Daniel Knowles, the midwest correspondent for The Economist, grew up in the United Kingdom and as a reporter has traveled extensively around the world. So when he recently wrote a book about the automobile, he did so from a considerably more “international” perspective than you would typically see in U.S. auto media outlets such as Automotive News.
Indeed, I have a hard time imagining the trade journal that Keith Crain built hiring Knowles because he has taken a fancy to urban planning — a field that the auto industry heavily impacts yet mostly ignores. The general attitude seems to be that Automotive News should focus on how automakers can pump out as much product as possible. The urban planners can then figure out where all those cars go — but they can keep their grumbling to themselves, thank you very much, damn pinko commie freaks.
Like a good fellow traveler, Knowles (2023) has tried to take the opposite approach. He has started with the question of how do people need to move around and in what ways can automobiles best expedite that? One of his conclusions is that there is an increasing generational split in auto usage. Over the last 25 years the number of drivers over the age of 70 has grown by 60 percent in the U.S. whereas younger people have cooled to this transportation option to the degree that some wonder whether we may reach “peak car.”
Knowles acknowledges that the data has shown both downs and ups in recent decades. However, he argues that “the idea of ‘peak car’ is still credible, because the reason young people are moving to suburbs and buying cars now is largely because of the inflated cost of living in walkable neighborhoods, rather than because of any deep affection for big front lawns and driveways with two vehicles in them. In the 1960s and ’70s, moving to the suburbs was an upwardly mobile move — it took you from a declining neighborhood in a noisy and polluted city to somewhere fresh and safe. These days it is something done reluctantly, usually because people cannot afford enough space to raise a child otherwise” (2023, p. 219-220).
Among the evidence that Knowles presents is a 2017 poll by the National Association of Realtors that found “more than half of Americans would prefer to live in walkable neighborhoods with smaller homes. Millennials prefer walking to having to drive by 12 percentage points” (2023, p. 221).
This is where urban planning comes in. Building more housing in urban centers could make it more affordable for young people who want to live in a neighborhood where they would not be so reliant on a car to get around — or could even get by without one. So far the level of construction needed is mostly not happening.
“The cities where people would most want to live, and where you can live best without cars, are simply not adding homes, while cities that depend on you driving everywhere, however unsustainable it is, are growing like mushrooms. The result, is inevitably, that housing prices are rising fastest in walkable places and slowest in sprawling suburbs” (2023, p. 220).
Whether or not you think that achieving “peak car” is a good thing, Knowles makes what I think is a useful point that urban-planning policies that impact housing construction in urban centers could influence the future scale of the U.S. auto industry.
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RE:SOURCES
- Knowles, Daniel; 2023. Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It. Abrams Press, New York.
The way I see it the automobile lost its essence that had propelled it to relevance, that was the idea of liberty innately intertwined with the ownership of one’a own means of transportation (almost a distributist policy à la Chesterton?), when it crossed the threshold and became a commodity that could not be renounced.
To say it more clearly, trouble began the moment the automobile industry began impacting infrastructure investment by the Governments (the US but also in Europe, the problem is shared albeit with different magnitudes) such that railways, tramways and underground lines got displaced at the mercy of highway and in general spending on road infrastructure.
The car became then a forced spending entry and a burden on families’ budget, and also created damage to the quality of air (even ignoring the issue of rising temperatures, exhaust gasses are not exactly healthy for the human lungs). Moreover, the “massification” of the automobile conjoined with the reckoning of these issues led to the decline and near disappearance of the funniest cars, that is 2 door coupes, convertibles and even sedans (for example, only the Germans from Mercedes and BMW still have sedan-derived coupes and convertibles), at the advantage of high-riding-chair-height-seating crossover-SUVs (in Europe) for people who want to have children in a degrading economic environment and whilst not being able to lower one’s body to enter a low-slung car.