Door Number Four
- Posted by ryan on December 7th, 2007 filed in Cities
Over at Gristmill, Clark Williams-Derry writes:
A couple of years ago, I ran some numbers trying to figure out which was the better buy for the planet — a biodiesel Jetta or a hybrid Prius. And I came to the tentative, but perhaps counterintuitive, conclusion that the best buy was … wait for it … a Toyota Corolla.
The Corolla, you see, was thousands of dollars cheaper than the Prius (the runner-up), even after I accounted for all the savings on gas from driving a fuel-miser. And if you were a green-minded consumer — someone whose top priority was reducing climate-warming emissions, say — you could probably put those thousands to better use somewhere else. Depending on the circumstances, I figured that lots of other investments — power-sipping appliances, say, or a furnace upgrade, or home insulation, or even donations to a worthy cause — might all count as “better buys” than a brand-new Prius.
But maybe there’s yet another option! What if, instead of spending all that money on a car, you instead put it into buying or renting a home near transit. Indeed, for most of the past five years I didn’t own a car, opting instead to take transit or walk when I could and rent a car when I couldn’t. I came out miles ahead on money and, no doubt, on emissions. There’s also this report from the Center for Housing Policy which explains the trade-off between housing costs and transportation costs in metropolitan areas. In short, families believe that by moving farther out to cheaper suburbs they’re saving money. In fact, what they save in housing costs shifts into their transportation budget. Since most people living in outer suburbs are driving, that extra transportation money corresponds fairly directly to extra emissions.
Obviously, many people are going to continue to drive or have no choice but to drive, and for those individuals, Clark’s comparisons may be helpful. We really ought to be focusing, however, on the way that the structure of our urban areas and urban infrastructure perpetuates a costly dependence on automobiles.
December 7th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
It’s worth noting that Clark is from Sightline, which has been running two related series on their blog (The Daily Score), The Year of Living Carlessly, and Bike Neglect, that very clearly promote transit, walking, cycling, etc… Sightline is all about some transit and walking and biking. The Year of Living Carlessly has been going on for over a year now. Godo stuff.
If the bottom line is reducing emissions, then there’s no reason to put all the eggs in one basket. Better to consider the built environment, land use, AND the emissions of the vehicles used to tranverse it for those that use ‘em.
December 7th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
I agree with you. I just worry about these lines of argument given the current distribution of residential settlement. Sprawl is the order of the day, and I think a lot of people who buy into the efficient automobile argument will never think about the fact that it’s not all that helpful if you’re still driving 40 miles to work.
December 10th, 2007 at 10:29 am
I managed to live downtown for five years without a car. I could walk to work, and bike to most everyplace else. But then I got a house and a wife and kids and a job in a freaking office park and all that changed.
I’m all for focusing how we subsidize one infrastructure for another, but I think we also need to address those policies that impact the shifting population demographics in the first place: crime, schools, taxes, and congestion. It’s not an urban-vs-suburban thing either; plenty of crime-ridden suburbs out there, along with crummy schools and crumbling infrastructure. But even if you double or triple car ownership costs and accelerate the collapse of highway kultur, people will still drive 40 miles to work to avoid those perceived problems they associate with density.
I keep coming back to how the suburbs need to be hipper and more vibrant and the core needs to be safer and more customer responsive. And they both need to be less reliant on subways-vs-cars: light rail, express busses, bike paths, short-haul rentals. Density isn’t the magic bullet and neither is anything else.