Personal Vehicles

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Typical car advertisements illustrate the strong connection Americans have with their cars. Car ads often feature a vehicle cutting through mountain passes, speeding along coasts, or taking hairpin turns—never with another car in sight. Though these ads promote an association between driving and nature, cars actually threaten nature in many ways. Automobiles and trucks pollute the air with greenhouse gases and particles. Vehicles also create traffic congestion, which leads to additional pollution and prompts communities to build more roads. Then the domino effect increases urban sprawl.

Mass-produced road vehicles pioneered by Henry Ford changed lifestyles forever. Ford’s innovation increased mobility and opened a new world of careers, learning, and communication, but it also soon produced congestion. Engineers worked diligently to design smooth roads for faster travel, plus traffic lights, bridges, and other deployments to keep cars moving. In the car’s early history as now, drivers tussled with the thorny problem of getting around slow traffic. In the 1940s, engineers began planning divided highways in the United States to keep traffic moving; passing lanes allowed faster vehicles to overtake slower drivers. The divided highways, also called freeways, next included overpasses so that
drivers could move through interchanges without stopping or even slowing. When urban sprawl accelerated in the late 1940s after World War II, city planners sat down with engineers to map out more roads based on patterns of trip origins and common destinations. New roads would bring, they thought, two rewards: income from vehicle and fuel taxes and a solution to congestion.

It is difficult to say whether new roads and rails encouraged urban sprawl or urban sprawl created the need for more roads and rails. In either case, additional road-building within the past few decades has not reduced congestion and, in many places, bad traffic has increased. The economist Robert Samuelson has been credited with the theory that “cars expand to fill the available concrete.” People might choose to decrease their driving either because of its environmental impact or due to rising fuel costs. However, Colorado State representative Claire Levy pointed out to the Denver Post in 2008, “The average person can reduce their driving by only a small amount since it is impossible to get to work, school, church, or shopping centers without a lengthy drive.” It seems as if Americans have become inextricably tied to their cars.

Economics influences driving patterns, as Representative Levy implied. Fuel costs often affect drivers’ choices in personal vehicles, carpooling, or mass transit, but housing costs also play a part in transportation. Housing costs near the center of desirable cities such as San Francisco, New York, Denver, or San Diego force families to seek housing they can afford, houses that exist only in outlying areas. As a consequence, the number of commuters and the distances they travel to city-based jobs increase as housing costs in a metropolitan area increase. The USA Today writers Debbie Howlett and Paul Overberg explained in 2008, “To afford a house in a neighborhood with good schools, low crime
and Saturday morning youth soccer, extreme commuters keep highpaying jobs in the big cities and buy houses well beyond the traditional metropolitan area. In California’s Antelope Valley, across a mountain range from Los Angeles, commuters call it ‘driving until you qualify.’ ”

The Zipcar car-sharing program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
allows borrowers to reserve a car online on an hourly basis. An electronic reservation
system remotely unlocks the vehicle at the time the reservation starts. Zipcar offers
several on-campus pickup and drop-off stations. Several cities have experimented with
similar car-sharing programs as well as bicycle-sharing to decrease traffic congestion
and reduce overall emissions. (GlobalExchange.org)

(The New Yorker’s Rick Paumgarten once explained, “ ‘Drive until you qualify’ is a phrase that real estate agents use to describe a central tenet of the commuting life: You travel away from the workplace until you reach an exit where you can afford to buy [qualify] a house that meets your standards.”) Mass transit has had a difficult time keeping up with these lengthening commutes.

Civil and environmental engineers understand that some drivers will not forsake their cars, and taking drivers out of cars may in fact hurt the global economy. The auto industry supports thousands of other businesses and also serves as a major recycler of metals. Many aspects of the world’s economy—a mobile workforce, taxes, jobs, and tourism—depend on cars too much to ignore. Car-sharing programs offer a good compromise to the abundance of single-driver cars. In these programs, drivers register with a car-sharing enterprise in their city and reserve a car at a set location and then leave the car with its keys once they are finished driving it. The next car-sharer takes the vehicle from there. The automotive analyst Thilo Koslowski told the Boston Globe in 2007, “The next generation of drivers
may have a little bit different view of how to meet basic transportation needs—they may not need to own a vehicle.” For the present, car-sharing is not offered in every city so it has room to grow. But car-sharing’s appeal lies in its potential to reduce the total number of cars on the road while allowing drivers the independence they enjoy.