Cars are the worst. I love them so much.

A paean, beginning with a question: what’s the correct place for the personal motorcar in the 21st century city?i

Western cities in particular are currently extremely car-oriented by design, much to the chagrin of woke WEFists who want us all to eat bugs, own nothing, and take transit. Indeed, for those keeping score at home, in addition to the top-down attacks against our currencies, demographics, religions, family structures, and general sanity – our dearly beloved private automobile is in clear and present danger.

As you’ll have surely noticed, bike lanes are popping up like Frankfurtian burkas, Lime bikes/scooters are similarly littering major cities, Uber/Lyft are basically endemic, and Western metropolises are currently spending untold billions to install (and in some cases re-install) rail-based commuter transit to connect their sprawling land masses via something other than 4-wheeled personal transport. All this while newer cars sound worse, look worse, drive worse, are too complicated, are being sold at prices tracking true inflation (which is to say grossly outpacing wage growth), insurance rates are skyrocketing, and our roads are crumbling to dust. Not to mention that we’re now collectively stumbling into the largest energy crisis in over 50 years being guided by the Seven Sisters towards their biggest paydays in over 50 years.ii It’s really a perfect storm tearing apart the last bastion of personal sovereignty in any way accessible to mere plebs: the motorcar. At least that’s how a certain line of relatively emotionally compelling storytelling goes.

If we ignore the flippy-pole quackery and simply assume that Western Industrial Civilisation is on a run-of-the-mill but still baked-in-the-cake downward trajectory determined moreso by Man’s internal cyclesiii than by cycles of Heaven and Earth,iv the current line of sight still looks fairly dire for motorists.

But what if that’s just fine?

Hear me out. I’ve got a few different angles to hit this from. Well, five in fact.

#1 Thermodynamics
Our current civilisational trajectory peaked somewhere in the past – we won’t debate where at this exact moment, whether it was 1970 or 1870 – but suffice to say that we’re now in the “managed decline” phase of empire, leaving us with a noticeably shrinking pool of energy from which to draw inherentlyv expanding claims. In this forward-looking if not entirely rosy-coloured context, the single-occupancy car is quite possibly the worst energy-return mobility machine ever mass-deployed in human history. Really, 2`000 kg of plastic and glass to move 100 kg of lard? Compare this to the alternatives, viz. bicycles, mopeds, motorcycle, etc. all of which enable almost infinitely more favourable returns on energy investment, and all while being dramatically smaller burdens to bear for our crumbling civic infrastructures. Given our post-industrial destinies, the degrees of freedom to not tighten our energetic belts is therefore extremely limited, leaving us with prickly reality of “choosing” to promote the highest (or at least higher) returns on energy investment so as to extend our society’s limited productive runway. This is then less “neo-feudal oppression” and more simple proactive budgeting, like having hypothermia and pruning bloodflow to the fingers and toes so the heart and brain can survive.

#2 Land
Something like 30-50% of the land area of a typical North American city is dedicated to automotive uses, including roads to be sure, but mostly just plain old fashioned parking. So just as we face a “housing crisis” – when urban land is so disproportionately dear, and we’re forcing detached home prices through the relative roof thus making family formation more physically constrained than it’s been in any of our lifetimes – at this exact and most inopportune moment our cities are donating more than a third of themselves  to store private mobility “necessities” at below-market rates, like they’re free needles to crackheads. Every municipal zoning code with a requirement for minimum number of parking stalls just magnifies this resource misallocation, directly raising the cost of housing, diffusing critical urban density required for social cohesion (and individual sanity), and reinforcing the fiscally and socially unsustainable car-dependence associated therewith. Parking requirements were never handed down from upon high, no matter how they’re treated now, and in fact they’re just 20th century relics frankly maladapted to our era. And just as we top-down engineered our world to accommodate the motorcar in the spirit of the last century, we now have a responsibility to re-engineer our world to accommodate people in the spirit of the next one. This is the only way to allow the scarcest resource in our cities (ie. land) be priced like the scarcest resource, and to give the next generation a fighting chance.

#3 Geometry
Congestion in a dense urban core is ultimately a positional good. Every marginal car added to the road network reduces mobility for every incumbent, and because road space in a dense core cannot fundamentally grow (unless you’re dreaming in FLW technicolour), the competition for it is zero-sum. Adding even more oversized and overweight tanks to this contest doesn’t resolve the quandary either, it just makes it more and more frustrating for every incremental user. By contrast – at least in the dense urban core – transit, cycling, and walking scale positively as the core densifies because each marginal rider makes the system more frequent, more useful, and ultimately better-funded. Again, because of the physical geometry of personal vehicles, it’s a mobility system that gets structurally worse as it succeeds, while transit/cycling/walking get structurally better, and no number of multi-lane highways changes this math.

#4 History
We can probably all agree that the auto-oil complex is not the ultimate nor final nor perhaps the most idealistically desirable form of civilisation, but it’s definitely the one we’ve had for the last 80 years. It was perhaps well suited to its time and place post-WWII, but like Hilter-hating, it’s now well past its peak as a paradigm, and is currently displaying all the textbook symptoms of post-maturity: diminishing returns, saturated demand, and financialization. The 21st century paradigm – information and coordination technology –vi is now in its deployment period, and its signature contribution to mobility is exactly the thing that makes car-minimised urbanism viable again: real-time routing, sharing, dispatch, the “last-mile” logistics. And that’s what strawmanners miss: every previous paradigm succession (canals to rail, rail to auto) involved top-down state direction. There were no majikal “free-market” transitions, then or now. There was always state-driven public policy, inevitably creating winners and losers, and that’s the way it’s going to be in the future too. Get on the right side of it, wouldja?

#5 Human Health
Western societies aren’t getting any younger, and the “great greying” will need to be reckoned with on its own terms, namely that of declining health and reduced individual mobility. Sure, Wegovy and Bryan Johnson are doing their part to keep our wrinkly asses looking and feeling our best, but when people say “sitting is the new smoking” they don’t just mean desk work and couch potatoing, but sitting in urban traffic too. There’s a reason why Asians and Europeans are so much trimmer and fitter than Americans on average, and the motorcar is a huuuuge part of this. We must honestly factor this into the unpriced healthcare claims on our remaining and increasingly scarce labor force as old age dependency ratios worsen and every worker’s healthy years become evermore valuable to a fiscally exhausted state. Active mobility is, by a wide margin, the cheapest public-health intervention available. It’s still true that retards on “micro-mobility” scooters end up in emergency rooms with their brains bleeding out their eyeballs, but those unlucky dummies are thankfully only harming themselves, whereas car accidents do much more externalising of damage when incidents inevitably occur. Of course there’s no such thing as a free lunch (or riskless ride) but micro-mobility still nets only 0.1% of the injury burden of motor vehicles all elements factored.

In Summa:
Thermodynamics, land, geometry, history, and human health… these five argumentative pillars now being laid out with some semblance of rational pretence, it must also be recognised that the automobile is a necessary and beautiful thing. It may not be particularly well-suited to dense urban cores, and this certainly creates an element of class segregation, but so does every other policy, and so does bloody mother nature. Get over it.

So we won’t be banning cars, much less considering it, but let’s leverage 4-wheeled mobility to its fullest, when and where it’s best suited. Inside dense urban cores where critical masses of people drive productivity and safety, cars should be as physically small as possiblevii with parking available as deep underground as possible, but generally be as limited and down-regulated as possible. Outside of dense urban cores, cars can and should roam free like motorised bison on the plains.

This is what sanity looks like, and this is what a “soft landing” looks like when it comes to spending the remaining energetic savings of our forefathers, and intelligently maximising whatever remaining youthfulness our own society possesses. I assure you that this calculus is nowhere less forgiving and less palatable than the sub-arctic environs your humble author calls home, where 6 months of the year are unwalkable, unbikable, and unscooterable given the ice, snow, and gravel, but we must think more broadly, more holistically, and more honestly. It’s just not all about me and my ever-expanding fleet of sexy metal, y’know.

 

  1. A question I’ve been asking myself on the back of last week’s essay, which concluded thusly:

    And the even more nonsensical part of all this daydreaming (and willy-wagging) is that I barely even drive any of my three cars these days, at least not in summer when I can instead choose one of my lovely Schindelhauer Friedrich bikes, a Lime scooter conveniently left across the street from my house, or use my own two highly-capable legs. I regularly go days at a time without getting behind the wheel at all, and that’s when I’m sleeping in my own bed, which is only about 60% of the time these days, what with all the philandering jetsetting.

    ↩

  2. Recommended reading on the subject: Richard Medhurst’s How the US Pulled off an Armed Robbery of the World’s Energy Supply and Created the Petrogas-Dollar which I consider to be about 85% correct. ↩
  3. And much is pointing towards this now being the “looting and pillaging” phase of empire. ↩
  4. Can such a cut even be made??! I have NFI but that’s where we’re going today anyways. ↩
  5. Many people call Gen Z “Gen E” for “Entitled” and not by accident. When I went to the local lighting store recently, the 20-something lesbian at the customer counter had a service dog for her anxiety because heaven forbid she sold fucking bulbs without having a breakdown. Peace is like Marxism, sounds great on paper, might even work for a few years, but will rot your people to the goddam core if it lasts too long. War, like fire, is cleansing. ↩
  6. It’s railroads all over again:

    ↩

  7. EU’s upcoming Small Affordable Cars Initiative (aka M1E small-electric-car category) actually seems to be a rare example of Brussels not being completely evil and retarded. Basically being the European Kei car. The Dacia Hipster concept is a gander in exactly this direction:

    And honestly something like this would even work in Canada as long as it had minimum 150-200 km summer EV range (75-100 km in the winter):

    ↩