Honk If You Love Your Car

__"Cars and Their Enemies" by James Q. Wilson, in Commentary (July 1997), 165 E. 56th St., New York, N.Y. 10022.__

If there is one feature of American life that Asphalt Nation (1997), she takes a sledgeinspires near-universal revulsion in social hammer to the hated shiny object, shouting critics, it is Americans’ love affair with the "sprawl... pollution... congestion...comcar. The latest blast comes from Jane Holtz muting." She wants mass transit, railroads, Kay, the architecture critic for the Nation. In and more biking and walking. What Kay and other auto haters don’t seem to grasp, argues Wilson, a professor of management and public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, is that Americans have very good reasons for preferring cars.

The debate between car lovers and car haters is really over "private benefits and public goods," he says. Virtually everyone is against pollution, energy inefficiency, excessive noise, fatal accidents, and the other social ills blamed on the automobile. But people choose their transportation based on what’s good for them. It’s an easy choice, says Wilson: "The automobile is more flexible, more punctual, supplies greater comfort, provides for carrying more parcels, creates more privacy, enables one to select fellow passengers, and, for distances over a mile or more, requires less travel time." The best studies, he adds, show that getting to work is quicker in cars than by mass transit.

As a practical matter, he notes, there is no real debate: Americans have voted. In 1960, 20 percent of U.S. households still didn’t own a car; by 1990, only 10 percent were carless. That year, in 19 of the 20 largest metropolitan areas, at least 75 percent of trips to and from work were made by a lone person in an automobile. "The exception," Wilson says, "was the New York metropolitan region, but even there— with an elaborate mass-transit system and a residential concentration high enough to make it possible for some people to walk to work—solo car use made up over half of all trips to work."

America’s car haters often hold up Europe as a shining example of a superior, auto-snubbing way of life. But the fact is that the number of autos per capita grew three times faster in Western Europe than in the United States between 1965 and 1987, Wilson says. "Despite [government] policies that penalize car use, make travel very expensive, and restrict parking spaces, Europeans, once they can afford to do so, buy cars, and drive them."

Though critics minimize the effort, the United States "has tried to copy the European investment in mass transit," he points out. Transportation planners have struggled to get people out of their cars and into buses, trains, and subways (and carpools). "Despite spending about $100 billion, Washington has yet to figure out how to do it." During the 1980s, the Metrorail system in the nation’s capital expanded from 30 to 73 miles of line and opened an additional 30 stations—yet the number of people driving to work increased by 414,000, and the transit share of all commutes declined.

The social costs of the car can be moderated, Wilson says. "Auto-exhaust pollution has been dramatically reduced in this country by redesigning engines, changing fuels (largely by removing lead), and imposing inspection requirements." More can be done, by raising gas taxes and building bike pathways, for example. Yet Wilson doubts that the critics will ever be satisfied, because so many of them dislike not just the car but all that it stands for: privacy, autonomy, speed, and "the joyous sensation of driving on beautiful country roads."