Let them drive Yugos.
A brief hiatus from the hiatus to complain randomly about Margaret Wente's most recent Globe and Mail article about how the Ontario government's attempts to promote public transit is doomed to failure on general libertarian grounds. I love this graf:
As for lower-income people — supposedly the main beneficiaries of public transit — they have an alternative, too. It's called used cars.
It's also called gas prices and car insurance, which as the latter two (albeit American) links suggest, is significantly more expensive and hard to acquire for low-income people, all else equal.
If Wente wants to argue that it's impossible to improve public transport to the point where it would be attractive to working people in the lower end of the income scale not to keep a car, then fine. But she's not actually making that argument.
Update: Declan has a post up on a related topic, the new StatCan study on commute times. In brief, StatCan finds work commute times are going up for both drivers and public transit users all across Canada, and especially in the cities, due mainly to increasing concentration of cars on the roads during rush hours. Vancouver is the positive exception. Declan has some ideas about why that is.
As for lower-income people — supposedly the main beneficiaries of public transit — they have an alternative, too. It's called used cars.
It's also called gas prices and car insurance, which as the latter two (albeit American) links suggest, is significantly more expensive and hard to acquire for low-income people, all else equal.
If Wente wants to argue that it's impossible to improve public transport to the point where it would be attractive to working people in the lower end of the income scale not to keep a car, then fine. But she's not actually making that argument.
Update: Declan has a post up on a related topic, the new StatCan study on commute times. In brief, StatCan finds work commute times are going up for both drivers and public transit users all across Canada, and especially in the cities, due mainly to increasing concentration of cars on the roads during rush hours. Vancouver is the positive exception. Declan has some ideas about why that is.
4 Comments:
That's one of the reasons I've been putting off car ownership as long as possible. I'm 26 now and I won't have one for at least another year.
Hah! I have you beat. I'm 27 and unless I have a kid, I plan to never own a car.
"As for lower-income people — supposedly the main beneficiaries of public transit — they have an alternative, too. It's called used cars."
Ye gods. I really can't believe someone could be that clueless. Maybe it's too much to ask Wente to understand that older cards have higher maintainence costs, but rich people have to buy gas and get tune-ups too...
Hope your back is feeling better!
Looks like I've got bragging rights at 32, without ever owning a car. Although if I moved out of the city (or had kids) I might well buy one.
Actually it was Wente's lame article (which was the subject of my third post on transit) that provoked me into finishing my first two posts on transit which had been sitting in the draft folder, so I guess I owe her one.
With respect to her comment on used cars, it seems she took that (along with a few other parts of the column) from transit contrarian Peter Gordon, "The transportation mode of choice of low-income people is used cars."
Not just idiotic, but unoriginal too.
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