'day-to-day costs' of a car, not including the later's amortized costs and insurance and maintainance.
Sam,
Availability depends on where you live, but have you looked into car-sharing?
ZipCar
FlexCar
CarSharing.net
That way you can have a car whenever you want one (and you can usually pick a model; ie. Mini Cooper, Prius, BMW, Pickup Truck, etc), but you don't have to pay to buy one, for insurance, maintenance, etc.
mgr,
carsharing is very neat, but no they are not in my range ...yet. maybe soon. I personally am looking forward to SMART:
http://www.sonomamarintrain.org/
mainly because I have just been fed up with the monopolistic oerpriced GoldenGate Transit buses in the past...even thought train looks to be more expensive. Toasts to competition!
"If we had better governments, it would have an impact on policy."
IF we had better governments...
OK. What if we never get them? Then what? Just sit back and let things happen?
Same thing goes for the whole "the costs are externalized" argument. OK. Do you think there's going to be some great awakening where everyone becomes noble and internalizes what they can shift on to others?
This is the point. You can't premise something like the health of the environment on people being "good". I can tell you that even with "good government" (which is a subjective notion), you still can't force people to do what they don't want to do.
The point I tried to make is that economic incentives will ALWAYS trump the best arguments and appeals to conscience. Not in specific cases, maybe, but certainly at larger scales.
I think a lot of people delude themselves with wishing for things that won't happen, then all they're left with is feeling morally superior while Rome burns.
Me? I prefer to accept things I can't change and consider them constraints on the problem.
Laziness is the way of nature - ie, it's natural. Yet how many people complain about it? It's not going to go away, nor should it go away. It's not a negative thing -- it's simply natural. Odd that so many committed to helping nature don't want to understand how it works and work with it.
I'm not harping on you particularly, Michael, but I'm just hoping people will stop and consider some of their assumptions and realize what really works as opposed to what we wish would work.
Joseph Willemssen Wrote:
I think a lot of people delude themselves with wishing for things that won't happen, then all they're left with is feeling morally superior while Rome burns.
Me? I prefer to accept things I can't change and consider them constraints on the problem.
I'm not harping on you particularly, Michael, but I'm just hoping people will stop and consider some of their assumptions and realize what really works as opposed to what we wish would work.
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And yet you propose no alternative approach. Your solution to the problem seems to be to just sit back and enjoy the ride, since you cant change human nature anyways.
"And yet you propose no alternative approach."
No, I didn't mention any alternative approaches in that post.
"Your solution to the problem seems to be to just sit back and enjoy the ride"
There's that word "seem" that pops up so often. Lovely word, "seem".
"since you cant change human nature anyways."
No, you can't change human nature but you can work with it. I thought I made that fairly clear in my two comments.
If people are going to be laziness-seeking and self-interested, then there's plenty of ways to appeal to that. One thing that most people don't ever realize is that profit making, laziness, and nature work on the same principle -- more for less. But often times the "sustainable solutions" we see are the sort that cost more, require more effort or sacrifice, provide reduced service, etc. That's a "less for more" type of solution and goes against the grain.
Carsharing is a good example of a smart solution. Increased diversity of vehicle choices, radically lower fixed costs, and greater ease of use. Cap and trade ideas usually get the incentives right, too. PAYD insurance is another good solution.
The thing is, if one continually ignores what "the flow" (ie, laziness, self-interest, more with less, etc) then one also tends to be blind to the best solutions, instead sticking with "solutions" like guilt-tripping which probably do more harm than good (in that they foment reactionary behavior).
I totally agree with you, Joseph, and the "good government" I was talking about above is one that would implement the kind of measures you are talking about.
BUT, it doesn't mean that things and solutions that go "against" the flow have no place; not everything has to be mainstream, and some people will always go further than others.
"BUT, it doesn't mean that things and solutions that go 'against' the flow have no place; not everything has to be mainstream, and some people will always go further than others."
Yes, that may be true, but sustainability is ultimately a global, long-term issue (by definition), so any esocteric or niche solution isn't acutally solving an issue that large. That's another one of those conundrums - trying to act ethically and in accord with your own values in your personal life, yet acknowledging that in a world of 6.5 billion people, individual action is statistically meaningless.
And, the beauty of solutions that work with the flow of things is that there is no resistance. I can't say it enough that the more radical or extreme or "perfect" one tries to be, the greater the reaction will be against it -- in many cases overwhelming any marginal "good" achieved by the effort to be "good". It's the "I'll get a bigger SUV just to spite your granola-munching butt" sort of reaction that we're all very familiar with.
When you help people to live their lives better (on terms that are important to them), then there isn't the values and political struggle that more conventional approaches encounter.
Does that make sense?
The thing is, many things that start out as "niche" and "out of the mainstream" later end up *being* the mainstream. That happens in all domains; music, technology, art, *isms, etc..
As for being only one person each and statistically almost invisible, I'd say that it's not true that each person has the same amount of influence; all we need is many people of influence and the rest will follow. When a roman emperor converted him empire to a certain religion, it didn't take long. When a few politicians start a war or a social program, it doesn't take long. When a book sells millions of copies... etc
Right, MGR, but what among those things is something we can control? Can we control whether a chosen person or persons takes the initiative to lead on some aspect? Can we control the process of diffusion?
I've lived long enough to see the last "green renaissance" back in the early 90s stop dead in its tracks. So I really don't put much hope into this notion of some sort of "tipping point" that emerges somehow out of random individual action.
As I said in my first post, the movement of energy prices has done far more for things like solar, wind, hybrids, efficiency, etc, than all the actions of people "living off the grid", driving electric cars, biking, etc. Those things are noble, sure, but ultimately we need to accept that they are for our own benefit, and are not going to end up changing the world. I could bike through ice storms in February and I highly doubt some person in a car is going to go "Hey - that's how I want to live my life!"
Instead, what's much more likely is they'll mutter to themselves "but for the grace of God go I" and shake their heads at it, wondering why I'm not relaxing in a vehicle, safe and protected, moving much faster to work and back (not to mention running errands).
But, have gasoline hit $4/gallon, and all of a sudden people will - on their own - start looking at bikes, transit, living closer to work, carsharing, etc. At $1/gallon, there's just absolutely no hope that people would start questioning their car dependence.
And that's just one aspect of daily life as it relates to sustainability.
What you forget is that there are many ways to affect economic factors.
Gasoline has been so cheap because of human decisions: Decisions to subsidize the industry and to subsidize it with wars and to externalize all its environmental costs and so on.
A decision could also be made to raise the price of gas so that it reflects better its real costs, or a "green tax" could be passed and the money from that tax could be given back to people through tax cuts; that way, you either use that tax cut money to pay for gas and end up even, or you buy a more fuel efficient vehicle and conserve, and you keep the money.
A mainstream environmental movement can help get these things passed in government and explain their benefits to the public. It's not happening now in the US, but in Canada, Scandinavia, parts of Europe, Japan, etc.. Some progress is being made (not enough yet, though).