Technological Fixes for Cars

There are a lot of technological fixes for private cars that promise lower fuel usage and cleaner-burning engines. The simplest and quickest to implement would be better engine design. It is no accident that in markets where fuel prices reflect the world market more closely (i.e., are higher) than in the U.S., fuel efficiency is a primary goal of automotive design.

Fuels made from renewable resources—ethanol and methanol are the ones I know about—could improve gas mileage, although at least one method of making ethanol consumes quite a lot of fossil fuel. In the long run there is talk of fuel cells and even hydrogen-powered vehicles.

All this sounds encouraging if the central question is how to keep people driving from place to place. But this is the wrong question. All the technological fixes in the world will not change the private car's basic inefficiency as a way of moving people. A well-designed, fuel-efficient bus that holds 40 passengers takes the place of at least eight (assuming the cars are filled with a driver and four passengers), or, in a typical U.S. rush hour, 35-40 cars. That is an enormous saving in highway space—and in parking space when the passengers arrive at their destination. And the bus is the least efficient form of mass transit.

The real puzzle we have to solve is how to preserve mobility. No one doubts that people have to get from place to place, or that they should be able to do so, quickly and efficiently. More efficient cars will make people mobile, although in many cities drivers now spend upwards of an hour each day in traffic jams. The problem of traffic jams alone shows that cars are not a permanent solution. The more people drive, the more crowded the roads get, and the more we build roads and parking lots that fill up almost as rapidly as we can build them. And every day that we substitute technological fixes for hard thinking about the fundamental problem of moving people is a day that we draw down scarce petroleum resources and add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.