Self-Driving Cars Are Cool, but They’re Not for Everyone
24th September 2017
Jerome Lucille points out some inconvenient truth.
Once upon a time, mass transit was the technocrat’s preferred method for prying people out of their wasteful, dangerous cars. If only we could subsidize the right combination of buses, trolleys, jitneys, light rail, monorail, and bullet trains—the thinking went—all our problems would be solved. To save the planet, “public transportation should be favored over private automobiles, and the cars heavily taxed,” wrote Hugh McDonald of New York City College of Technology in a 2014 book on environmental philosophy. That view is shared by a number of other scholars and policy makers who hope to eliminate traffic deaths, largely by getting rid of cars.
But now there’s a new kid on the block: self-driving cars. The trouble is that neither of these approaches takes into account the reality that almost 20 percent of the population of the United States live in the low-population rural areas that make up the majority of the country’s land mass, and they’re not about to trade in the F-150 for a newfangled robot chariot.
Automobiles mean freedom — freedom to go from where we are to where we want to be at a time and pace of our own choosing. Those Who Know How To Live Our Lives Better Than We Do (Socialists, Communists, Environmentalists, and other varieties of Democrat) don’t like this freedom; they’d much rather we Do It Their Way. They pretty it up with cool-sounding words, but that’s the bottom line.