Sure, studying transportation is important if you need to find the best route to the hardware store. But you might be surprised to know that transportation study might have other uses, like enlightening you about the most profound philosophical mysteries of the universe. For example, transportation might just tell us some surprising things about the degree to which we truly have free will.
One iron law governed 20th century transportation: driving always increases. But surprisingly, the 2000s appeared to see a halt to that trend. A few theories.
The Economist reports that the city of Shanghai has been auctioning car license plates. The average auction price has recently been $6,900, truly remarkable considering average family income in China, and even in Shanghai. The number of plates given out in 2011 will be reduced further in an attempt to reduce gridlock and pollution (both of which my experience several years ago in Shanghai suggests are world-class).
Last time, I showed you evidence (courtesy of Robert Puentes and Adie Tomer of the Brookings Institution and Adam Millard-Ball and Lee Schipper of Stanford University) that driving per person seems to have peaked in the 2000s and now may even be dropping. This bucks every travel trend we’ve seen since Henry Ford got to work. What might be slowing down the acceleration in driving?
In the SuperFreakonomics chapter on cheap and simple solutions, we wrote: And seat belts, at about $25 a pop, are one of the most cost-effective lifesaving devices ever invented. In a given year, it costs roughly $500 million to put them in every U.S. vehicle, which yields a rough estimate of $30,000 for every life saved. How does this compare with a far more complex safety feature like air bags? At an annual U.S. price of more than $4 billion, air bags cost about $1.8 million per life saved.
A number of Freakonomics readers have alerted us to yet another novel lottery idea. As Wired reports, Kevin Richardson won Volkswagen’s Fun Theory contest for his idea.
U.S. auto sales are looking a bit better this year. Trucks in particular are doing well. But one category is moving in the opposite direction. Why? Some blame has to go to the fall in gas prices from a peak of more than $4 a gallon. That’s right: it’s the tiny, gas-stingy cars that aren’t moving off the lot.
A reader named Gerald Andriole writes in with a small but interesting puzzle.
My Michigan-dwelling grandson will be 15 soon and will start learning to drive. He can’t get a full license until he’s 17, though, as the state wants to limit times and amounts of teen driving, presumably for safety reasons. That’s sensible – teen drivers are more likely to get into accidents. Despite this, the state prevents insurance companies from requiring people to purchase additional coverage for the teenager, even though between ages 16 and 17 the boy will be driving on his own.
In case you haven’t heard, California’s Proposition 19 was defeated last week. The initiative, which would have revoked state laws that prohibit the possession and small-scale cultivation of marijuana, drew only 46 percent of the vote. I’m no expert on what this will mean for incarceration rates, California’s budget, drug-related violence or the sales of Phish concert tickets, but what will keeping pot illegal mean for transportation?
Ahh, Google. Has there ever been a company that has done me such terrific good, while asking for so little except the ability to do me terrific harm?
A reader named Linda Cass asks an interesting question that pokes into the self-interest/fairness/altruism area we’ve been writing about lately: Why do 99% of people dim their headlights for oncoming vehicles?
Steven Rattner, the financier, onetime journalist and recent “car czar,” has just published a book called Overhaul: An Insider’s Account of the Obama Administration’s Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry. This weekend, the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt, and if this snippet is a good indication, there is a lot of sensible, factual material to be read.
From a new working paper by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi: “We examine the ability of the government to increase consumption by evaluating the impact of the 2009 “Cash for Clunkers” program on short and medium run auto purchases.”
The conclusion couldn’t be any starker: “Indiana lawmakers say the state’s driver education program isn’t working, citing a fractured system administered by three separate agencies and statistics that put the program’s usefulness in doubt.”
My son is renting a car in December. He’ll drive it for two days in Orlando, then he’ll drive to South Florida for an eight-day stay. With the drop-off charge, the price is $900. But if he drops the car off in South Florida when he arrives and rents a new one from the same company, the total price is only $500. He values his time spent dropping off the car at less than $400, so he’ll do it.
About a month ago, Lincoln announced that it will be introducing a new hybrid electric version of the MKZ model with a price tag of $35,180. On its own this is nothing earthshattering, as many automakers have joined, or will soon join, Honda and Toyota in mass-marketing hybrids. But what makes Lincoln’s announcement exciting is that their hybrid will be coming at a price you won’t be able to refuse. Or will you?
I received the following email from Kyle Tower, one of the lead members of the Ticketfree team, responding to my earlier post on speeding insurance.
If you think your commute is bad, take heart: a nine-day, 100-kilometer traffic jam recently befouled the Beijing-Tibet Expressway. It was reportedly caused by “maintenance construction,” although the road is often troubled by traffic.
A couple weeks ago, Ian Ayres became briefly fascinated and somewhat appalled by the appearance of a new Internet business that offered a sort of insurance against speeding tickets. In return for an annual fee of $169, ticketfree.org promised to reimburse you for the costs of up to $500 in moving violations. Then, the site suddenly disappeared. Why?
People are significantly fatter in countries, states, and cities where car use is more common. Mass transit use, on the other hand, is correlated with lower obesity. But there has been scant evidence that public transportation actually causes widespread weight loss — until now.
Our minivan is ten years old, so we went out to buy a new one this weekend. In Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics, we write a lot about how the Internet has changed markets in which there are information asymmetries. Buying a new car gave me the chance to see first-hand these forces at work in the new car market.
Bad news: with all due respect to Terrafugia, unless you’re a fan of Futurama it’s probably going to be awhile before you see a flying car. But cars that drive themselves are coming, probably within most of our lifetimes and possibly sooner than you might think. They will drastically cut traffic congestion, improve safety, and be a terrific boon to those like the young and the old who are deprived of mobility. The ability to take our hands off the wheel will also undoubtedly send sales of Big Macs and mascara skyrocketing. But do we have the drive to make robot cars a reality?
Thieves are less likely to target brightly colored cars.
Last post I started a series on the different ways men and women travel. The disparities are many, and go back a long way; after all, Eve and not Adam took the first family grocery-shopping trip, and Noah, not his anonymous wife, built and drove the first recorded vehicle.
In the days of the walking city, women (at least middle- and upper-class women) largely stayed close to home; walking long distances down filthy, chaotic, and dangerous streets was simply seen as unladylike.
When cars entered the mainstream in the 1920s, they were considered a menace to pedestrians, who were killed in great numbers. Cars rarely hit pedestrians any more; they hit jaywalkers. The term, jaywalking, shifted the blame for accidents from motorists to walkers, and ownership of the streets from walkers to motorists.
In SuperFreakonomics, we tell the story of how Robert Strange McNamara, an outsider at the Ford Motor Co., led the charge the put seat belts in automobiles at Ford. It was not a popular decision within the company nor with the public; pushing for a safety device in a car did a bit too good of a job of reminding people that cars could be quite unsafe. But McNamara got his way. Over time (a long time, it turned out), the seat belt won widespread adoption, saving roughly 250,000 lives in the U.S. alone since 1975.
If nothing else, getting an economics Ph.D. should teach someone how to complicate and obfuscate the issue so that it isn’t so obvious to outsiders that the argument makes no sense.
Edmunds.com reports that its statistical analysis of the Cash for Clunkers program finds that the program generated only 125,000 extra new vehicle sales, meaning that the cost to the U.S. government was $24,000 for each of those new cars.