When you see a New York Times piece calling for localized bans on cars for the sake of the environment and “equity and justice” and waxing about the beauties of the coronavirus shutdown, it’s easy to roll your eyes at another progressive pipedream.
But conservatives should take some of the ideas seriously here.
Specifically, if you believe that family and community are important but imperiled by modern society, or if you believe that the government spends too much and has too much control over our lives, you should want us to be less car-dependent.
Of course, rural America will always be car-centered, and millions of people want to live in the country. That’s great, and nobody can or should want to change that.
But cities and towns can be different. I say towns deliberately because living in a small town (as opposed to a sprawly suburb) is often the best way to live the sort of life conservatives want.
I’m going to make a lot of generalizations here, and maybe they don’t apply to you. Maybe you’re not a small-town, front-porch conservative, but instead, you’re a privacy-fence, build-the-highways type conservative. But I believe that if conservatives thought about what matters most to them, more would become more car-averse.
I became much more car-averse in recent years because I realized how important community is when pursuing the good life. The reporting and reading I did while writing Alienated America made me realize how a car-centric world interferes with community cohesion and family strength.
Kids are less able to just run around when your physical environment is built around cars. They need to be driven to the playgrounds and playing fields. Pickup basketball and tag in the street are impossible when 35 mph is the norm for a dozen cars that go by every few minutes.
Communities are less cohesive in a car-centric world. You drive from your garage to a distant, regional shopping center, serving a much larger and much more anonymous population. If you sit on your front porch, fewer neighbors walk by because there are fewer places to walk to.
For a contrast, come to my part of suburban D.C. where two Orthodox synagogues are. Due to a ban on driving on the Sabbath, there are tight-knit, walkable neighborhoods where people raise their children as a community.
Specifically, for big families (which are disproportionately religious and conservative), the need to drive everywhere is a huge drag. You need to bring a bunch of little kids with you as you shuttle the older kids to practices and play dates.
More walkable small towns mean more kids biking or running off to baseball practice.
Now, I’m not advocating big government solutions such as banning cars or massive light-rail projects. I’m not saying “abolish the suburbs.” I’m saying that maybe suburban towns and counties want to drop their big government regulations and allow more dense development — and that conservatives would like many of the results.
I know it freaks conservatives out to talk about this, in part because Joe Biden is talking about it, and the federal government ought to have zero or near-zero role in any of this. It’s also scary to conservatives because of how lefty the talk about walkability or against car-centric development can be.
For instance, in the New York Times piece, author Farhad Manjoo talks about “the public health and environmental damage caused by cars,” complains about “gas-guzzling” cars that are too big for his tastes, and is upset that carmakers (sometimes) lobby against regulations that get between them and their customers.
He uses the language of the Left, calling everyone in a car a “fat cat,” saying that abolishing cars would bring about “equity and justice.” (Of course, being car-free is often a sign of wealth and privilege — rich people can afford to Uber everywhere and buy a house wherever is most convenient for you.)
The article gets all Green New Deal too and envisions taking land from cars and giving them to “social services.” I have no desire to replace cars with Planned Parenthood or whatever Bill de Blasio’s administration wants to push on people. Manjoo’s article doesn’t include a single mention of the words “children,” “parents,” “family,” or “neighborhood,” much less “church.” The article’s dream of Park Avenue with a large pedestrian promenade (which sounds great) even has a hideous modern art sculpture in it.
But the article has some very good ideas in it. If you closed some lanes in really wide avenues, vendors could set up roadside newspaper stores, soda fountains, or burger stands. Parking lots in the middle of shopping centers could become playgrounds in which kids could frolic while parents spoke with other adults while sipping their black coffee or American beer.
Congestion pricing on driving in city centers could pay for roads. That’s conservative because user fees are better than taxes.
If you love family and community and dislike big government, you ought to look around yourself and ask: Is this built for people or for cars? Then ask: What can we, as a community, do to make things more people-centric?
