Streetsblog San Francisco

After yesterday’s electoral drubbing, the Obama administration will have to deal with a starkly different Congress when they make their expected push for a multi-year transportation bill early next year. We know that some influential House Republicans, like John Mica, don’t necessarily believe that bigger highways will solve America’s transportation problems. And we know that some pro-transit voices in Washington originate from the right. But no one expects the GOP ascendancy to make transportation reform any easier.

For a taste of the right-wing line against transportation reform, check out the election week issue of the Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard. Inside, editor Fred Barnes (under fire recently for accepting speaking fees from the GOP) mounts an attack on just about every federal transportation policy other than highway spending. There’s nothing really conservative about Barnes’s screed — it could have come straight from the pen of an asphalt industry lobbyist. Wondering what a transportation bill would look like if it were reshaped according to what highway boosters believe should be the “core program”? Read Barnes and find out.

He starts by ridiculing Ray LaHood’s speech at the 2010 National Bike Summit, where the transportation secretary said that Americans “want out of their cars, they want out of congestion, they want to live in livable neighborhoods and livable communities.” Barnes disagrees:

LaHood was half right. People hate traffic congestion. But they want to get out of their cars about as much as they want to get stuck behind a bicyclist who rides at a donkey’s pace before running through red lights and stop signs. What people mainly want is to stay in their cars and have LaHood do something to reduce congestion.

Like finance the construction and maintenance of highways and bridges to facilitate the flow of autos and trucks. That, rather than promoting “livability” or “the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of nonmotorized,” is the job of the Department of Transportation. Always has been.

This is, basically, his entire argument: People just want to “stay in their cars.” We have zero interest in getting around any other way. According to Fred Barnes, we are perfectly content to drive and drive and drive, as long as we don’t have to put up with all the other people driving. If you believe that, then his cheerleading for highway construction makes a lot of sense.

If being inside our cars is what we’re really all about, by all means lets throw more money down the sinkhole of highway expansion. That will guarantee more quality time inside our cars. Then, a few years later, when we’re in our cars but not enjoying it so much because the new lanes are jammed with traffic again, we’ll repeat the whole expensive process.

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I mocked Max Muller of Max Motors last summer for offering free AK-47s with the purchase of a new vehicle from his Butler, Missouri, showroom. We noted the “Kalashnikovs for Clunkers” deal was the second annual offering of guns with new cars, after he offered Glocks or Gas in 2008. At the time I wrote the article, Cash for Clunkers was all the rage so my angle was how kooky an incentive a firearm was for re-upping your ride.

Well, this year Max has gone right for the jugular, trying to sell his most compensatory vehicular stock by offering one of the baddest weapons on the market, whether for the battlefield or the Viagra crowd: the Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle. If you aren’t already familiar with the Barrett, it’s made by Ronnie Barrett in Murfreesboro (pronounced “Muf-freeze-burrow”), Tennessee, and it has become the poster-child for gun-control advocates trying to keep military-grade weaponry off the civilian market.

I’ll admit right now to my Streetsblog readers, I grew up a gun aficionado on a ranch in Nevada and, at age 13, I wanted little more than to become a sniper for the Marines. Well, I also really wanted a red pick-up truck with chrome roll-bars, a gun rack in the cab and vanity plates that read “Matt.” So in a deep-down, reptilian-brain way, I understand the appeal of a big V-10 and a bigger firearm, though every fiber in my adult sensibility strains against these impulses.

Short detour into my adolescent psyche aside, if you haven’t already gone to Max’s Snipers for Vipers radio ad, I highly recommend a listen. The deep voice of the narrator beckons you to make like Randal O’toole (funny, for a Portland-area bike rider, he sure loves hot rods) and head over to the nearest dealership to get a real manly killing machine with your manly killing machine.

What did your dealer throw in with your new vehicle? Did he top off your blinker fluid? Give me a break! Max motors is taking it to the next level. They’re calling it “Snipers for Vipers.” Yeah, you heard me, Max Motors is always taking aim at lower prices. You can take aim too, when you buy a new Dodge Viper from Max Motors, you’ll get a free Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle. It’s a gun with the power to match the car. A cool Dodge Viper and a .50 caliber sniper rifle. Max Motor has 10 Vipers to choose from, so go ahead, pull the trigger. Ask about “Snipers for Vipers” now at Max Motors in Butler Missouri, home of the free, the brave, and the guaranteed lowest prices in the USA.

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The Obama administration got a lot of attention earlier this year when it raised fuel efficiency rules to an average 35 miles per gallon across the nation’s fleet of automobiles that will be produced between 2012 and 2016. Now the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), a division of the U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT), have laid out an ambitious road map [pdf] to push tougher greenhouse gas emission and fuel economy standards for passenger cars and trucks built from 2017 through 2025, standards that hypothetically could push the national fleet average up as high as 62 mpg.

“We must, and we will, keep the momentum going to make sure that all motor vehicles sold in America are realizing the best fuel economy and greenhouse gas reductions possible,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. “Continuing the national program would help create a more secure energy future by reducing the nation’s dependence on oil, which has been a national objective since the first oil price shocks in the 1970s.”

Today’s report provides an initial assessment for a potential national program for the 2025 model year horizon and outlines next steps for additional work the agencies will undertake to meet the yet-to-be established GHG reduction goals. Depending on the scenario eventually chosen, the industry will have to reduce CO2 production across the national car and truck fleet from a minimum 3 percent (or the equivalent of 47 mpg) up to 6 percent (or the equivalent of 62 mpg).

The report outlines the costs and benefits of several approaches for reaching the targets (technology pathways A, B, C, or D), from focusing on reducing vehicle size and advanced gasoline, to relying on gas-electric hybrids and full electric vehicles (EVs). Rule makers assert that even the 6 percent target is achievable with existing technology, though the higher benchmark would require more hybrids and EVs within a manufacturer’s fleet. Read more…

Rowena learned about the true cost of cars the hard way. Raised by her mom, a Filipina immigrant, in a happy if carless home in northern California, Rowena marveled upon graduating from college and getting a steady job that she could afford to lease her very own car. For a small down payment and $199 a month, she was in a beautiful new Honda.

Three years later, lease up, the dealer convinced her to buy a somewhat nicer car, one with “just $299” in monthly payments. When the car was repossessed a year later because she couldn’t make the payments, she figured she had handed her dealer and loan company over $15,000. Sitting down to do the math, she estimated that insurance, gas, parking, tickets, tolls, taxes, and fees had vacuumed an additional $12,000 out of her accounts.

So four years and $27,000 later, Rowena had no vehicle, no savings, and a credit rating in ruins.

Like most Americans, Rowena had no idea of the true total and ongoing financial cost of car ownership, and, like most Americans, she found her dealer in no rush to warn her about them. While rent or mortgage remains the largest budget item for the average household, transportation now comes in a close second, and in some zip codes it even exceeds housing.

Transportation swallows one out of every five dollars earned by the average American family, double the bite it took in 1960. This increase alone could account for much of the plummet, over that fifty-year period, in the household savings rate, which by the aughts had skidded close to zero.

We know how things got this bad. Back in 1960, developers had not yet fully sprawled out our housing stock; government had not yet spent billions on road building, letting transit atrophy; automakers had not yet piled on horsepower, luxury, and cargo space; lenders had not yet become so likely to set unsustainable and predatory car credit terms; and drivers had yet to consider short trips unwalkable and bus trips social suicide.

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The Tango personal electric vehicle made a bunch of headlines when George Clooney bought one in 2005, but there haven't been too many on the road given the cost of $150,000.

The manufacturers pitch the vehicle as a high-performance electric car that can zip through traffic given its slender frame. Assuming you can split lanes legally (California is the only state where it is explicitly legal), you can use it as you would a motorcycle on congested roads. The Tango is also short enough that it can be parked perpendicular to the curb, just as a motorcycle would. 

Rick Woodbury, the President and Founder of Commuter Cars Corporatation, which has made 12 Tangos to date, said it was "designed it to be the fastest, safest, most convenient car for 90 percent of urban trips." 

Woodbury said the problem with traffic and commuting is a case of inefficient use of space, though his solution is not transit or bicycles, but narrower cars. "There are 106 million single-occupancy vehicles clogging the streets. That's 106 million people using the wrong tool."

Woodbury said the ability to scale up production is hampered by money. He can build the current model at its sticker price at cost, but to sell it in the $10-15,000 price range, he would need around $1.5 billion in capital outlay to mass-produce the vehicle, an unlikely scenario without getting the buy-in of a major traditional car manufacturer.

"Car companies just don't invest in disruptive technology," said Woodbury.

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Last Christmas, an Oregon couple driving with their baby in the
backseat followed erroneous GPS instructions and got stranded on
wilderness roads in a Cascades snowstorm. Twelve hours later, they had
given up hope and taped a farewell video. While a rescue party
fortunately was able to save them, they no doubt wished they hadn’t
allowed their belief in modern electronics to override their own clear
eyes and good instincts.

Their misplaced faith is hardly
exceptional. If there is one true religion in the United States, it
worships at the altar of Technology. Christian or Jew, Muslim or
atheist, we accept this doctrine: that technology provides the main path
to improving our lives and that if it occasionally fails, even
catastrophically, all it will take is another technology to make everything better.

How else to explain two case studies in modern hubris that now appear to be reaching their denouements: The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe and Toyota’s sudden acceleration debacle.

It is our belief in technology that has for years reassured us, along
with oil industry advertising and the promises of the U.S. Minerals
Management Service, that drilling offshore — way offshore — could be
done safely while we kept on refilling our tanks. It has reassured us,
along with car company marketing and green lights from the NHTSA, that
our cars — increasingly electronically complex — would keep our
families safe while we put ever more miles on the odometer.

The automobile, not the computer or smart phone, is still the
technological icon we venerate with the greatest fervor. The car is the
most important, most expensive piece of technology most of us own. It is
the technology of the past century, and neither BP nor Toyota would be as large or as powerful without our genuflections.

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The fat lady hasn’t sung yet, but the country’s auto dealers have been exempted from the financial reform bill now in its final stage in Congress. Given that the purpose of the bill is to protect Americans from harmful manipulation by the people selling them financial products, this is a pretty stunning development. The nation’s auto dealers either provide or broker most of the $850 billion worth of currently outstanding car loans across America. That’s a pile of financial product: It’s more than household credit card debt and second only to home mortgages.

Every year, 50 million people buy a car, and 94 percent of those sales are loan-financed, to an average tune of over $28,000 for a new vehicle. At both new and used lots, a good number of those loans involve unethical and fraudulent practices. Like the mortgage industry, dealers have pushed credit and pricey products on people who couldn’t afford them, and then fudged paperwork to make it appear they could. They offered "zero interest and no money down" and extended loan terms from what was until recently an average of three or four years to seven and even eight years, leaving huge numbers of car owners "upside-down" on their loans -- which is to say, owing more than their car is worth.

More egregiously, their business innovations -- not advertised as such, of course -- include such activities as “power-booking” (reporting to lenders that a car is equipped with non-existent options, thereby raising the amount of the loan) and “yo-yo financing” (a form of bait and switch, in which car buyers leave a down payment or trade in their car, drive off the lot, and then are falsely told that the financing "fell through" and that they have to pay a higher interest rate, often under threat of repossession or arrest).

The list goes on. Dealers regularly get kickbacks and markups from other lenders. Car loans have been packaged and dangerously securitized, just like home mortgages. Dealers encouraged many car buyers to use home equity loans to make their purchases, obliterating whatever cushion they had when home prices plummeted. It’s a jungle on the lot for consumers, especially the poor and those with poor credit.

In a recent New Yorker article, James Surowiecki seeks to explain how the auto dealer exemption could have happened when it is so opposed to the public interest, and when powerful actors like Citibank and J. P. Morgan did not escape regulation. He sees it as mostly a public relations coup, with the dealers presenting themselves as Main Street plain folks, virtually victims of the financial system themselves. They also played up the number of jobs dealerships provide in communities across the nation (how those jobs would dry up if dealers had to make an honest living was not made clear).

But what wasn’t noted is the power of the car dealers over the press itself.

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What does San Francisco's retired top traffic engineer think about Market Street, Muni and global warming? We sat down with Jack Fleck recently for an extended interview. The 62-year-old retired last week after more than 25 years with the former Department of Parking and Traffic and the current San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA).

Fleck expounded on a number of topics and his answers offer some insight into his thinking over the years as the city's lead traffic engineer.

On cars and driving:

As a student I started connecting all these problems with the automobile and the first one was related to the urban riots, I mean the fact that at that time equal housing laws didn't exist. So, African Americans were pretty much confined to the inner city, at the same time the freeways were crisscrossing the cities and making them much less livable, destroying neighborhoods and creating noise and pollution and all of that, and they became like pressure cookers and they exploded, and so the inner city blight and the white flight were something I paid a lot of attention to in the '60s. But then also reading Jane Jacob's book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," and how she contrasted Robert Moses, who was the big freeway builder. His vision of how the freeway was always good versus the reality, and not just freeways, but parking lots and widening streets and all the things that she talked about to create the fabric of a city and the way that the automobile was part of the problem. It wasn't like that was the only problem, but that was something she talked a lot about and I learned the word 'livability' I think from Don Appleyard when I took classes at Berkeley. I went to grad school in City Planning at Berkeley.

So that sort of struck home as that's what I want to do, make cities livable and I don't know that it was really a word that was used a lot until more recently, but it does make sense. That's from all the days that I've been involved in this is trying to make this city a better place to live. But then there were other problems with cars obviously, the wars for oil and I think I learned the word ecology in about 1969, it was the first time I heard that word. I was like 'oh, that's a good one', because air pollution, oil spills which obviously are still a problem. So all of that sort of compounded to make me much more anti-automobile, but still, I was like 'yes, cars are still convenient and people love cars.' I was never a person that loved cars like they were my baby or something, like some people their whole identity is caught up in their cars and that's still true today, but they are very convenient to get around and so it's a love/hate thing.

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In an effort to curb solo commuting and educate employees at various city and county agencies, and at several touchstone regional employers, 511.org and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District are sponsoring the "Great Race for Clean Air" in August and September. The event is similar to TransForm's CarFree Challenge or the SFBC's Gas-Free Fridays, but the focus is more on employers and education in the workplace.

Lilian Chan, a Transportation Demand Management Coordinator for the San Francisco Department of the Environment, said the goal is not only to get employers to sign up and engage in friendly competition to reduce greenhouse gas emission from employee commutes over two months this summer, but to engage with them in longer-term education campaigns and ultimately alter commute patterns. 

"We're hoping to get larger employers involved to get their support in encouraging alternative transportation for their employees," she said.

The employers will compete with similar-sized companies in each county and the winners will receive a special commendation by county authorities. Though this is the first year the event will be held, the various resource teams in each county hope the Great Race catches on and becomes an annual tradition.

Be sure to sign up before the July 15th deadline and encourage your employer to promote the event if they don't already.