Re: War on the car-driver
Tom Walker wrote:
Heartfield, the accidental satirist, wrote,
On British statistics, around 85 per cent of all journeys are by car. Around ten per cent by train. For the train network to reduce car journeys by one seventh, it would have to double in capacity. To halve car journeys, it would have to multiply five times.
- snip -
Public transit is not socialism, whether it is the London Underground or the train to Auschwitz.
Surely you’re not saying the final solution would have been more humane had only Der Führer driven the prisoners to camps in Volkswagens?
On “British statistics”, Mr. Heartfield must have in mind those notorious “single occupant trains” when he calculates the necessary expansion of the train network. Actually, the more extensive and timely the public transit system becomes, the higher would be its utilization of capacity — increasing returns to scale produce relatively large increases in ridership for modest improvements in the network.
Also http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/DrivingMadness.html (links to sources in original):
The U.S. consumes about twice as much of the principal transportation fuels (gasoline and the so-called middle distillates, which include diesel and jet fuel) per capita as Western Europe. More of us drive, and when we drive we travel longer distances in less fuel-efficient cars. The contrasts are pretty striking, as a glance at the nearby chart of vehicle miles traveled per capita (that is, total miles traveled by cars and trucks divided by the population) shows.
For more detail, we can turn to a recent study by Genevieve Giuliano and Dhiraj Narayan of USC comparing the driving habits of Americans and the British. Just 3% of U.S. households have no car, compared with 23% in Britain; 16% of U.S. households have more vehicles than drivers, compared with 3% of British households. Americans average four car trips a day, twice as many as Brits, and travel seventeen miles a day, almost three times as much as the U.K.’s average of six. The average American travels almost twice as fast, too. Almost 90% of American voyages are by private vehicle, compared with 58% in Britain. Exact stats are unavailable, but it looks like Americans are almost twice as likely to drive solo. British travelers are more than five times as likely to take a bus, three times as likely to take a train, and almost five times as likely to walk or ride a bike than Americans.