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Sunday 15 August 2004
Questionable Statistics
Journalistic Laziness and SUVs In today’s Washington Post, there’s a column by Warren Brown headlined ‘In Alaska, Cars Are an Inferior Mode of Travel’. The same thing can probably be said of the other forty-nine states and the District of Columbia, too, but there you are. This column seems to have appeared in the Post’s business section, though honestly in the contextless limbo of the online newspaper, it’s hard to be sure. In any case, Warren Brown is the Post’s automotive columnist. From the Seward, Alaska dateline at the top of the column, and from the general fuzzy-headedness of the whole thing, it smells to me like Mr. Brown is on vacation in Alaska, and, in the slower moments — perhaps while Mrs. Brown was taking a bath or something — he has been perusing the road maps, having exhausted the literary possibilities in the Guest Services Directory of the Fairbanks Motel 8. This seems plausible to me because I’ve done the same thing, and one of the things I’ve noticed about Alaska is that there are in fact a good number of towns that do not appear to be served by any roads at all. Apparently everyone and everything gets in and out of these places via railroad, airplane, hot-air balloon, and dog sled; according to the Alaska DOT, about 30% of Alaska’s population live in such road-less places. From the Post column: All this makes Alaska’s road maps relatively easy to read, because there aren’t that many roads on the map. Indeed, in some towns, such as little Talkeetna, which has two paved streets, the visitor is just as likely to find a single-engine plane sitting in an airfield adjacent to a private home as he is to find a sedan in a single-car garage. This does seem to be borne out by the facts. The Alaska DOT says that Alaska has sixteen times as many aircraft per capita than the rest of the United States, and six times as many pilots per capita. 13% of the commercial airports in the U.S. are in Alaska, even though Alaska is home to only 0.2% of the American population. Warren Brown again: It is not so much that Alaska is anti-car or anti-truck as it is that the state’s legendary winters and wild and rugged interior naturally relegate private road runners to an inferior place in its transportation scheme. I don’t think it’s that. There are 820 vehicles for every thousand Alaskans (compared to 750 per thousand in the US in general), and 738 drivers per thousand people (versus 670 per thousand in the whole country). Alaska has more miles of road per capita (23) than the rest of the country (15), too. Admittedly, most of Alaska’s roads are unpaved, but if you only look at those roads that are part of the National Highway System, Alaska is even further ahead, with 3.33 miles per capita compared to a nationwide 0.6 miles per capita. So this place — where ‘private road runners’ are ‘relegated to an inferior place’ — has more cars, more licensed drivers, and more miles of road per capita than the rest of the United States. Nevertheless, Brown says: In such a milieu, practicality surpasses ego, and vehicle cost and effectiveness take precedence over whim in vehicle-buying decisions. Huh. Okay, if you say so. Remember, though that this is a ‘milieu’ where people own more vehicles than in the rest of the United States. In any case, this would seem to imply, though, that outside of such a milieu, ego and whim take precedence over vehicle cost and effectiveness and practicality. I wonder what this columnist drives? Is it a Lada? A Yugo? Even the very blandest car I can think of, a Saturn sedan, involves a bit of what I think he’s referring to as ‘ego’, inasmuch as Saturn drivers are usually hung up on how unbelievably practical their cars are, and how anyone who buys anything else is driven by baser instincts. He still goes on: Thus, in comparison with the rolling fleets of exotic metal often seen on the streets of the District, New York City, Miami and Los Angeles, there is a relative dearth of luxury automobiles and sport-utilities in Alaskan towns. Aha. This column is much more stream-of-consciousness-y than you usually find in the Washington Post, but I think that I may have been able to figure out the central point of this thing: In Alaska, where Men Are Men et cetera, people Do Not Drive Luxury Cars and SUVs. Thank goodness for the Washington Post. As their TV commercials say: If you don’t get it (i.e. if you do not subscribe to the Post), you don’t get it (i.e. you are not properly informed). Phew! No longer do we have to live in ignorance of what Real Men (i.e. Alaskans) drive and how this differs from what the fops and dandies in places like Washington, DC drive — because, of course, the car you drive is some kind of window into the innermost recesses of your soul. It’s probably true that there are fewer ‘luxury’ cars in Alaska than in the rest of the country, though I can’t figure out how to get statistics on this. There appear to be at least five Cadillac dealers, two Mercedes-Benz dealers, one Porsche dealer, one Lexus dealer, one Land Rover dealer and one Hummer dealer in Alaska, but I suppose these places mainly sell their wares to people who ship cars back to Seattle. Or perhaps they don’t sell anything at all and they stay in business just to give their owners something to do during the long winters. Statistics are available on SUV ownership, though. The Census Bureau’s Vehicle Inventory and Use Survey for Alaska (pozor: PDF!) shows that between 1992 and 1997 (the most recent year for which statistics are available), Alaska’s number of SUVs increased by over 55%. This might be why Alaska’s SUV-to-licensed driver ratio is 1:8.48, which is the third-highest in the country, after only Colorado and Wyoming. The District of Columbia, on the other hand, which this professional Washington Post journalist specifically derides for having too many SUVs, is actually fifty-first on the list, with fewer SUVs per driver than any state: there’s one SUV in DC for every 31.52 licensed drivers. This is approximately one-quarter of the SUV-age in Alaska, which is a ‘milieu’ — remember now, you read it in the Washington Post, one of America’s most-respected newspapers — where people eschew SUVs. Let’s review:
And someone at the Washington Post took this piece of tripe off the fax machine or the e-mail, or however they get columns from people in Alaska, set it in type, and printed several hundred thousand copies of it this morning. Warren Brown will get paid for having written this thing. Ah, but anything’s good material as long as it makes SUVs look bad! I find this particularly interesting, as earlier this year I noticed and wrote about a howler by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker that did much the same thing. Gladwell’s article was worse than today’s column, though: Warren Brown was just phoning it in in the middle of August, while Gladwell was writing a long article allegedly backed up with statistics and science and interviews and a paragraph on the back of each one. The only problem there was that the statistics that Gladwell cited themselves directly contradicted his thesis, if you bothered to look through them carefully. Oops. I’m beginning to think that I should start a new category here for these kinds of stories: ‘SUV bellyaching’, perhaps. SUVs have this strange power to make certain kinds of people froth at the mouth, and to make respected journalists ignore reality simply because they want the statistics to match their preconceived notion. Posted by tino at 23:53 15.08.04This entry's TrackBack URL::
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In a recent review of his, you actually get the answer to your question of what he drives himself: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45772-2004Aug6.html “Our Mini Cooper couldn’t handle the luggage. Nor could our Mercedes-Benz C230, or Toyota Echo. Carting suitcases and valuables here in the open bed of our Chevrolet S10 pickup truck was out of the question.” No SUV, but he certainly seems to have “fop” and “dandy” covered. I’m not sure if the C230 is particularly luxurious (it’s certainly not by Mercedes-Benz standards) but it’d definitely moreso than his Toyoto Echo or Chevrolet S10. Posted by: fedward at August 16, 2004 11:47 AM Just a quick note about Talkeetna, where I live. I also saw this article and smiled at the way this ‘little’ town was described. Two paved roads huh? Every day in the summer, a constant stream of huge industrial tour buses and RVs comes hauling down those “2 roads”, disgorging a few thousand tourists every day to wander the town. It’s true, you will see a few airplanes next to a few houses … I can think of 6 airplanes parked like that right now. But the state airport 2 blocks over has a hundred or more planes sitting on a huge paved area. What I’m trying to say is that although Talkeetna may be “quaint” compared to many other places, it’s nothing like the half-picture painted by Mr. Brown. Posted by: Jim Kloss at August 16, 2004 01:54 PM At the very least, people in Alaska can argue that they actually need their SUVs to be able to get around, unlike, say, SUV owners in LA or Houston. We drove around some in Alaska in January, 2003, and we were very happy to have the SUV for those few days, especially when we drove from Anchorage to Seward (in retrospect, not one of the brightest ideas we’ve ever had). Alaskans seem, to me, to be much less interested in pretentiousness. It’s one of the things I like about the place. Posted by: Sue at August 17, 2004 04:10 PM You know, the grand-daddy of modern SUVs was introduced in 1936. It had the same general name then as it does now; a station wagon on steroids. And it had the same name then, too: Chevrolet Suburban. If SUV use in the ‘burbs is a marketing fad, it’s a marketing fad that’s lasted for seventy years so far. The anti-SUV crowd tries to denigrate SUVs by complaining that most people only drive them around the suburbs; I think the implication here is that they would be okay if only people were driving them into the trackless wilderness. The problem is, most anti-SUVers would have a problem with people driving anything at all into the trackless wilderness. The natural habitat of what we now call the ‘SUV’ is and always has been the suburbs. For serious off-road and bad-road use, they weigh too much and have too much overhang beyond the wheels. A Jeep is much better. In the suburbs, though, the SUV excels. You can’t get things delivered in the suburbs, so you’ve got to be prepared to haul stuff yourself. Your kids can’t get around by themselves in the suburbs, so you need a vehicle that can hold them and their friends. Things are far apart, and traffic is bad, in the suburbs: you need a comfortable vehicle, because you’re going to be spending a lot of time in there. And because most people can’t afford a separate vehicle to use when they’re hauling stuff or the kids around and another for when they’re traveling alone, they wind up driving the SUVs everywhere. SUVs and other such vehicles are not the problem, but rather symptoms of the larger Problem Of The Suburbs. I’m sure that some people drive SUVs because they’re fashionable, but many, many more drive them because they are practical. Insisting that people who drive SUVs drive them because of vanity, or pretentiousness, or feelings of sexual inadequacy, or other personal failings on their part will not make it so. Station wagons, conversion vans, minivans, and SUVs all serve the same purpose: to provide functional suburban transportation, Each one of these vehicles has been vilified in turn — almost always by people who don’t need them, and who think that this means that nobody else needs them, either. SUVs are, by and large, pretty expensive. Do you really think that people would keep buying them in large numbers if they were really so ill-suited to their needs? Posted by: Tino at August 17, 2004 09:08 PM What really disturbs me about the anti-SUV argument is that it seems to indicate that there should be some authority who decides what kind of vehicle a particular family or individual actually “needs” and should be permitted to buy. I find that very disturbing. Posted by: Nicole at August 17, 2004 09:15 PM Tino wrote: SUVs and other such vehicles are not the problem, but rather symptoms of the larger Problem Of The Suburbs. I’m sure that some people drive SUVs because they’re fashionable, but many, many more drive them because they are practical. Insisting that people who drive SUVs drive them because of vanity, or pretentiousness, or feelings of sexual inadequacy, or other personal failings on their part will not make it so. You’re spot on that they’re an expression of the larger problem of the suburbs. The problem of the suburbs is that there are costs which don’t factor into an SUV purchase that maybe should, but those frankly are the same costs that haven’t been factored into the suburbs to begin with. People naturally want more: more space, more comfort, more power, etc. The suburbs support this very well, except where the roads fall apart because the vehicles are heavy and the roads poorly maintained, or where the roads are simply inadequate for all the people who moved out there for more space. I’m all for building suburbs at their real costs, meaning that they should have to, say, pay for construction of new roads or expansion of existing roads. Suburbs are cheap because they’re paid for in traffic and lost time. SUVs are “cheap” because fuel is comparatively cheap and we don’t tend to tax cars on their weight. If people had to pay for their suburban (big house, big lawn, big car) lifestyles with cash money instead of just, well, the time they’re stuck in their luxury SUVs with premium sound systems, they might reconsider. Then again, they might not. People do apparently commute to DC from West Virginia and Pennsylvania now, so they must value their time differently than I do mine. If your ass is already going to be stuck in traffic for over an hour each way, every day, the decision to do it in comfort and style is an easy one. There’s an economic model of suburban construction I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere (but then you’re far more familiar with New Urbanism than I am, so you may be able to produce an example): A new community could agree as part of its construction costs to pay all or part of the actual costs of extending mass transit: bus or light rail terminals, additional running stock, etc. There’s an argument that nobody would buy those houses because they’d cost 30% more, or whatever the number would be; there’s another argument that they’d sell out quickly because people would indeed want to move in somewhere they knew they could get to work without having to fight traffic. Has that been done anywhere? SUVs are, by and large, pretty expensive. Do you really think that people would keep buying them in large numbers if they were really so ill-suited to their needs? This is a conversation we’ve had a number of times before. I only care about SUVs on a personal level because in the small car that’s practical for me I can neither see nor be seen around them. I would never go so far as to suggest that I should be placed in charge of who gets to drive what (except in my own ego-centric universe, of course, which is moot); the pro-SUV brigade seems to believe that the answer to this is that I should just get with the program and buy an SUV myself. Posted by: fedward at August 19, 2004 01:15 PM You’ve brought up a lot of points here, nearly every one of them showing confusion or short-sightedness in some important way: you are looking for your keys under the streetlight instead of where you dropped them. I’ll just address one point, that of people supposedly not being willing to pay a premium to be near mass transit. I address this peripherally here, where I tell the story of 21-foot-wide townhouses near the East Falls Church Metro station going for $800,000. These are nice houses, I’m sure, but they’re not even close to being $800,000 houses. They command quite a premium because of the proximity of the Metro station. In this case, most of the premium goes to the builder, and some to whoever sold them this Metro-adjacent land — the station was already there. But the fact that all these houses sold pretty quickly indicates that people are willing to pay at least a 30% premium to be near mass-transit. The problem is that a 30% premium to cover the construction of the line and the station wouldn’t begin to cover the costs the way we currently do things. Metro doesn’t want any more business. This is pretty counterintuitive, because generally more customers are a good thing; but this is only true if you turn a profit. If you operate at a loss, and have no plan or ambition to ever not operate at a loss, every additional customer is an additional drain. Posted by: Tino at August 19, 2004 02:45 PM Tino wrote: You’ve brought up a lot of points here, nearly every one of them showing confusion or short-sightedness in some important way: you are looking for your keys under the streetlight instead of where you dropped them. I’ll just address one point, that of people supposedly not being willing to pay a premium to be near mass transit. Of course I’m looking under the streetlight, that’s where the light is. Anyway, I wasn’t saying that people are unwilling to pay, I was asking semi-hypothetically if anybody has actually built new construction nowhere near existing transit and also paid as part of the construction process for the extension of said transit out to where they are. I know people are willing to pay premiums for “luxury townhomes” in Falls Church. Falls Church, while suburban (historically, anyway), is still sufficiently dense that such things are not out of place. What I don’t know is if they’re willing to pay a similar premium to live far outside the Beltway, if they could do so without being required to spend at least an hour in a car twice a day. Your idea that Metro isn’t interested in more business is intriguing (and I’ve subscribed to your newsl^H^H^H^H^H XML feed) but shockingly cynical, even to me. But you’re probably right that a 30% premium wouldn’t cover costs. What I don’t know is if anybody’s done any sort of math to say what premium would cover those costs, if spread out among both commercial and residential real estate. It still stands that in lieu of such a premium in cash, said premium is paid in non-productive, non-family, non-quality commuting time. Posted by: fedward at August 19, 2004 03:57 PM This is why there’s still no Metro line to Dulles Airport, even though it’d be very popular. It’s not about what’s demanded, it’s what can be subsidized. This is why I’m against public subsidy of this kind of thing. I don’t think it’s inherently wrong to subsidize public transit; the government probably realizes a net gain once you figure in increased property taxes, income taxes, and so on. I oppose the subsidy because the subsidy distorts what gets built. I don’t oppose the subsidy because I want to kill public transit; I oppose it because I don’t want to kill it. And of course people living on the outskirts and not near stations already pay a premium, but it’s a premium that’s totally wasted. At least when you buy a more expensive house that money goes back into the economy via the builder or seller. The billions of dollars’ worth of time spent sitting in cars doesn’t enrich anyone. Part 2 of the Post’s recent series on sprawl is largely about these tradeoffs. I stick by my argument is that the real problem is our continuing policy of building single-use, low-density ghettos. That’s not part of the problem, that is the problem. With that pattern of development — and ‘new urban’ approaches are better, but not better enough — private cars are really the only mode of transportation that works (and they don’t work well). This is why I said that you’re looking under the streetlight: you are thinking of how road use could be disincentivized and how rail transit could be better funded while we continue to build this kind of garbage. I think that the solution is to stop screwing up the human habitat. We assume that people genuinely want 1.5 acres in the suburbs, but it’s easy to forget that it’s generally illegal to build anything else now. The artificial, regulation-induced undersupply of dense, mixed-use human habitat (i.e. ‘cities’) leaves most people priced out of what they want unless it’s in Sterling or Ashburn or The Mews At Windsor Heights. That just about all human settlements tend to take very similar forms throughout history around the world (except for the United States in the last sixty years) and that people are willing to pay enormous premiums to live in mixed-use, high-density environments in the United States — lead me to believe that this is the natural, desirable human habitat. Fostering that — or at least not banning it — should be the goal, not the alleviation of some of the worse aspects of having people live in situations that are fundamentally unsuitable. Posted by: Tino at August 19, 2004 04:46 PM I’m not actually just thinking of how to ‘disincentivize’ road use. One of the things I specifically mentioned was paying for building new roads and expanding existing ones. And I also mentioned bus stations, which would be useless if not connected to, um, roads. Rail pretty much just solves one problem, which is how to get a lot of people from the same point A (or contiguous set of points A, B, C and so on) to the same point Z (… Y, X and so forth). It works only in the same city model you describe, where there’s a dense combination of origins and destinations. It doesn’t work in sprawl, except as an adjunct to other transportation. Rail could work in Leesburg (where there once was a rail line which has been converted to trails) and it could work in Germantown, but it wouldn’t work in many places, nor would I try to force it to. I think those builders out in nowheresville (pop. Tire) need to cough up dough for highway expansion between them and the city core, not just their own local roads. And I think the NIMBY folks in the middle need to get used to the idea of wider highways (or double-deckers, or something) to handle all those cars. But I agree with you that the real solution is to build actual cities again. Posted by: fedward at August 19, 2004 06:03 PM damm, 10 comments so far, is that RSS feed working already? I don’t have time to read them all today but I have one quip; The GM Suburban has long been popular with big families out west. In Utah, they call them “Mormon Assault Vehicles” Posted by: steel at August 19, 2004 08:49 PM I have no problems with SUVs; I drive one myself and generally encourage natural resource use. However, I have a problem with hypocrites, which are particularly rampant in the anti-SUV community. Even worse are the number of Range Rovers in the Bay Area with “No Blood for Oil” bumperstickers. Posted by: Shaye at August 20, 2004 11:29 AM Posted by fedward: A new community could agree as part of its construction costs to pay all or part of the actual costs of extending mass transit: bus or light rail terminals, additional running stock, etc. There’s an argument that nobody would buy those houses because they’d cost 30% more, or whatever the number would be; there’s another argument that they’d sell out quickly because people would indeed want to move in somewhere they knew they could get to work without having to fight traffic. I’ve always thought that you could place the blame squarely on the shoulders of our elected officials. I don’t think there are many sub-developments built that haven’t had building permits issued by the county. Common sense would have them (or their appointed minions) not issue building permits until the appropriate infrastructure is in place. Something like this happened in Fredrick, MD a few years ago, in response to the drought. I’m sure they’re back to building like crazy now that their water problem has been temporarily fixed by rainfall. Builders like to make donations to politicians “war chests” because that’s cheaper than building the proper infrastructure. Politicians like to have more residents, because they can control more money from taxes. More money means more favors they can doll out, more patronage jobs they can grant, and more social programs they can fund. This gives them more votes on Election Day to fuel the cycle. When they clearly need to buy a chunk of infrastructure, they can whine to Uncle Sugar. Of course this money always comes with strings attached. (55 speed limit, gun free school zones, etc.) I don’t really have a solution to all this, the knee-jerk reaction is always carefully crafted laws, but that’s an oxymoron. Posted by fedward: I only care about SUVs on a personal level because in the small car that’s practical for me I can neither see nor be seen around them. I can’t see around delivery trucks also, but if we didn’t have all of this stop-and-go traffic I wouldn’t mind as much. Posted by Tino: we’ve got one of the nicest subway systems in the world, but one that’s utterly incapable of supporting itself. Well, nicest looking maybe, but it doesn’t go where people want to go (like Georgetown), it doesn’t have enough parking, and it’s not served by an efficient bus system, so everyone wants to drive to the station. It doesn’t save you any time (except maybe you can do work while you are not driving). It doesn’t run 24 hours, and there are no express trains (instead of 4 parallel lines they have 2, so they need to shut down the system at night to do repairs, also there are no bypass lanes for express trains). This is the capital of the free world; at least have an express bus that stops only at the stations running 24 hours a day. Oh and the magnetic based farecard system sucks, but I hear they are changing over to smart cards. I don’t think ANY mass transit system that came on line after WW2 ever made a profit. Amusement parks like Pen-Mar, MD were made to be tourist destinations and summer homes, designed to promote rail travel. When they figured out that most people were arriving via automobile, they quickly sold off those assets. Posted by Tino: I think people would be willing to pay a premium to live outside the Beltway and have access to the Metro, yes. People already do: compare the prices of houses near MARC and VRE stations to houses a similar distance from the center but not near stations. When I was house-hunting near Bowie, MD I checked the master plan, and scouted the area on foot around the new “Bowie Town Center” for every possible location for the future Metro station. You hit the jackpot if you get a house that is close (but not too close) to a Metro station. (Other things to note are the train motif in the food court, the pedestrian bridge between “Bowie Town Center” and the Metro parking lot, and the fact that said lot has the infrastructure to be converted from free bus lot to a paid Metro parking lot) Posted by: steel at August 20, 2004 07:28 PM |