Passage of the Day: The Wall Street Journal on the Car Luddites
It’s about time somebody said these things (link requires subscription; bolds are mine):
Welcome to the modern-day Luddite movement, which once raged against the machine, but now targets the automobile. Just last month, environmentalists organized a “world car-free day,” celebrated in more than 40 cities in the U.S. and Europe. In the left’s vision of utopia, cars have been banished — replaced by bicycles and mass transit systems. There is no smog or road congestion. And America has been liberated from those sociopathic, gas-guzzling, greenhouse-gas-emitting SUVs and Hummers that Jesus would never drive.
It all sounds idyllic, but in real life this fairy tale has a tragic ending. As Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, reminds us, if the “no car garage” had been a reality in New Orleans in August, we wouldn’t have suffered 1,000 Katrina fatalities, but 10,000 or more. The automobile, especially those dreaded all-terrain four-wheel drive SUVs (ideal for driving through floodwaters) saved more lives during the Katrina disaster than all the combined relief efforts of FEMA, local police and fire squads, churches, the Salvation Army and the Red Cross. If every poor family had had a car and not a transit token, few would have had to be warehoused in the hellhole of the Superdome.
This month we paid honor to the heroism of Rosa Parks for fighting racism through the bus boycott in Montgomery. What helped sustain that historic freedom cause was that hundreds of blacks owned cars and trucks that they used to carpool others around the city.
A strong argument could be made that the automobile is one of the two most liberating inventions of the past century, ranking only behind the microchip. The car allowed even the common working man total freedom of mobility — the means to go anywhere, anytime, for any reason. In many ways, the automobile is the most egalitarian invention in history, dramatically bridging the quality-of-life gap between rich and poor. The car stands for individualism; mass transit for collectivism. Philosopher Waldemar Hanasz, who grew up in communist Poland, noted in his 1999 essay “Engines of Liberty” that Soviet leaders in the 1940s showed the movie “The Grapes of Wrath” all over the country as propaganda against the evils of U.S. capitalism and the oppression of farmers. The scheme backfired because “far from being appalled, the Soviet viewers were envious; in America, it seemed, even the poorest had cars and trucks.”
It’s not hard to imagine life in America without cars. If you travel to any Third World Country today, cars are scarce and the city streets are crammed with hundreds of thousands of bicycles, buses and scooters — and peasant workers all sharing the aspiration of someday owning a car. But in America and other developed nations, the environmental elitists are intent on flipping economic development on its head: Progress is being measured by how many cars can be traded in for mass transit systems and bikes, not vice versa. The recently passed highway bill establishes a first-ever office of bicycle advocacy inside the Transportation Department. The bicycle enthusiasts seem to believe that no one ever has far to go, that it never rains, that families don’t have three or more kids to transport, and that mom never needs to bring home three bags of groceries.
I’ll go further and repeat a point The Journal first made about thirty years ago: Autos, trucks, and the highways that support them represent the single-greatest mass transit system yet devised. The fact that trips are made only by one or a few persons at a time doesn’t change the fact that millions of people, and billions of dollars of goods, are moved point-to-point, and door-to-door, in safety and comfort, something no other “mass transit” system can claim.
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BONUS: Origin of the term “Luddite.”
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UPDATE: Triticale has good anecdotes on where anti-car sentiment comes from.
