Biden On the Move

I don't mean Joe Biden's poll numbers. I mean his transportation policy.

Joe Biden is a big car buff.  He owns a 1967 Corvette (as seen above) that he loves to take out on the road.  It's one of his most prized possessions.  He's also a big Amtrak supporter, having taken the national passenger railroad to work when he was a United States Senator.  So he knows how much we need public transit to get around and how much it would benefit the economy if we had more regional rail transit as well as a modernized Amtrak on par with the bullet-train networks of France and Japan.  But because he loves cars - and because he brags about having been instrumental in saving General Motors (his mantra from the 2012 presidential campaign when he ran for a second term as Obama's Vice President - "Bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive!") - no one can say he's out to take away people's cars.

But I won't be surprised if he takes away your Ford F-150 unless you need it for your job.  Nor would I be surprised if you might have to buy an inexpensive small hatchback or pay more than you already have to to buy a sport utility vehicle.  Biden also believes in fighting climate change, and among automobiles, gasoline-powered vehicles made on light-truck platforms are the worst offenders.  And it you do get a monster wagon, it's going to have to be electric.  Biden is advocating development of electric vehicles as a more sustainable alternative to gasoline-powered cars and trucks, and auto companies in both the U.S. and in other countries are already responding with such product - and electric vehicles are becoming less expensive as time goes on. That big, fossil-fuel-powered SUV you have is set to become as obsolete as that old sedan with the CD player you gave to your kid when he or she got a driver's license.  And if you want a pickup truck, I think you'd better have a carpenter's or plumber's license to avoid paying a gas-guzzler tax, because it's not a big leap of imagination to expect Biden to bring back Barack Obama's tough fuel-economy standards - the jettisoning of which by Trump is probably a reason Ford got rid of its fuel-efficient compacts.     

Biden is the most engaged presidential candidate on transportation issues since Michael Dukakis, because cars and trains are a personal passion of his - just like they are with me - and he knows what he has to do to make cars and public transit sustainable and affordable to give Americans freedom of mobility in an environmentally conscious world.  That's why he's against giving out more permits for fracking.  And while he has said he will not ban fracking where the practice is already operating . . .  trust me, with fracking going bust on its own, he won't have to.  We're moving on from oil and gas shale and going green.

Newt Targets The Volt

In his latest attempt to distinguish himself from both President Obama and his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich blasted the President's transportation and energy policy while campaigning in Oklahoma by claiming it was anti-American to encourage the development of electric cars and more fuel-efficient conventional vehicles when the free market has shown a clear preference for light trucks, preferring instead to drill for more oil to increase the supply of gasoline and bring gas prices down (although American oil would be sold on the global market and have no effect on gas prices home). He drew numerous cheers from the hayseeds he was addressing when he added, "You cannot put a gun rack on a Volt."

It's easy to attack General Motors after it used its government loans to develop an electric Chevy that costs almost as much as an entry-level Cadillac and has had teething problems in its early stages. Also, anyone who needs a gun rack on his vehicle wouldn't buy one anyway. But it's weird that Gingrich would complain about so much money spent on helping American car companies develop electric cars when, as Michigan Live's Jeff Wattrick is ready to remind us, Newt wants a lunar base that would be more expensive and yield fewer consumer-friendly benefits. Newt also says he would prefer to spend the subsidy on helping Americans who can't afford a Volt to buy a cheaper used car - preferably a pickup, I'm sure.

Okay. Never mind that a subsidy for a used car would make it less necessary for GM to sell a new car and make it less necessary for GM to keep as many dealerships as they have remaining after the mass dealership closures of 2009. Yes, GM is making smaller cars, but they've been making small cars since the late seventies. That includes the downsizing of their larger cars in response to rising gas prices; the big sedans GM used to make before the 1973 oil crisis bear no resemblance to their largest sedans of today. The current crop of GM's largest cars are two feet shorter than the big sedans they were making forty years ago - because the free market demanded smaller (but not necessarily small) cars. And yes, the Volt costs nearly $40,000, but new technologically advanced products always cost a lot when first introduced. As they technology becomes more mainstream, the price of the product comes down. DVD players, after all, were very expensive when they first went on the market in 1997. Now they're so cheap that even CVS can sell them.

And, true, more people have bought pickups and SUVs in the past twenty years rather than small cars, but no one is stopping Detroit from making them. And if you do need a vehicle that can bear a gun rack, you can still buy a Chevrolet Silverado pickup.

Oh, and, by the way, while you can't put a gun rack on a Volt, you can put a gun rack in a Volt:

Happy driving!

No Railway or the Highway

A report from Tampa, Florida on The PBS NewsHour re-affirmed my lamentable conclusion about the utter stupidity of this country's federal transportation policy.

Tampa wants to build a light rail line to serve the central city and the surrounding suburbs in Hillsborough County, and it has the strong backing of the city's Democratic mayor. It would increase mobility and create more jobs Local Republican leaders, citing the tax increases and extra spending this would involve, oppose it, and they have similar reservations if not outright hostility toward a high-speed rail line to connect Tampa to Orlando. The Republican mayor of nearby St. Petersburg, to his credit, supports it so long as his city is also included in this line, which would mostly run down the median of Interstate 4.

One local Tea Party member insists that the federal government only has basic duties, such as the common defense and a national highway network. He didn't come out and say the government does not have the responsibility to build a railway network - which is of course public transportation, not like a highway, which is a public right of way for private vehicles - but that's pretty much what he intimated.

And I could have sworn he said the Constitution provides for the Interstate Highway System, although I don't recall the Founding Fathers suggesting a need for concrete roads for motorized vehicles. As for the idea of the Constitution mandating a national road system, Henry Clay repeatedly tried for a national road and canal network in the early nineteenth century, but his opponents kept thwarting him, insisting that transportation was a state issue that the federal government had no right to be involved in. President Andrew Jackson, for one, didn't think Clay's proposal constituted interstate commerce and so wasn't covered by the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which states that Congress shall have the power "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."

And oh yes, "Interstate" 4 only goes through Florida. As with any other mainline Interstate, its construction was funded federally with money shared by the states. Did this help interstate commerce? Or was this highway, which crosses the Florida peninsula between Tampa and Daytona Beach, just built to encourage development in central Florida?