Most social and economic data end up telling predictable stories; shockingly, income and education are correlated! Poverty and crime go hand-in-hand! Abstinence Only sex education doesn't work! We see "studies" and "reports" that reveal these facts get emailed and passed around Facebook, resulting in a collective well-duh response that reinforces what common sense tells us. I don't really get interested until the data tell us the opposite of what we expect. For example, how many of you would have guessed that the United States trails nearly the entire industrialized world in car ownership (including leases) per capita? Don't lie. You thought we were #1 too. Don't worry, though. Despite being far from #1 in that category, we still use more than twice as much energy per capita than even the energy hungry countries of Western Europe.
How can it be that America, the land where profligate energy consumption is treated as a birthright, has fewer cars per capita than pansy-ass France? This is America, land of the SUV and the morning commute and the culture of car worship. This is a country that never saw a public transportation proposal it liked. We have to have the most cars. Hell, in most cities and towns in this country it's practically impossible to accomplish the basic tasks of life without a car these days. So what's the deal?
As the first link (from The Atlantic) suggests, part of the problem is economic inequality; we'd probably own more cars if we could afford it. This is supported by data reported widely earlier this year that the average age of cars on the road in the U.S. has never been higher. That's a clear sign that we're modifying our consumption to reflect unemployment, underemployment, lower wages, and uncertainty about the future.
How do we manage to use so much more energy if we have fewer cars? While the obvious answer is that we drive bigger, less efficient cars – and believe me, we do – the more pressing fact is that we drive more. Europeans have smaller cars (much to Americans' amusement) and don't drive them as often or as far. The daily drive from the suburbs to Downtown might be a staple in the American suburbs but is not common elsewhere. Even if we all drove tiny Euro-style hatchbacks we'd still use far more energy per capita because miles driven per capita are off the charts here.
Nothing quite like unexpected results to force us to confront our new economic reality. Luxury car sales are still going strong, though! So there's that.
argh says:
It's not true- that graph only lists cars, and leaves off pickup trucks and SUV's. We're still #1 in car pollution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_per_capita
(well technically #2 if you count Monaco)
Diamond Dave says:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_per_capita
shows USA at #2 with 800 and change vehicles per capita. Heavy trucks and buses can't possibly account for the ~350 difference from the articles numbers so I'm inclined to believe the author is misinterpreting the data.
Talisker says:
@Diamond Dave: "Per capita" is per individual person, so 0.8 vehicles for the USA. 800 per capita would be a bit much even for the Americans. :-)
Interestingly, 20% of the US population is aged 14 or under, so there is almost exactly one vehicle in the USA per resident of "driving age":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
Canada has plenty of suburban sprawl and these days is more prosperous than the USA, but still gets by with 0.62 vehicles per capita. Shows what could be done if US policymakers gave a damn about alternatives to driving.
Tim H. says:
And if we could afford it, we'd buy more economical, less polluting cars. Greens don't seem to get that economic stagnation has relevance to their cause.
c u n d gulag says:
Back in the 80's I loved living in NY City when I worked there. I grew up in Upstate NY, where, if you might as well be dead, if you don't have a car.
I didn't have to have a car in NY City. I took the subway into Manhattan, and walked around a lot. I took buses, taxi's. But I mostly walked.
One time, some friend asked me to look after their car while they went on vacation.
At first, I thought, "COOL!"
Then, I realized you have to move the car every morning before 7am, so the streets can be cleaned. And almost no TV show has ever shown what the street of NY look like at 6:55, with people running out of apartments as if the whole city is being evacuated – all to try to find a spot on the opposite side of the street.
And good luck going out on Sunday night, and finding a parking space anywhere near where you live after 10pm, when everyone has settled in their apartments and homes, ready to go back to work on Monday. It took me over an hour to find a spot, and it was over a half-hour walk away.
I told my friends, next time they go anywhere, either find some other sucker, or pay for a garage.
We need to look at how and where we live, and how we get to work and play.
A lot of times, it may be better to build UP in, than to build OUT around, a lot of metropolitan area.
Owning a home, with or without a picket fence, and a yard is a whole lot of work, and very over rated.
Give me that apartment in a city, where almost everything you need is in walking distance.
Freeportguy says:
Having worked in Europe, I can attest that traffic jam AND especially parking scarcity and fees all make it more practical, economical and less stressful to use suburbs trains and city public transportation. Consider that London even has an access fee for cars.
Major Kong says:
Most European cars are diesels with manual transmissions. So even a European car of equivalent size will get better mileage.
The last time I was in France I rented a Renault Laguna, which is a good sized car by French standards. I'd say about the same size as a VW Passat or a Chevy Impala.
After converting from metric, I was getting 40+ mpg while running at French highway speeds. The speed limit is 130 kmh (80 mph) and most people are running closer to 90 mph.
Doctor Couth says:
Our national fondness for clown-car style families as opposed to reproducing below the level of natural increase skews the results (per talisker).
Talisker says:
@Doctor Couth: I'm not sure what you think is being "skewed". But the USA has an average of 2.06 children per woman — very near replacement level.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
sluggo says:
The author obviously did not take into account all the houses on wheels in West Virginia.
sluggo says:
Nor the cars without wheels in the front yards all over Alabama.
Kulkuri says:
One reason the average age of cars on the road is up is that cars are lasting longer. When I was young, if a car made it to 100,000 miles without the engine being rebuilt it was quite the accomplishment and cause for celebration. Now people don't think twice about buying a used car with 100,000 miles on it, most people usually just think most of the bugs have been worked out. Also if the drive train held up, the body rusted and fell apart, so there were fewer old cars on the road as many of them were in the junkyards.
Does that energy use include all the trucks hauling stuff around the country. It takes a lot of fuel to haul that cheap Chinese crap from the ship to your local store.
Hobbes says:
People look at me like I'm nuts when I express my extreme desire to never own a vehicle again. I might crack and buy a motorcycle if I end up living somewhere really really far away from everything, but honestly I like biking enough that I don't think that's going to be an issue, and I much prefer living in the middle of a [city/town] where there are sufficient things in walking or biking distance.
Today I biked to work. I live across the street from a (somewhat high-end) grocery store, and there's another less high-end one on my ride home if I need slightly cheaper things. The airport is on the city bus line; I'll be taking a coach bus from campus to Chicago on Friday (there's also one to Minneapolis). It's pretty fantastic how little one actually needs a vehicle here, if one's got the patience.
Eric Titus says:
The World Bank has data on Vehicles per capita since 2003, which shows that it's been staying pretty steady for the past 10 years.
If you look at the numbers by state, there's actually a lot of variation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_vehicles_per_capita
Some of the variation is probably due to where people/cars get licensed, since it's surprising that Colorado would only have .35 cars per person, but other wealthy states with good public transit (i.e. New Jersey, New York) are low on the list. I wonder to what extent the surprisingly low numbers (compared to the national avg) for states like Texas, Indiana, and Arkansas are a result of inequality.
Michael says:
Yes, that linked story and study have it completely wrong; the U.S. has way more passenger vehicles per capita than anywhere in the world (except Monaco, apparently), they just happen to be passenger vehicles that are nominally classified as light trucks.
Carnegie and the Atlantic should be ashamed and completely retract these stories. They got it wrong.
Middle Seaman says:
European mostly drive gasoline powered stick shifts although diesel is widely used as well. Apartment living is the rule in most big cities. Public transportation in the form of buses, trolleys, trains and subways is commonplace. Cities such as Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Berlin have each many thousands of bicycle riders. Berlin, for instance, has almost no traffic jams.
All that saves energy.
Despite endless commutes, no one really cares about improving transportation. Four hours a day is a terrible waste of quality of life. Yet, it has been the rule for at least three decades and it is getting worse.
sluggo says:
@ Eric Titus
I suspect that one factor is a lower average age……little kids don't own cars.
blahedo says:
The Atlantic author has published a clarification that says he's including "all "passenger vehicles," which means cars, pickup trucks, SUVs, and minibuses." So that's not it. But clearly, there's something going on; this is a factor-of-two disparity between the source cited in the Wikipedia article and the one for the Atlantic article.
Ed says:
Wow, some of you really blow at reading:
"Some confusion in the comments about what kinds of vehicles are counted in the rankings. I respond below, but the gist is that this data includes all "passenger vehicles," which means cars, pickup trucks, SUVs, and minibuses. It does not include commercial freight trucks or buses with over nine seats,"
blahedo says:
Ok, so the WP link was stale because there's a new edition out, so I updated the WP page and am now looking at the 2012 edition of the DoE's data: http://cta.ornl.gov/data/download31.shtml . The relevant stats are in Chapter 3.
In Table 3.6, we see the money stat, which is 812 "vehicles" per 1000 people in 2010, down from a peak of 844 in 2007.
In tables 3.2 and 3.3 we see the vehicle totals for cars (3.2) and trucks (3.3), along with caveats that the latter table includes personal vehicles (pickups, SUVs) in the US to an extent much greater than in other countries. The 2010 totals are roughly 119K and 121K respectively, which would each account for around 400 vehicles per 1000 people (assuming 300M people).
Now, I think that the truck total of 121K includes things like freight trucks and city buses and such, which Fisher (the Atlantic author) says are excluded from his totals. But, the fact that the DoE's cars-not-including-SUVs-and-pickups number (around 400 per thousand) lines up so well with the Atlantic author's number (439 per thousand) is certainly suspicious, since it would indicate that pickups and SUVs make up less than a tenth of all individual-type vehicles.
The alternative explanation that admits Fisher's numbers and also accounts for the DoE numbers is that US freight-truck-and-public-transit vehicles are vastly more common than, say, Germany. If US cars are 400 per thousand (DoE) and all individual vehicles are 440 per thousand (Fisher), then SUV-type trucks are 40 per thousand (and freight/public trucks are 360 per thousand). But the Germany numbers from the DoE tables, divided by 82M for the German population, give a car total of 512 per thousand and a truck total of only 36 per thousand. The Germans have a strong industrial economy and great public transit, so are their truck-and-bus needs really only a tenth of ours in the US?
Elle says:
I am a distinctly inelegant cyclist, and especially admire the Dutch for their prodigious abilities to traverse a whole city with a basket of books, a bunch of flowers, and a baguette, without incident. The sweetest thing about the Netherlands is seeing bakfietsen everywhere, with gorgeous Dutch children in them. Dutch girls also seem to learn how to balance sidesaddle on the back of a bike, so when they're grown up they can perch insouciantly on the back of their friend's / girlfriend's / boyfriend's ride.
I don't think I've driven our car for a few weeks, but my city pales into transport inefficiency compared to places like Geneva. There, you arrive into the airport, and get a pass that covers a free train journey to the main station, and then a connection via tram (or train or bus, I think?) to wherever you're going. Your hotel gives you a pass that covers the duration of your stay and gets you back to the airport. There are a squillion trams and everything is fantastically easy to use.
JohnR says:
"I don't really get interested until the data tell us the opposite of what we expect." Yup – that's when the fun really starts. Are the data wrong? Is the interpretation wrong? Were my expectations wrong? Sometimes the solution is obvious and simple, but sometimes it takes some really fascinating digging to winkle out, and it usually teaches something. I use a variation of that as a crude initial assessment – I don't usually accept any claim offhand that supports a viewpoint the claimant is known or expected to hold. On the other hand, I'm likely to provisionally accept a claim that runs counter to what I would expect from that source. As for common sense, my experience is that it's vastly over-rated both to its frequency and its sense.
Anonymouse says:
@ MiddleSeaman: don't forget the right-wing claim that bicycles are more polluting than cars, because bicyclists peddling hard emit more carbon dioxide than riders in a car.
mothra says:
@ MiddleSeaman: don't forget the right-wing claim that bicycles are more polluting than cars, because bicyclists peddling hard emit more carbon dioxide than riders in a car.
Never heard THAT one. I know that right-wingers get mad about paying for bicycle facilities because LIBERAL.
Nick says:
Bike lanes = creeping socialism. If you loved America, you'd buy a Hummer. Commie.
Elle says:
Not that there aren't abundant reasons not to buy one, but I really don't understand how anybody manages to park those.
mel in oregon says:
our culture is different than france. you see all these huge SUVs driven by a guy 60 or more who sees his grankids once a month & is retired. then you have some guy with a smart car, a 42 foot motor home, a huge pickup & another giant SUV. of course gw bush gave a huge taxcut if you bought a hummer. americans as a general rule are conservative as hell, know-it-alls, ignorant as hell & very stupid. that's why we are in the mess we are in. oregon though has the most bicycles per capita, the least amount of people that go to church, & probably more people that love the great outdoors than any other state. i like to hunt & fish, don't care for religion, & like living in the most progressive state.
Bernard says:
gosh, with all this right wing bashing, i'd think this was an left wing site. lol
they tore up all the street cars in New Orleans, and from what my parents told me, they went everywhere.you can still see pieces of old tracks around town. doing away with streetcars was part of the great "sell" of American PR marketing. also limits the ability to the poor aka "the Other" from upseting the "good life" sold by Madison Ave.
only now are they ripping the streets up and re laying the street car tracks. though, the train companies won't give the right of way anymore to allow what could be done.
they still own the streets. and cars are what is the way we are told how to get around. Bikes are just a socialist communist attack on the American Way.
next thing you know they will want to have socialized Medicine here!! the nerve of these people!
Major Kong says:
I'd love to ride my bike more for short errands.
Unfortunately the way the roads are set up, I'd have to get on a major highway and take my life in my hands just to get to the grocery store that's a mile from my house.
So I'm put into the ludicrous position of having to put my bike on the car and drive to some place I can ride my bike.
Haydnseek says:
@Elle. The Hummeristas find them quite easy to park. They simply take up several spaces, and if someone objects, then fuck you because FREEEEEEDOM. I NEED this vehicle because it snowed at the 200 foot level in Los Angeles County in 1954. It was only one-quarter inch, BUT STILL. Look, you have the legal right to purchase and operate this monstrosity. I have the moral right to call you a fucking asshole.
Ellie says:
This is sort of a tangent, but since we're talking about bikes….
I don't like bikes. There, I said it: The liberal heresy. I don't really think very much of bikes as an "alternative" form of transportation.
By which I mean, it's not that I don't think they can be lots of fun (if you're into them) and can work as one kind of transportation alternative among others for some people under some circumstances, BUT….
I kind of feel like they are a distraction from any kind of a real solution, but which I mean, public transportation and massive zoning changes in favor of high-density urban centers. Which isn't likely to happen, I know…which is maybe why everyone likes to talk about the simpler non-solution of bikes?
The problem with bikes is, lots of people can't use them. People with certain health problems or disabilities can't use them. People who need to move other people – a parent toting a couple of small kids, a grown kid toting an elderly sick parent – can't use them. They're not practical if you have to carry a bunch of heavy groceries or other stuff. People who sweat a lot and don't want to arrive at their destination smelling like a locker room can't use them. (And please don't tell me "once you get used to it, you won't sweat!" Maybe you won't sweat – but trust me, I sweat. Always.) They're impractical for anyone wearing a skirt, stockings and heels. They're dangerous in the ice and uncomfortable in the heat.
And yet, the left seems so enamored of bikes – "Oh, if only everyone would just embrace bikes, all would be well!" And when I try to point out that bikes are maybe not such a democratic solution, since there are lots of people and lots of situations where they just don't work, I usually get vilified.
Massive investment in public transportation and serious re-zoning are real solutions that would "work" for a much greater number of people, at least in the long term. Public transport has its shortcomings, but generally speaking, walking and taking a bus, train, or trolley is "do-able" by a much wider swath of the public than is taking a bike.
Not that re-zoning and re-vitalized ubanism and massive investment of public resources into public infrastructure is going to happen, of course. But neither is salvation by bike. And the left's seeming obsession with the latter is, IMO, not really helpful.
Ellie says:
Quick addendum:
My above rant was not directed at anyone here. It's more just a generalized frustration with a certain element of the left that I've encountered elsewhere. So if you think it was directed at you, it wasn't.
Julie says:
Yeah, I find those figures hard to believe, too. But maybe my perception is skewed by living in a two vehicle per capita household. Not counting the motorcycles and boats. My husband attracts internal combustion engines like moths to a flame.
Scott says:
The energy consumption graph isn't very specific, but it apparently includes ALL energy, including electricity. There's another graph of electricity consumption that shows US electricity consumption rising smoothly at about a 30 degree angle for the whole span of the graph, while Europe has been level since about 1993.
I would guess that this has at least something to do with air conditioning, of which we have lots and Europe nearly none.
AuroraD says:
I have to chime in with Ellie, above. I love public transit (lifelong New Yorker, never even learned to drive), and used to be a passionate bicyclist, but since I became disabled, can no longer bike to my job. Bikes are great, but not so much for the differently abled.
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