Fuel-efficient or not, a car is a car

This Tesla Model 3's electric motor failed to prevent the car from crashing into a pole and taking major damage (photo courtesy of Electrek)

This week, the Department of Transportation and Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a Trump Administration-backed joint plan to relax fuel-efficiency standards for motor vehicles, rolling back Barack Obama’s 2012 proposal to double new cars’ average gas mileage by 2025. One of the administration’s primary justifications for the rollback: better gas mileage would incentivize more driving, and in turn, more car crash deaths.

The proposal has mortified much of the public for obvious reasons, and amid ensuing national pushback experts have largely debunked the traffic safety metrics DOT and EPA cited.

But even before Donald Trump took office, fuel-efficient cars were never going to fix American transportation. The reason is simple: no one – not Trump, not Obama, not even Berkeley’s most radical tree-sitters – can change that even the most environmentally-friendly cars are…well, cars.

Thus, this week’s announcement from DOT has no effect on our fight for more efficient, reliable, and affordable transportation. By promoting better mobility, rather than asking people to make sacrifices, we can do a lot to benefit the environment.

Like all cars, fuel-efficient vehicles let people down. And if you buy one, you’re funding opposition to the multimodal improvements we need.

Tesla Model 3s, Chevy Bolts, and Toyota Priuses may not make driving more dangerous. But they also fail to make it any safer, crashing into each other, cyclists, and pedestrians just as Suburbans and F-150s do. Fuel-efficient vehicles get stuck in traffic, induce stress on their occupants, block bike lanes and crosswalks, traverse highways that ruined once-vibrant urban neighborhoods, and are stored in massive, expensive parking lots.

Some auto industry executives do favor fuel-efficient vehicles, but this doesn’t make them any less of an obstacle to multimodal transportation improvements. For example, Elon Musk, CEO of electric car company Tesla, is a member of the transit-is-crime-ridden cult and has openly tried to undermine California’s under-construction high speed rail line. Musk went so far as to say buses and trains are infested with serial killers (never mind that cars have been the weapon of choice in many recent mass murders), then called Jarrett Walker – a leading force for better mobility today – an “idiot”.

Multimodal transportation is better transportation

Multimodal options such as transit, cycling, and walking help reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, advocates wishing to better these options often cite their environmental benefits, just as backers of fuel-efficient vehicles do for their mode of choice.

Other important environmental efforts, from plastic bag bans to water conservation campaigns, often ask people and corporations to make small sacrifices to further a greater public good. Of course, many people selfishly don’t want to do their part, fierce opposition arises, and all too often – as the DOT-EPA proposal demonstrates – the good guys lose.

Fortunately, we don’t have to ask anyone to sacrifice for the environment, because we already offer better transportation and a better quality of life than the auto and oil industry is capable of providing. It’s been more than 7 years since I first embraced multimodal options, and I’m far better off for it. Call me selfish if you’d like, but I choose to ride trains and buses primarily for my own benefit.

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Some additional notes on this week’s events...

Autonomous vehicles will fix everything…when it’s politically convenient, apparently

Autonomous vehicles have become one of the primary weapons in the auto and oil lobby's continuing war on multimodal mobility. We’re told that these vehicles will eliminate the lion’s share of car crashes and make traffic congestion a thing of the past, rendering options like transit unnecessary.

But the pro-car, anti-transit administration’s 1217-page proposal, which (as mentioned earlier) hinges largely on the very traffic safety concerns self-driving vehicles are supposed to address, first uses the word “autonomous” on p.423. Text on this page describes driverless capabilities as an example of an emerging technology for which “effectiveness against fatalities and the pace of their adoption is highly uncertain”. The word is not used again until a pp.1093-1095 summary of possible incentive programs that could encourage vehicle manufacturers to develop autonomous technology.

The auto industry could voluntarily produce more fuel-efficient vehicles. They won’t.

The Trump Administration is not forcing the auto industry to produce less fuel-efficient cars than the previous standards would have required. However, in contrast to those of us on the multimodal side of transportation, who simply want to provide people the best product we can, car companies are out solely to maximize profit.

Media coverage of the regulatory rollback has highlighted concerns the auto industry has raised regarding the changes, presenting them as part of the public’s powerful backlash to the proposal. But the concerns industry stakeholders have raised appear unrelated to the obvious environmental and ethical concerns – rather, they’re worried that if courts rule in favor of states wishing to maintain their own, stricter fuel-efficiency standards, they’ll face an inconsistent patchwork of regulations, resulting in manufacturing challenges. They could solve this problem by simply producing all of their vehicles to the standards of the strictest state (maintaining national manufacturing consistency), but they don’t seem to consider this a possibility.