Can car companies play a constructive role in mobility’s future?

A gas station at the end of the rainbow, as seen from an Orange County Transportation Authority bus. Do auto and oil companies have any reason to encourage people to use safer, more sustainable forms of mobility? (Photo by me)

At this year’s TransportationCamp DC, the annual “un-conference” at which attendees craft their own mobility-themed sessions, I learned a lot about ways to get things done, such as redesigning bus systems, rolling out (de)congestion pricing, changing federal transportation policy, making streets safer and more usable for people not in motor vehicles, and managing the complex relationship between homeless people and public transit providers.

Given the impact decisions made in the near future will have on our mobility and quality of life for generations to come, it was no surprise that the January event was sold out, with more than 100 people waitlisted.

But among the event’s primary sponsors, who ensured that this year’s Camp – the status of which was in real doubt for a time – took place, stood an entity much more unexpected: Ford Motor Company.

The company’s investment in TransportationCamp DC was part of its Ford Mobility initiative, which it advertises as an effort that, among other things, is “helping cities address the mobility issues that residents care most about: safety, commute, livability, transit, and micromobility.” As part of the initiative, Ford-owned firms operate scooter-share systems, help transit providers track their vehicles, and provide real-time transit arrival data to riders – goals which the event’s collaborative environment furthered.

However, a couple days later, Ford aired a commercial during college football’s national title game that was emblematic of the challenges auto-dependency and its associated stereotypes have inflicted on cities. The ad portrays smiling people traveling by SUV through a dense urban environment. While their gleeful-appearing movement is somehow uninhibited by traffic congestion, at one point they pass a jam-packed bus full of riders wearing expressions as if they’re being hauled off to prison.  

Was this stereotypical ad just a pain point in a genuine auto industry effort to overhaul itself into something more than a drive-or-be-stranded monolith? Or was it proof that the industry is trying to string the mobility-seeking public along until it’s too late to avoid a more sinister endgame?

Honestly, I don’t know. But below, I’ll lay out cases for both possibilities, with the goal of helping us achieve a positive outcome regardless of what’s actually going on.    

Scenario 1: Auto industry leaders understand that their financial future depends on leading the way into a sustainable, people-oriented future, but companies are struggling to fix their old ways

The promising future envisioned at the TransportationCamp sessions I attended could well align with the auto industry’s best interests. Given the realities of climate change, the threat cars pose to people both inside and outside vehicles, and the inadequate and inequitable nature of auto-dependent connectivity, in this scenario car companies have realized that if they don’t find a way to align their financial goals with more efficient, productive mobility, they will go bust. Catalyzed by the industry’s near-collapse in the late-2000s, this culture of change is continuing to evolve in earnest today.

However, just as some bus systems have remained static for decades despite changing travel patterns and new development, inertia also plagues the auto industry in this scenario. Longtime employees are used to producing the ads we’re so familiar with, intended to get people to spend lots of money on vehicles far bigger than they actually need. Accordingly, engineers and financiers continue to produce those vehicles and insist they’ll make the companies money. 

But evidence suggests that this inertia may be eroding. In recent years, the industry has poured substantial money into forms of mobility that don’t conform with the one person, one (or two) car(s) model.

These investments are not limited to support for collaborative opportunities like TransportationCamp. For example, Ford owns Spin Scooters and GM invested $500 million in Lyft, which operates numerous bikeshare systems across the country after acquiring Motivate. While they have not always been successful – in early 2019 Ford shut down Chariot, a fixed-route Bay Area minibus system it owned, while GM has had to scale back its Maven carsharing service – the fact that car companies continue to try suggests that they’re determined to find a mixed-mode model that works well for both their finances and the public.   

      

Scenario 2: Car companies feel they can maximize profit by fending off competition and keeping people auto-dependent for decades to come

The prior scenario sounds promising, but we can use the same underlying facts to support the possibility of a different situation – one where the above-described problems signify the auto industry’s primary goal rather than just temporary pain points, while the more positive-looking initiatives are just a façade.

This scenario would continue a trend that started with the beginning of automobile mass-production last century. Soon enough, revenue was sufficient for several corporations that profit from driving to create National City Lines, a consortium that – while not solely responsible for auto-dependency – certainly did its part to make transit worse during the postwar era.

The likes of GM, Firestone, and Chevron aren’t investing in road diets on today’s hostile, oversized arterial roads using the same gusto with which they tore out the urban rails of our past. In fact, the design of one such Bowling Green, KY 45-mph-speed-limit arterial recently inspired a couple up-and-coming GM engineers to race each other at over 100 mph in their employer’s newest vehicle model. GM surely could have designed and installed an automobile equivalent of positive train control, the speed limit-enforcing technology Congress has mandated installation of on all national-network railroads that move passengers or hazmat freight, before releasing its Corvette Stingray onto public streets…but it didn’t.

There’s plenty of evidence suggesting that, even if car companies provide sustainable transportation a bit of charity here and there, the auto industry is using its power primarily to sustain the culture that inspired that Corvette race in Kentucky, rather than to change it. For example, while the industry received kudos for working with California to draft relatively strict emissions standards, once the Trump Administration pushed back against those standards companies decided not to voluntarily stand by the environment, but rather to jump at the opportunity to boost their profit margins. And today, firms such as Ford, which aggressively boasts about the capabilities of its monstrous F-150s, continue to do everything they can to sell their SUVs and pickups to the public.  

   

We don’t know exactly what car companies’ plans are. Can we control them?

While we know the auto industry aims to maximize profit, it’s impossible to know exactly how car companies plan to do so going forward. It’s possible that there are factions within the industry that envision both possible futures described above and, if so, we should identify those on board with Scenario 1 and do everything we can to ensure they win out. We should also avoid fixation on specific technologies and be skeptical of those who peddle trends or stereotypes too vigorously.   

But one thing is certain: good mobility consists of safely, expediently, sustainably, and affordably moving people in a manner that utilizes space efficiently. Thus, we should keep the discussion focused on those concepts and, to the extent car companies are willing to help provide environments for such productive discussion (like TransportationCamp DC 2020), we should continue to take advantage.