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:

  1. This guy’s facts are verifiably wrong, because he based his column on a few isolated observations and made some assumptions.
  2. Not only that, but the actual statistics seem to directly and strongly contradict his assumptions.
  3. And he chalks his erroneous conclusions up to ‘ego’ on the part of the people in the city where his column was published.

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.