Mother Nature: collaborator in the “War on Cars”?

“What planet are you from?” fumed Forward Seattle’s Joe Quintana, reacting to the Cascade Bicycle Club’s David Hiller. Hiller had just suggested that living next to arterials, highways, and freeways was terrible for your health, and that our over-dependence on cars is making us obese. “I suppose diet has nothing to do with it!” Quintana said to no one in particular.

Publicola had arranged this Tuesday-night panel, moderated by Seattle Channel’s C.R. Douglas, with lobbyist Quintana pitted against advocate Hiller, and Sightline’s Eric de Place wonk-jousting against the Washington Policy Center’s Michael Ennis. We were crowded into the back room at Liberty Bar on Capitol Hill, and Hiller seemed to know the first names of half those present.

Publicola recaps the debate nicely–and Erica fact checks the numbers thrown out here–so let me just summarize briefly before moving on to an observation of the conflict’s interplanetary nature. The four did manage to agree that greater density is key to the success of transit–and also that effective transit doesn’t have to mean the most expensive modes (try van pools) or even public ones (think of private bus coaches like Microsoft’s Connectors, or car-sharing companies).

But while Quintana (and Ennis, to a lesser extent) did think there was a “war” on–Quintana’s word choices included “jihad,” “Taliban,” and “Luddite,” but, unaccountably, not “social engineering–Hiller and de Place refused to cop to it. They argued that cars were an important transportation solution–but an over-used one. De Place’s primary message was simply that the Northwest spends $16 billion on fossil fuel every year–the money goes out of state, we get the externalized costs.

Douglas needled Hiller and de Place, asking them why they weren’t fighting a war against cars, given all the ills associated with single-occupancy vehicles. But Hiller and de Place pointed out that they own cars themselves. (I’d suggest that, for instance, when your doctor tells you to reduce your salt intake, it’s not a “war on salt.” It’s simple moderation.) Douglas also asked Ennis to name a single regional road project that he wasn’t for (they were all necessary).

Still, as Douglas mentioned at the outset, it’s not getting any cheaper to drive a car: Street parking is going up downtown, and the Mayor and Council want a higher commercial parking tax rate, plus a $20 increase in the car tab fee. In addition, a barrage of new tolls loom on the horizon.

For Quintana, all this places an undue financial burden on downtown businesses while provoking retail flight, as businesses head east to the acres and acres of free parking. De Place argued, with some merit, that the larger economic situation–chronic unemployment, job insecurity, market losses–might be more responsible for businesses closing shop downtown, but you can still sympathize with the fact that none of these changes appears to make life any easier for struggling retailers.

The lie of the “War on Cars” meme is easily demonstrated when you consider that a real war on cars would do the exact opposite of what the Mayor and Council hope–all of these increases are increasingly desperate attempts to raise money for the city’s deficit-laden coffers. They are all predicated on the assumption that people will continue to drive their cars. The costs may sting, but it’s emphatically not a green attempt to leverage people out of their cars–that would leave the city broke. If anything, it represents a cynical understanding of how dependent people are on driving.

So why have we ended up in this distracting, fruitless debate? Well, follow that “War on Cars” link, above. Some people raise support for their cause by riling people against another group. And differences exist. For Ennis and Quintana, life without a car is half a life, a young person’s fantasy–with maturity, one realizes that four wheels are best for most people.

But they were facing a roomful of 20- and 30- and 40-somethings who have a vastly different view of what “most people” are like, and want. They like Seattle’s urbanity and are in no hurry to commute to suburban peace and quiet. They bike and use public transit–they rely on both, and have high expectations. And–here I am speculating–they have intuitively an easier grasp of systems and networks, having grown up in a world of switches and bottlenecks and throughputs. They get that the purpose of a road diet isn’t, then, simply a question of reducing lane square footage but of optimization.

So there is culture clash–and it’s interesting that while culture clashes revolve around differences, they’re not necessarily important differences. Culture clashes are ultimately about dominance, and what you see with the “War on Cars” is a dominance display, a disproportionate reaction whose end is to run off competition for resources. The “War”‘s goal is to enlist a right-thinking majority with tales of an attack on them–and don’t get me wrong: Losing the privileges of dominance feels very much like an attack.

(Oddly enough, or not, given this reading, Ennis kept arguing all night that it’s spending on public transit alternatives that is disproportionate, and Seattle’s decades-delayed attempt to play catch-up with light rail couldn’t be costed out over its potential lifespan–what mattered was its share of current resources.)

But posturing aside, Seattle is at an inflection point in its history, undergoing a shift from being a town “of size,” with the habits and conventions of a town, to a city. As its population has grown, it has become a place that city-people move to (at the debate, the world’s cities were present in personal anecdote, but no one said, “You know, in Tacoma they do it like this,” or “I like what Fife has done”). I know some locals resent that, but we may have to learn from kindred cities how to grow inward and upward. In any event, you will have little luck telling someone who’s lived where transit and bicycling are popular that, just here, only cars can do the trick.

When I think of Ennis, who talked often about how cars and roads had got us the quality of life we enjoy today, I think of the Buddhist warning about clinging to things: You build a raft to cross the river, but you don’t carry it on your back once you get to the other side. Go ahead, put the car down, even if just for a little bit.