Fuel Efficiency Standards
The automakers were not happy about this and tried a media blitz to counter it. I suspect they eventually agreed for two reasons. First, they did manage to lower short-term goals. Second, 2025 is a long time away and my guess is they are waiting for a Republican president to gut this agreement before they have to do anything.
Whie the Republicans are waiting for Gregg Easterbrook to write a long column for The Wilson Quarterly about how this should all be credited to President Jenna (Bush) Hager (2025-2033).
Three, no doubt there was some grudging admittance that, right now, Obama could be talking to the managers of VW, Toyota and Kia instead of GM, Ford, and Chrysler.
my guess is they are waiting for a Republican president to gut this agreement before they have to do anything.
This has been every industry’s standard practice for quite some time. It has proven to be very effective.
You have to wonder how much oil will cost by then too.
Locking in the planned higher standards will cause the car companies to change their planning and production between now and then, so a move like this will also help to prepare the country and the industry to weather higher fuel prices, as well as the more obvious regulatory benefit of having the standards kick in.
It’s damn sure that we’re in for a world of hurt because of all those lost decades of planning during the cheap oil illusion. Poor mass transit and all those sprawling suburbs that can’t be well served by mass transit in any case, etcetera. People bought cheap houses never realizing that their daily commute could easily become $5,000 a year in gasoline.
Dude, you’re preaching to the choir. I was a city planner in a past life, and we’ve been saying that for years. Decades.
How about looking at it from the business end of things? All of those industrial parks and office parks – the damn access roads are a mile long, before you get to the first driveway.
And the worst part is, all of that sprawl was forced by the government. When a developer owns ten acres of land, you literally have to threaten that you’ll rip down his buildings with bulldozers and fine him many thousands of dollars to prevent him from building 80 homes instead of 10, or including some retail space instead of just houses, or from building some or all of it as multi-family homes instead of single-family.
And yet, because the sprawl-burbs fit some antiquated vision of “individuality” – one based, as far as I can tell, on the ideal of never being in the presence of a stranger without a barrier of steel and auto glass – their defenders pretend they’re the natural outcome of individual choice.
Suburbs are sub-optimal for the steadily growing older demographics People who can’t drive, or shouldn’t drive, living in a world where you have to drive.
It’s not all hopeless, though. From Dallas to Phoenix to Denver to Las Vegas, pretty much all of the cities that grew up around the car have adopted progressive, smart-growth master plans that encourage infill and recentering, are building transit systems, are encouraging walkable, transit-oriented development patterns in their developing areas, and are otherwise working to turn themselves into the kind of high-value cities that we built in the first 175 years of this country’s history.
One really neat project is the Stapleton neighborhood in Denver. They’re taking the old Stapleton airport, which was retired, and building a whole new neighborhood there in a dense, centered, New Urbanist style, with strong transit access. It will actually be the largest neighborhood in Denver at build-out.
Sounds great! Now, all those cities need is water!
May as well move to Muskegon now and beat the rush when the aquifers start giving out, desert folk.
What’s really frustrating (for me, anyway) is that this does not seem to be happening at all in Florida, where our bigger cities are all defined by sprawl and auto-dependence (on any list of the most dangerous places to be a cyclist or pedestrian, you’ll see Florida cities round out at least half of the top ten spots). Sure, those New Urbanist, Celebration-style subdivisions are pretty popular here, but that’s just the same urban sprawl with a different mask. You still can’t live completely – or even mostly – car-free in those places.
Combine our stubborn refusal to acknowledge the costs of sprawl with our already developing issues with water access, and this state is completely fucked. As if it weren’t already, for myriad other reasons.
Yeah, Florida is a black spot.
All of those old people who can’t get anywhere without driving, and all the streets they drive on to get anywhere are four or six lanes wide, with the gigantic corner radii. You’re taking your life in your hands if you try to walk to a store, and it’s three miles to the store anyway.
As a Las Vegas resident, I can tell you straight up there has been no such progressive development here at all. We have buses and they’re a joke, we have a single monorail that serves nobody but conventioneers and it’s a joke, we have nothing but car dependency throughout the city and nobody has any real plans to change that and that’s no joke.
As the apocryphal story goes, when higher standards were proposed back in the (fill in the decade)’s, the Japanese called a meeting of their engineers and the Americans a meeting of their lawyers.
Woot woot.
These guys are fucking brilliant. By 2025 they’ll be retired to their palatial estates and we’ll be paying $25/gal for petrol.
Nobody will be able to afford to drive to the manor house to burn it down.
Let alone fuel for the fires!
Good luck living in that manor home after the electric lines are stolen and the copper resold. Starve ‘em out has always been a safer strategy for the besieger…
You know, anonymous is trolling, but I wouldn’t mind seeing Erik make a post sometime discussing the impact that our state-subsidized state-mandated suburban tract house culture has had on labor in postwar America, by spreading out and fragmenting communities and destroying peoples sense of interdependence and belonging by encouraging them to think of themselves as lords living by themselves. I’ve always felt that was insidious.
Disclaimer; I live in the suburbs of a small city, and I love it. LOVE it. Given the choice I wouldn’t live any other way. That said? The development I live on, if it weren’t protected by the ironclad, totalitarian fist of state power, it would have been bought out and turned into higher-density townhouses forever ago.
“No one who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do.”
- William Levitt, developer of Levittown, 1948
Suburbia is a deliberate, ideological program, and it always has been.
My problems with suburbia are technical, not moral, really. If someone invented a source of limitless clean energy tomorrow I would be all ‘woo-hoo! Bring on the sprawl, imma buy me a Hummer! TWO Hummers, one for weekends!’
That said, I like the suburbs, so I’m not without a dog in that race.
What is it you like about the suburbs? There are and have always been walkable suburbs with real town centers and strong transit connections.
I own a house with a yard. It’s only a little over 5000 square feet, but I can have a cook-out.
People talk as if all of the features of the late-20th century suburb necessarily go together, from good schools to large parking lots to streets that aren’t safe to cross to a predominance of single family homes. They don’t, necessarily.
Who said socialism will never catch on, that it takes up too many evenings?
Nobody lives in cities.
They’re too crowded.
Lawlz.
Interesting that two of his complaints are directly crime-related, with a third being indirectly crime-related.
I live in a dense neighborhood in a smallish city that used to have serious crime problems. Things have changed over the last decade, though, and since I moved here I’ve never felt threatened by my surroundings, or felt that it was unsafe to be out at night.
Hell, I was a victim of three separate crimes back when I lived in the suburbs. But here in the city? Not even once.
Apparently we all live on the set for The Wire.
You know, when Robert (it is Robert usually, right?) goes through and prunes these threads, what remains is like some kind of strangely compelling surrealist performance art.
You know, when Robert (it is Robert usually, right?) goes through and prunes these threads, what remains is like some kind of strangely compelling surrealist performance art.
Heh, indeed. How ironic that Norm’s sole purpose in commenting here is to stink up the joint, and the end result is…really kinda cool. That’s some nice Blog Fu.
Yeah.
Funny stuff.
I’ve driven a car that gets better mileage for over ten years (2001 Honda Insight). Color me unimpressed.
If they didn’t give them all the exemptions from CAFE, the current standards would be fine. Flex fuel vehicles, for instance, are exempted, which is why all the gas guzzling pickups are flex fuel vehicles.
We call that Tokyo.
F’gods sake, “Anonymous”:
1) No-one’s upset that people weren’t forced to conform to their fantasies. They are upset that Americans paid artificially low prices for automobile transport for decades, and that as a consequence of that made seemingly rational lifestyle decisions that, writ large, have resulted in an awful lot of infrastructure having built to fit an American society that’s going to be very poorly suited to more realistic long-term transport pricing. Other societies recognized the situation, and used gasoline taxes, toll roads, and superior mass transit to help provide the incentives to encourage people to adopt a lifestyle and shape a society that wouldn’t run into a brick wall once gasoline prices inevitably rose.
2) People interested in actually having a conversation usually find it’s helpful to adopt (and consistently adhere to) some sort of pseudonym by which they can be recognized and addressed, “Anonymous”. Although, as you doubtless are aware of this, your failure to do so probably means I shouldn’t be bothering to respond to your comment.
I’ll gladly take them over the statists who want mandatory offsets and minimum parking requirements.
Somebody should push you onto the third rail, asshole.
Freedom, ladies and gentlemen!
“Anonymous”,
Are you actually illiterate, or merely an asshole? Do all those other countries that implemented higher gas taxes have dictatorial central planners? Or even dictators of any sort? Or did their elected representatives in government make rational decisions about long-term costs and how to make sure consumers recognized those long-term costs and made their decisions in the light of that recognition?
And, yes, “Warren Terra” is a pseudonym. So what? Using a pseudonym makes it easier to address me, and using a single handle consistently encourages me to resist the temptation to lash out in my own displays of assholery. All of this is salutory, and I encourage you to adopt and adhere to a pseudonym of your own.
The latter.
He’s a troll – but a representative one.
Your typical wingnut hates hates hates anything but whitebread, cookie-cutter suburban sprawl, but they have absolutely no arguments to make against the need for smarter development, so they make up a bunch of dystopian nonsense and act like drama queens.
Their favorite bit of nonsense being to pretend that sprawl development isn’t the most heavily-regulated, central-planning-induced pattern of human settlement in world history, and that they’re actually making some sort of pro-freedom, anti-regulatory argument when they defend the seas of asphalt and Chemlawn that they’re terrified to leave.
Perhaps it’s because it really is anonymous? I hear they are here. and everywhere.
It’s also common to find that they are so sheltered that they literally do not know there is anything other than their regulatory-enforced cul-de-sacs, except what they remember from watching “Good Times.”
Oh man, if you think the ads HERE are hilarious, you should see the ones on Balloon Juice, or TPM.
I doubt a lot of John Coles readers are gonna spend good money on Tea Party literature, is what I’m saying.
There a Christian dating web site that buys ad time on the Rachel Maddow Show.
To get away from you?
Pigovian taxes on negative externalities are the sheerest form of tyranny. Normy is going to buy some fertilizer and diesel fuel and have his mom stitch him up a uniform and blow up and kill kids until he is free to make market choices that other people have to pay the price for.
An even worse form of tyranny is to have absolutely no government force whatsoever brought to bear when someone who owns land near you builds at a higher density than your neighborhood was built at.
I mean, what kind of Orwellian murder-state does that?
Hmm, or not.
For those that think suburbs are the only way to go, I highly recommend getting out of the country and seeing how other peoples do things. I went from growing up in a sprawled-out suburb of Indianapolis to the center of Madrid, and loved it. I now live in a lower-density area of Japan, but we still average a higher density than Chicago.
Or is it that we seek him here, there and everywhere? Or is that someone else?