Matt Yglesias

Fuel Economy

There are two things you can do with a more efficient automobile engine. One is build a vehicle that gets more miles per gallon. The other is build a vehicle that moves more pounds of steel. And Christopher Knittle points out that we’ve largely been doing the latter:

From 1980 to 2004 the fuel economy of U.S. vehicles has remained stagnant despite apparent technological advances. The average fuel economy of the U.S. new passenger automobile fleet increased by less than 6.5 percent, while the average horsepower of new passenger cars increased by 80 percent, and their average curb weight increased by 12 percent. For light duty trucks, average horsepower has increased by 99 percent and average weight increased by 26 percent over this period. But there’s more to this story: in 1980, light truck sales were roughly 20 percent of total passenger vehicles sales — in 2004, they were over 51 percent.

In Automobiles on Steroids: Product Attribute Trade-Offs and Technological Progress in the Automobile Sector (NBER Working Paper No. 15162), Christopher Knittel analyzes the technological progress that has occurred since 1980 and the trade-offs that manufacturers and consumers face when choosing between fuel economy, weight, and engine power characteristics. His results suggest that if weight, horsepower, and torque were held at their 1980 levels, fuel economy for both passenger cars and light trucks could have increased by nearly 50 percent from 1980 to 2006. Instead, fuel economy actually increased by only 15 percent.

Of course this was just manufacturers and consumers responding to market incentives. During this period the price of gasoline was generally falling, personal income was generally rising, and the massive negative externalities associated with burning gasoline were largely unpriced. In a different, better, policy regime taxation of gasoline would have risen so as to make the price of fuel grow relative to personal income, creating incentives for this technology to be deployed in a socially useful way.

Penalizing Dangerous Driving

Elisabeth Rosenthal reports on the UK’s crackdown on texting while driving:

Inside the imposing British Crown Court here, Phillipa Curtis, 22, and her parents cried as she was remanded for 21 months to a high-security women’s prison, for killing someone much like herself. The victim was Victoria McBryde, an up-and-coming university-trained fashion designer. [...] The crash might once have been written off as a tragic accident. Ms. Curtis’s alcohol level was zero. But her phone, which had flown onto the road and was handed to the police by a witness, told a story that — under new British sentencing guidelines — would send its owner to jail.

In the hour before the crash, she had exchanged nearly two dozen messages with at least five friends, most concerning her encounter with a celebrity singer she had served at the restaurant where she worked.

A few thoughts on this. One is that if Curtis had been walking down the street firing bullets into the air at random, and one fell and killed someone, I think she would have been sentenced to a lot more than 21 months. Another is that despite the cliché about car “accidents” the fact of the matter is that fatal motor vehicle collisions typically involve someone breaking the rules. This, after all, is why the rules are there. The traditional social convention in the United States (and apparently the UK as well) that the rules governing the safe operation of fast-moving incredibly heavy pieces of equipment should be routinely ignored or treated as no big deal is really crazy.

As I noted almost 100 people per day die in car wrecks in the United States. Fortunately, thanks in part to increased attention to the need for sensible, well-enforced rules, driving is becoming less fatal:

This trend is great, and we should be trying to continue it. One way to do so is to get serious about the dangers involved in cell phone use, including texting, while driving. Since these technologies are new, we know for certain that people are perfectly capable of getting along in life without using mobile phones while driving their cars. We also know that using them is very dangerous. Under the circumstances, fairly harsh, well-publicized penalties are called for. This is a situation where deterrence really ought to work extremely well.

A Terrible Argument Against Congestion Pricing

Via Ryan Avent, David Owen says that congestion pricing would be bad for the environment because traffic jams inspire people to take transit instead of driving.

This is, in my view, a very silly line of argument. It’s probably true that you could construct a model of a situation in which congestion pricing increases the net quantity of driving. But if that situation exists, and you want to change it, then there are lots of good policy options available. You could use the revenue from congestion pricing to finance more attractive transit options. Or you could take advantage of the reduce congestion to start taking lanes away from private automobiles and building bike and bus lanes. You could do all kinds of things.

The main point I would make is that the issue of whether or not you should congestion-price roadways is more-or-less at right angles with the question of how much your public infrastructure should promote driving versus cycling or transit or walking or anything else. The point of congestion-pricing is that the most efficient way to manage the scarce resource of space on crowded streets during peak hours is via a congestion price. That’s true no matter how much or how little driving you’re hoping to see. If you want people to drive less, the thing to do is to build narrower roads and invest in transit and bike infrastructure. If you want people to drive more, the thing to do is to build narrower roads and be stingy on transportation alternatives. But either way if you want to avoid productivity-killing traffic jams you ought to charge people for driving at peak hours.

Cabbies on Cell Phones

(cc photo by augapfel)

It seems like every time I get into a cab these days, the driver is engaged in a non-stop cell phone conversation via a headset. I understand why cab drivers want to do this, but it’s incredibly dangerous:

A cabby paced beside his wrecked car, an earpiece dangling from the side of his head. An emergency worker, Ralph Ortiz, asked him what had happened.

“I was on the phone,” the driver told Mr. Ortiz, who several months later said he was still stunned by the response. “I didn’t see the light turn red.”

New York City cabbies have been banned from using cellphones for a decade — even the hands-free type, putting the city a step ahead of state law. But the stringent rules remain almost entirely unenforced, even amid research that shows drivers who talk on cellphones are four times as likely to cause a crash.

As long as the country is on the general subject of health care and public health, it’s worth pointing out that Americans’ tendency to die or be seriously injured in motor vehicle crashes seems much more amenable to policy remediation than does the country’s issues with obesity. Traffic engineering is reasonably well-understood by experts, and the research on things like the dangers of talking and texting while driving is pretty unambiguous. It would be a simple thing for a major city to mount a few “sting” operations aimed at handing out heavy fines to phone-using cabbies. And once stepped-up enforcement had been in place for a little bit, violations would drop rapidly, norms would change, and it would become much more practical for passengers to lean on drivers not to put everyone’s lives at risk.

You could even do something as simple as post a sign in the back of the cab clearly stating that the driver’s not supposed to be on the phone.

Administration Fights to Preserve Dealership Closings

(cc photo by dave7)

The Obama administration is trying to remind members of congress that they shouldn’t wreck the auto bailout by all trying to save their district’s favorite car dealer:

The leader of President Obama’s automotive task force warned members of Congress on Tuesday that reversing or stopping the closing of thousands of General Motors and Chrysler dealerships could threaten the automakers’ turnarounds and keep them from repaying billions in government loans.

The official, Ron Bloom, also said the government no longer needed to guarantee the warranties on G.M. and Chrysler vehicles, now that the companies had emerged from bankruptcy protection. Mr. Bloom said the $641 million given to the guarantee program had been repaid, with interest. No claims were made under the program.

I’ve been extremely skeptical of this auto bailout initiative from the get-go. But things have actually turned out, thus far, much better than I would have expected. The bankruptcy process went relatively smoothly, and in the scheme of things the volume of net government expenditures has been pretty restrained. But congress stepping in and preventing the dealership closings would throw all of that into jeopardy.

Driving While Telephoning is Deadly

(cc photo by woodleywonderworks)

One of the stranger things about the United States is our habit of constantly ignoring the massive public health risks associated with automobile use. Matt Richtel has a great piece in the NYT about the specific case of people who talk on their cell phones while they drive:

Extensive research shows the dangers of distracted driving. Studies say that drivers using phones are four times as likely to cause a crash as other drivers, and the likelihood that they will crash is equal to that of someone with a .08 percent blood alcohol level, the point at which drivers are generally considered intoxicated. Research also shows that hands-free devices do not eliminate the risks, and may worsen them by suggesting that the behavior is safe.

A 2003 Harvard study estimated that cellphone distractions caused 2,600 traffic deaths every year, and 330,000 accidents that result in moderate or severe injuries.

And of course your decision to be reckless and talk on the phone while driving is a lethal threat not just to you and your passengers, but to other people on the road. Especially to people who may be trying to use public streets without encasing themselves in a vast steel exoskeleton.

Part of the problem here is that there simply aren’t enough laws prohibiting this behavior and they’re not enforced strictly enough. But as with drunk driving, there’s also a problem that widespread auto dependency makes it difficult to enforce rules in a properly stringent manner. If having your license taken away from you was more “pain in the ass” and less “crippling disability” then it would be more viable to do it when people exhibit clear patterns of reckless behavior. Meanwhile, literally thousands of lives are at stake.

GM Bankruptcy Going Well Except for Congressional Effort to Ruin It

(wikimedia)

Despite the gloom and doom, the General Motors bankruptcy process actually went forward smoothly and swiftly and now the new GM is ready to emerge. Good work! But one problem as a majority of members of congress have decided to start undermining a potentially successful policy and “have signed onto a bill to reverse the closing of 789 Chrysler dealerships and block General Motors Corp. from closing more than 1,300.” Kevin Drum notes that we seem to have firm bipartisan support for this bad idea, with Democrats and Republicans alike working to do the bidding of their local car dealerships rather than advance the nation’s legitimate policy goals.

Felix Salmon hopes the Senate can fix this because Senators represent larger areas and thus are less under the thumb of individual dealers. I guess I’d say that it just seems that nothing whatsoever can pass the Senate (exceptions are made, of course, for Bush-sponsored tax cuts, Bush-sponsored health care bills, and Bush-sponsored wars) so probably this bad idea will die along with a half dozen good ideas.

Are Hybrids Too Quiet

The times I’ve driven in a Prius, I’ve been totally impressed by the spooky silence of the hybrid engine. But apparently there’s some concern that hybrids are dangerously quiet and could strike people unawares. In Japan, it seems there’s going to be a panel to consider the issue of whether regulators should mandate a noise-making device be incorporated into the cars. Thinking about it, it’s definitely true that as a cyclist I wouldn’t be thrilled about the idea of lots of cars silently sneaking up past me from behind.

Political Journalism Just Can’t Quit the Ecological Fallacy

Many cars (cc photo by Sylvar)

One favorite trick of American political journalism is to notice that some states are liberal and some are conservative, then to notice that the liberal states have some characteristics, and then make inferences about the characteristics of individual liberals by attributing the qualities of the states in which they reside to them. For example, since wealthier states are more liberal, you can assert that liberal voters are richer than salt-of-the-earth conservative types. This mode of inference, though popular, is also mistaken. It’s known as the “ecological fallacy.” But that never seems to stop it. Thus, for example, there’s this from The Washington Times:

The Volvo-driving liberal and the redneck in a Chevy pickup are long-held stereotypes. But a map of car ownership – produced by R.L. Polk & Co. – overlaid on the electoral map reveals the surprising extent to which how we vote corresponds with what we drive.

Blue-staters on each coast, from Los Angeles to Seattle and from Boston to the District, are the most likely to drive foreign cars. Domestic brands have their highest levels of market share in the mostly conservative interior of the country.

Now as it happens, it does appear to be true that there are strong correlations out there between individual voting behavior and individual consumption patterns. So there’s probably some legitimate results to be found in this area if you really look into it. More enlightening than the “foreign vs domestic” issue would probably be to look at kinds of cars—who buys trucks and SUVs versus who buys conventional cars.

Car Fatalities in America

One story you’re not going to see leading tomorrow’s newspaper is “97 dead in fatal car accidents.” And yet in 2007, this country saw 37,284 people die in car wrecks. That averages out to 97 per day—much more than the seven people whose death in yesterday’s Metro crash has acquired so much coverage today. Obviously in part that’s because driving is much more popular than transit. Still, according to the Census Bureau 87.7 percent of people get to work either by driving alone or in car pools, while 4.7 percent take transit. That’s about 18 times more driving than transit usage. By contrast, 14 times more people die in car wrecks on an average day than died on the rare day that anyone died in a train crash. On a typical day, of course, the United States has zero train-related fatalities.

Long story short, investments in mass transit would have substantial public health benefits. And, indeed, since car wrecks disproportionately affect teenagers and young adults the impact in QALYs of even moderate reductions in automobile usage would be enormous. The good news about this, however, is that the death rate per 100 million VMT has been declining in recent years:

This is rarely discussed, but the consequence is that 1,000 fewer people died in car wrecks in 2007 than died in 1994 even though total vehicle miles traveled increased from 2,358 billion to 3,030 billion. That’s a huge gain for the country.

Insulating GM From Politics

As Brendan Nyhan points out, no matter how sincere the Obama administration is about its desire to avoid politicized management of General Motors, in practice it’s hard to imagine a de-politicized state-owned firm. Members of congress are already putting their requests in and no administration can totally ignore congressional pressure. Meanwhile, “Even when the administration does not weigh in directly, the management of GM will be forced to consider what issues might draw political attention and adjust its strategy accordingly.”

Nyhan’s proposal:

Shouldn’t the government now bind itself to the mast and directly forswear intervention in the company’s decisions? For instance, after voting for a new board of directors, the Obama administration could transfer control of the government’s shares to a Federal Reserve-type board of independent experts. This step would free the administration of de facto responsibility for GM’s decisions and insulate the President from any resulting fallout. By contrast, political meddling is likely to hinder the company’s efforts to return to profitability, which would in turn harm the administration and the country.

This might be a good idea. But it’s worth emphasizing that even this doesn’t really solve the problem. The Fed’s independence, after all, is in many ways nominal. There’s nothing stopping congress from changing the laws that govern the Fed—including the provisions making it “independent.” Thus, in principle, a Fed chair can be swayed by informal political pressure. The reason the Fed is independent in practice is that Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan built a strong political consensus around the idea of Fed independence so politicians don’t want to be seen as undermining it.

Earlier Fed chairs were much more inclined to do the bidding of the Johnson and Nixon administrations and this was a major contributor to the super-high inflation that emerged in the 1970s.

General Motors is Not a “Significant Swath of Corporate America”

One of the great pathologies of the news biz is that there’s a structural incentive to overstate absolutely everything. Thus, Politico asserts that “Even as it gets set to announce the bankruptcy of General Motors Monday, the Obama administration is struggling to set parameters on how it will act after taking a 60 percent stake in the new company that emerges — and now that it has become the owner of a significant swath of Corporate America.” Conor Clarke points out that the government is, in fact, the owner of merely a trivial fraction of corporate America:

At any rate, Jon Cohn makes the case for the administration’s efforts and is fairly persuasive.

I wonder, however, about the international relations aspects of some of this. General Motors is now going to be majority owned by the US government with a substantial additional fraction owned by the Canadian government. There’s a fair amount of precedent for state-owned corporations (mostly from Europe, and most of it not very promising) but I’m not really familiar with much in the way of that sort of international joint venture. What’s more, no other country seems any more inclined to allow its car industry to go under than we are. But it’s hard to compete against rival firms that are getting government subsidies. Consequently, once you shift from a “nobody subsidized” equilibrium into an “everyone subsidized” equilibrium, it seems to me that it may be difficult to switch back. In principle, this is a solvable international coordination problem, but international coordination can be hard to pull off.

Meanwhile, it seems that the man now running the auto industry is Brian Deese who got his start right here at CAP/AF working for Gene Sperling.

International Comparisons of Car Ownership

Via Felix Salmon, a helpful dataset that allows me to put together this chart, showing car ownership rates in a few wealthy, sparsely populated countries:

This isn’t like comparing the United States to Denmark or the Netherlands. These are other countries with low population densities and plenty of room for development to sprawl across. But still, the consumption and lifestyle patterns appear to be quite different, with the American model much less ecologically sustainable than what’s happening in Canada or Iceland. Note that Iceland has so few people that there aren’t even any trains. There’s just a decent swathe of the population living in nice walkable communities.

The New GM Europe

The new General Motors is going to be a strange enough entity—a state-owned automaker with its own union and the government of Canada on board as major junior partners. But the situation in the new GM Europe, which is mostly composed of Opel, is even odder. It initially looked like Opel was going to be sold to Fiat, which is also buying Chrysler, as part of Fiat’s campaign to become a legitimate first-tier player in the auto market. But Magna, a Canadian car parts company (that’s also to some extent Austrian), was also interested in Opel. And the German government seems to have decided that a Magna-owned Opel would preserve more German jobs than a Fiat-owned Opel would. So the Germans helped stitch together a deal also involving Sberbank, a very large state-owned Russian bank.

And part of the appeal of that to the Russian government is that GAZ, Russia’s number-two car manufacturer, will now start building Opel cars on its assembly lines rather than terrible, terrible GAZ cars. Thus, jobs will also be saved in Russia.

In other words, the Russians and the Germans appear to have taken action to guarantee even more overcapacity in automobile production. And with essentially all global automakers operating with some level of government support, it’s hard to see how anyone can stay in the game without continuing government support. At some point, aren’t we going to have to start unraveling this?

Welcome to Government Motors

Considering the various other moves that have been made since last October, what the government is planning to do with General Motors seems like a reasonable choice out of the set of viable options. That said, I’ve been uncomfortable with this policy trajectory from the beginning precisely because this outcome seemed like a best-case scenario for an auto bailout endgame and it’s not a very good endgame. Recall that as of November, in theory government assistance was just a “bridge loan” that was going to be repaid and all was going to be well. Now the government’s going to own a large dysfunctional auto company.

I mostly share Kevin Drum’s concerns about this. But to put the problem more broadly, the issue is simply that the government, in its capacity as GM owner, has too many divided loyalties. It would be nice to think that Government Motors will protect the environment, protect the financial interests of taxpayers, protect the interests of GM’s workforce, and protect the interests of GM’s business partners all simultaneously but in the real world these objectives are clearly in tension. Trying to resolve these questions is going to be a mess.

I think it’s entirely appropriate to be spending money to help people working in the auto industry and, more generally, people living in the “Greater Michigan” zone where the decline of auto manufacturing jobs is causing huge problems. But there’s little reason to believe that propping up GM in this manner is the best way of getting assistance bang for the taxpayer buck.

Making Costs Explicit

Kevin Drum writes about Google’s PowerMeter project, a nifty web application that will tell San Diego Gas & Electric customers (and in the future, presumably customers of more firms) exactly how much electricity they’re using. Kevin observes that “The simple act of making people aware of their electricity usage can probably generate a surprising amount of conservation.” I tend to agree, and I think it’s something the behavior economics lovers in the White House should find appealing. Here’s another idea of Kevin’s:

And relatively speaking, it’s cheap. This kind of thing could help in other areas too. Here’s a cheap and simple idea, for example: place the estimated 5-year cost of gasoline on the sticker of every new car. EPA could easily come up with a formula based on average car use and recent gasoline prices, and it would almost certainly make fuel-efficient cars more attractive if people saw the savings of buying one right in front of their faces when they were comparing cars. More like this, please.

I have a related idea, that’s smart but politically toxic. It would be a good idea for the federal government to set an explicit target for gasoline prices over a ten-year period. The idea would be to have gasoline prices slope gently upward. When market prices deviate from the gentle upward slope, federal gas taxes would automatically adjust—going either up or down to compensate. That way a whole range of economic actors—homebuilders, city planners, car companies, retailers, customers, etc.—could plan sensibly. It would also make it easier to do the kind of EPA estimates Kevin is talking about. What we do right now—where on Monday and Wednesday politicians call for more fuel efficient vehicles and then on Tuesday and Thursday they call for cheaper gas—is confusing and counterproductive.

The Chrysler Deal

Looks like Chrysler will wind up in a pre-packaged bankruptcy before becoming a firm jointly owned by Fiat, the United Auto Workers, the United States of America, and Canada. The point of passing through bankruptcy courts is (a) to force a handful of holdout bondholders (mostly hedge funds, it seems) to take a haircut and (b) to be able to put the hammer to Chrysler dealers.

Another element of this is that Chrysler’s financial arm will not be bailed out. Instead, GMAC—GM’s financing arm, now restructured as an independent bank holding company—will take over.

Given the status quo as of two weeks ago, I think this is a good resolution. But I still wish that back in late November when this issue first come up that we’d moved directly to the government putting up money to do debtor-in-possession financing and but the company through the bankruptcy courts. Fiat could have bought Chrysler’s productive assets in a bankruptcy process, and instead of spending billions keeping Chrysler operating for a few additional months more funds could have been made available for direct relief. I suppose that, politically, it may have been necessary to go through the motions of showing that it wasn’t possible to get all the concessions needed short of bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, how much precedent is there for state-owned enterprises to be jointly owned by two different countries?

Car Sales On an Unsustainable Trajectory

This came up at yesterday’s transportation panel and the point is worth making on the blog. Whatever you think about the likely medium-term outlook for the economy and whatever you think about the future of transportation policy in the United States, the market for new auto sales is definitely going to perk up sometime reasonably soon. To see why, look at this chart Calculated Risk posted a couple of weeks ago showing how long it would take the current fleet to turn over at the current rate of sales:

This chart is produced by taking the total number of registered vehicles in the U.S. divided by the sales rate. The numbers we’re at right now are not only way out of line with trends, but they’re way out of lines with the basic realities of American life. People’s vehicles aren’t going to last forever, and for the majority of people the inconvenience of carlessness is going to outweigh their recession-driven desire to reduce spending. Note that the US population continues to grow, making this look even less sustainable.

BMW: Bike Commuters’ New Favorite Car Company

This seems like a promising development:

According to New Scientist, the pair have developed a prototype door that uses a range of sensors to detect any oncoming dangers, and work in concert with an accelerometer in the door to prevent it from being opened. What’s more, the sensors are apparently also able to detect the proximity of the object and adjust the resistance of the door accordingly — for instance, slowing the door down if you’re about to slam it into a lamp post.

My hope, of course, would be that this will prevent careless drivers from opening a car door right in the path of an oncoming bicyclist. But if you drive regularly and don’t yet own this fabulous technology, please do take a second before opening the door in your parked car to check for this scenario. Bad things can happen otherwise.

The Obama Auto Plan

It’s taken me all the way until the end of the day to actually digest the day’s big story—the Obama administration’s new auto industry plan. The first thing to say about this is that unlike a lot of other things that have raised the cry of “socialism!” this really sort of is socialism. You have the President of the United States firing the CEO of General Motors, and simultaneously ordering Chrysler to pursue a process of selling itself to Fiat. The administration is wisely trying to avoid an extended period of state-directed management of industrial firms producing consumer goods, but that’s certainly the situation they’re in at the moment and it’s something we ought to try to bring to an end as soon as possible.

My understanding of the Chrysler portion of the deal is basically that if Chrysler and Fiat can’t come to terms within 30 days, then Chrysler is going to enter into a Chapter 7 liquidation process at which point Fiat could buy whatever it wants. Consequently, Fiat is likely to be able to extract favorable terms on whatever deal they reach. General Motors, meanwhile, is in effect being put into a debtor-in-possession bankruptcy. They haven’t technically been put in such a scenario, but the firm’s restructuring plan has been rejected and the panel is offering a 60 period in which to put together a more radical restructuring featuring haircuts from bondholders and labor unions and dealers. This is basically what would happen in a DIP bankruptcy. The thinking is that given current conditions in the economy and the credit markets it wouldn’t be possible to arrange that through the private sector, so a bankrupt GM would need to be liquidated rather than reorganized. The government is stepping in to, instead, facilitate reorganization.

In both cases, these seem like economically reasonable courses of action. It’s important to note, though, that if these plans work it doesn’t seem like they’ll especially achieve what people would ideally like to see. The American auto industry isn’t really going to be “saved.” General Motors is going to shrink radically, and Chrysler’s production facilities will basically become “transplant” factories of an Italian firm. In job terms, the auto industry is going to continue to shrink as a source of employment. In particular, the Chrysler-Fiat merger scenario is consistent with massive job losses in the United States since it’s not obvious how many Americans Chrysler would really want to employ. If GM succeeds in getting out of a lot of its debt obligations, the resulting company isn’t going to be well-positioned to expand when the broader economy recovers since it’ll be hard to borrow on favorable terms. And the “good jobs” nature of blue collar work in the auto industry is going to further erode.

Long story short, this looks like an economically responsible way to avoid a cataclysmic implosion of these firms at an inopportune moment. But this isn’t going to prevent the conditions facing the population of Michigan from further deteriorating. That state more-and-more looks like it’s going to be the 21st century version of the Great Depression’s Dust Bowl. The most important policy question facing us in this regard thus continues to be what can be done to help the people of the Rust Belt that doesn’t just involved indefinitely propping up shrinking firms. The first step is simply to turn around the shrinkage in the larger economy, but the question will remain even if recovery reaches the rest of the country.

Death By Collision With People Driving Their Cars Illegally

To echo Dave Alpert’s concern I think it’s deplorable that this is the standard way of describing what happens when illegal driving kills people:

Four people ranging in age from 19 to 21 were killed early yesterday in Culpeper County, Va., when their car collided with a vehicle that was going the wrong way, Virginia State Police said.

Nobody would ever write “four people ranging in age from 19 to 21 were killed early yesterday in Culpepper County, Va., when their heads collided with bullets that were flying in the wrong direction.

Cars and trucks are, obviously, useful ways of getting around and I expect that people will continue to use them regularly for a long time to come. But equally obviously, fast-moving heavy metal objects are extremely dangerous. The people piloting them have a responsible to be careful with what they’re doing. And people who aren’t careful—especially those people whose carelessly leads to deaths and serious injuries—deserve to be subjected to strong implicit and explicit moral criticism. The common rhetoric of “accidents” the use of the passive voice serve to obscure what’s happening and where the responsibility lies.

Swedish Government Resisting Calls for Saab Rescue

With governments around the world taking steps to prop up their domestic auto industries, I’ve been wondering where the necessary reduction in global car production capacity is going to come from. One answer, it seems, is Sweden where the center-right government says it’s not interested in having Swedish taxpayers take over Saab as GM tries mightily to dump it.

Sarah Lyell’s New York Times coverage spins this as a repudiation of “Nordic” “socialism,” but in truth Nordic social democracy at its best doesn’t involve all that much socialism in sense of state ownership of the means of production. Rather, its successes have to do with the generous provision of social and human services (education, day care, health, etc.) and infrastructure in exchange for high levels of taxation. Pretty much all advanced democracies have, at one time or another, flirted with state support for “national champion” firms that have many employees (General Motors) or important political connections (Citibank) and that’s true in the very market-oriented countries and the very social democratic ones.

Obama’s Car Invention Myth

I’ve been glad to see Obama getting dinged around a little for the line in his speech about how the United States invented the automobile. What I wish more people appreciated was that he’s been using this line on and off for a while now. Way back during ThinkProgress’ October 15 debate live-blog I noted:

Obama said America invented the automobile industry. In fact, the first market-viable car was developed by Germany’s Karl Benz. The first automobile was invented in 18th century France and the first internal combustion engine was invented in 1806 by a French-speaking Swiss man (this is why we use the French word “automobile”).

Obviously, this isn’t a really big deal in the scheme of things. But I do think that one thing this country needs is to become a little bit more mature about our place in the world. We’re the richest, mightiest nation on earth and we’re close to the top in land area and population size. A ton of stuff was invented here, a ton of first breakthroughs were made here, Henry Ford is a very important figure in the history of the car industry. But this can be taken too far. I recall that back during his 2000 convention speech, Joe Lieberman suggested that “only in America” could a Jewish person get nominated for Vice President even though France had a Jewish Prime Minister back in the 1930s. The kind of solipsism and hubris of that statement, or of made-up tales of automobile invention, ill-befits a country that wants and needs to play a role of genuine leadership on the world stage.

DC Cop Urges Pedestrians to Avoid Inconveniently Colliding With Illegally Fast-Driving Cars

I learned in the course of my Commerce Cabinet Crisis blogging that in some ways, the original sin of traffic engineering turns out to have been committed at the Department of Commerce back in the 1920s. Before there were cars, obviously, there weren’t rules regulating where cars could and couldn’t go. But when cars were invented, a potential safety problem emerged. A car might strike and kill a pedestrian. Clearly, cities were going to need to cope with this. Cities could have responded primarily through measures designed to restrain the behavior of drivers, so as to render their vehicles less lethal to ordinary citizens living their lives. But instead, in part at the urging of the Commerce Department, they decided in the name of “safety” to start putting draconian restrictions on the pedestrians. Thus, even in a very walkable city like New York or Washington, any given street is separated into a “not allowed to walk here” portion (the road) and a “not allowed to drive here” portion (the sidewalk) with the no-walking portion much bigger than the no-driving portion.

You can see the sort of mentality that thinks we should avoid traffic “accidents” (typically caused by illegal, non-accidental behavior on the part of the driver) by restraining pedestrians still on display in the attitudes of MPDC Officer David Baker as described in the Examiner. He says the big problem is that pedestrians need to pay more attention and stop listening to iPods as they cross intersections. How about if I keep walking around the city listening to music and the cars stop speeding? Well, he says that’s not a big problem (via):

Some vehicles do speed through that busy crossing, Baker said, but most average 34 to 37 mph. The speed limit there is 30 mph. As he surveyed the site with his radar gun, Baker said he watched pedestrian after pedestrian stroll by listening to their iPods and talking on their cell phones, crossing against the walk signal and stepping into the crosswalk in anticipation of a walk signal.

If the speed limit is 30, then anyone driving 34-37 miles per hour—which is most drivers, according to Baker—is speeding. A cop sitting there with a radar gun should try to stop them.

Even better, we actually know a lot about the intersection between road design, human psychology, driver behavior, and vehicle speed. The road could be re-engineered so as to encourage drivers to actually obey the speed limit. Evidence suggests that this will be more effective than relying on direct enforcement that, by necessity, can’t always be in place.

Detroit Wants $14 Billion More

Anyone who thought the last dose of auto bailout money was the last we’d be asked for was kidding himself, and anyone who thinks this $14 billion request will be the last is also kidding himself. The trouble, though, isn’t really the price tag. It’s the conflicting goals of the enterprise. Amidst an enormous recession, there’s a fairly compelling case for spending money on this scale as what amounts to a jobs policy. Standing by and letting the level of unemployment shoot up further would not be helpful to the larger macroeconomic situation. But to really do this right would amount to the management and owners of the companies just admitting defeat, and saying they want the government to keep their assembly lines running as welfare cases. They don’t want to do that for a whole variety of reasons. Instead they want to say that this is part of a plan to save their companies and the “domestic” auto industry. But that means cutbacks:

In return, the two companies also promised to make further drastic cuts to all parts of their operations, in the hope that they can eventually strike a balance between their bloated cost structures and a dismal market for new car sales.

G.M., for example, said it would cut 47,000 more of its 244,000 workers worldwide; close five more plants in North America, leaving it with 33; and cut its lineup of brands in half, to just four: Chevrolet, Cadillac, GMC and Buick.

There’s a business case for big layoffs. GM is hardly the only firm undertaking them. But if spending tens of billions of dollars on a jobs program makes some sense, spending that kind of money to help keep the management and marketing infrastructure of the firms in place as they layoff and furlough their workforce doesn’t. But you sort of need to choose what you’re doing here—are taxpayers creating makework jobs to prevent the rust belt from becoming the new dust bowl, or are we trying to provide assistance to our “national champion” firms and help them compete? If it’s the jobs we care about, we’d probably be better off spending the money giving different jobs to auto workers—spend $14 billion+ on Detroit to Chicago high-speed rail or something (ditches, anything)—which would have the same beneficial employment effect, avoid bailing out shareholders and managers, and help reduce auto industry overcapacity thereby lending a helping hand to Ford and to U.S. production of “Japanese” cars. Otherwise, if every country around the world insists on sinking more and more money not into its nation’s car companies instead of into its people who work for car companies then we’ll have a situation where the whole industry just keeps shrinking and sinking slowly.