Emma Rothschild

A post-auto society?

Director of the Joint Centre for History and Economics, King's College, Cambridge and Harvard, Feb 17, 09.

Tagged with transportation, urban planning, environment, economy, government, energy

The various bailouts of the [auto] industry that were discussed in December identified viability, or sustainability, with two main changes: a reduction in labor costs, including the costs of contractual obligations such as health care benefits and pensions for retired workers and their families, and a promise by the auto companies to invest in smaller and more fuel-efficient vehicles.

But a bailout that includes no more than a commitment to fuel efficiency, or to electric vehicles, without increasing investment in public transportation and in the substitution of information for transportation, would be a denial of the Obama administration’s commitments to respond to climate change. For the idyll of plug-in hybrids is also the promise of a high-energy, low-carbon society, in which the auto-industrial organization of space, or of transport-intensive growth, is set in concrete for another generation, or longer.

An enduring bailout, or a new deal for Detroit, would be different. It would be an investment in ending the auto-industrial society of the late twentieth century. This would involve innovation in public transportation, and in the infrastructure that would enable people to work at home or close to home.

It would be an investment, even, in the old promise of “automotive” freedom, of owning a car but not having to use it, and of being able to go anywhere at any time, in Asia as in America.

The automobile industry, and its employees and retired employees, could be part of a bailout of this sort; they could be a source of plug-in hybrids, bus engines, new ideas for assisting deprived urban communities…, and long-forgotten projects of public transportation. The condition for continuing support would be a lasting commitment to innovation in low-CO2 vehicles, and also in the public transport and urban projects with which the auto companies were once so involved. Even General Motors, in the earlier crisis of the 1970s, described itself as “a total transportation organization.”

A new deal in which the bailout of the automobile industry was one component of a program of investment in the transformation of the auto-industrial society would connect economic, environmental, and energy policies.

Like the “Economic Security” programs of the New Deal of the 1930s, a new New Deal would be an effort to change the distant future of the United States - in this case the future use of space - by government expenditure and more open regulation.

Full story: Can We Transform the Auto-Industrial Society?
Source: The New York Review of Books, February 26, 2009

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