Posted on 09/04/2005 9:38:42 PM PDT by logician2u
4 September 2005
Those who fervently wish for car-free cities should take a closer look at New Orleans. The tragedy of New Orleans isn't primarily due to racism or government incompetence, though both played a role. The real cause is automobility -- or more precisely to the lack of it.
"The white people got out," declared the New York Times today. But, as a chart in the Times article makes clear, the people who got out were those with automobiles. Those who stayed, regardless of color, were those who lacked autos.
What made New Orleans more vulnerable to catastrophe than most U.S. cities is its low rate of auto ownership. According to the 2000 Census, nearly a third of New Orleans households do not own an automobile. This compares to less than 10 percent nationwide. There are significant differences by race: 35 percent of black households but only 15 percent of white households do not own an auto. But in the end, it was auto ownership, not race, that made the difference between safety and disaster.
"The evacuation plan was really based on people driving out," an LSU professor told the Times. On Saturday and Sunday, August 27 and 28, when it appeared likely that Hurricane Katrina would strike New Orleans, those people who could simply got in their cars and drove away. The people who didn't have cars were left behind.
Critics of autos love the term "auto dependent." But Katrina proved that the automobile is a liberator. It is those who don't own autos who are dependent -- dependent on the competence of government officials, dependent on charity, dependent on complex and sometimes uncaring institutions.
As shown in the table below, the number of people killed by hurricanes in the U.S. steadily declined during the twentieth century. Economists commonly attribute such declines to increasing wealth. Wealth differences are also credited with the large number of disaster-related deaths in developing nations vs. developed nations. But what makes wealthier societies less vulnerable to natural disaster? There are several factors, but the most important is mobility.
Number of Deaths Caused by Hurricanes in the U.S. 1900-1919 10,000 1920-1939 3,751 1940-1959 1,119 1960-1979 453 1980-1999 57Source: Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory. Number for 1900-1919 is estimated as the exact death toll from 1900 Galveston hurricane is unknown.
People with access to autos can leave an area before it is flooded or hit with hurricanes, tornados, or other storms. When earthquakes or storms strike too suddenly to allow prior evacuation, people with autos can move away from areas that lack food, safe water, or other essentials.
Numerous commentators have legitimately criticized the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other government agencies for failing to foresee the need for evacuation, failing to secure enough buses or other means of evacuation, and failing to get those buses to people who needed evacuation. But people who owned autos didn't need to rely on the competence of government planners to be safe from Katrina and flooding. They were able to save themselves by driving away. Most apparently found refuge with friends or in hotels many miles from the devastation. Meanwhile, those who didn't have autos were forced into high-density, crime-ridden refugee camps such as the Superdome and New Orleans Convention Center.
Rather than help low-income people achieve greater mobility, New Orleans transportation planners decided years ago that their highest priority was to provide heavily subsidized streetcar rides for tourists.
These tourist lines do nothing to help any local residents except for those who happen to own property along the line. The city was not deterred by table 7.2 on page 8 its own analysis of the Desire line showing that each new rider on this line would cost taxpayers more than $20.
About 26,000 low-income families in New Orleans don't own a car. If all the money spent on New Orleans streetcars from 1985 to the present had been spent instead on helping autoless low-income families achieve mobility, the city would have had more than $6,000 for each such family, enough to buy good used cars for all of them. Add the money the city wanted to spend on the Desire Street streetcar and you have enough to buy a brand-new car for every single autoless low-income family -- not a Lexus or BMW, certainly, but a functional source of transportation that would have allowed them to escape the current disaster.
While I don't think that buying low-income families brand-new cars is the best use of our limited transportation resources, it would produce far greater benefits than building rail transit. Studies have found that unskilled workers who have a car are much more likely to have a job and will earn far more than workers who must depend on transit. That is why numerous social service agencies have begun programs aimed at helping low-income families acquire their first car or maintain an existing one.
Yet when I point out the comparative benefits of providing mobility to low-income people vs. building rail transit lines to suburban areas that already enjoy a high degree of mobility, rail advocates often respond, "We can't let poor people have cars. It would cause too much congestion." Yes, as the Soviet Union discovered, poverty is one way to prevent congestion.
New Orleans is in many ways a model for smart growth: high densities, low rates of auto ownership, investments in rail transit. This proved to be its downfall. While the city was vulnerable from being built below sea level, many cities above sea level have proven equally vulnerable to storms and flooding. In the end, New Orleans' people suffered primarily because so many lived without autos, thus making them overly dependent on the competence of government planners.
Please feel free to forward or reprint this article with appropriate citation.
Idiot N.O. Mayor bump
It's Bush' fault.
Thanks for pointing out the role of "smart growth" in the deaths of so many people.
In California, the Sacramento Region Blueprint is creating "smart growth" chaos with significant funding from the Department of Transportation. If you see "traffic calming", international style road markings for crosswalks and such and "smart growth" or "transportation-oriented" developments, you can bet the good old DOT is paying for a lot of it.
More reason now than ever to trim the federal government and evict the people hating Agenda 21 sustainable development bureaucrats that are disabling America.
If you could only fit wheels to a big-screen TV.
I'm not quite convinced yet.
So now not only can I blame tree huggers for the price I'm paying for gas in my little town but I can dump a couple dozen truckloads of them dead bodies that are swellin up down there in the Big Easy right on their front porch.
One things for sure, if you didn't have a car of your own, you sure weren't going to get out of New Orleans. How could you with over 400 buses sitting idle in their bus barns that the sorry excuse for a Mayor did not comandeer and load with poor people and drive them out, before he fled to safety himself.
It isn't Bush's job to call out City and School buses to evacuate people, it's the Mayors and the Governors. They are the beginning of the Chain of Command and they made no effort to implement the disater plan they both had to know was there. It was Bush who pleaded with them to even announce an evacuation and they waited until it was almost too late.
Not everyone can own a car, least of all the poor. Still, if they can drive a car, they can handle a bus, a 17 year old youth did.
There is no excuse for the City and States failure here, no matter what kind of smokescreen they put up to make it look like Bush failed.
Had Bush just gone in and taken charge, they would be screaming today that he interfered in State Matters and is instituting a Nazi State.
That Governor and Mayor deserve no less than to be tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail by the very citizens they failed.
I didn't take it as such. :)
It's no coincidence that 9/11 happened in one of the most high density, and mass transit cities on earth.
Dispersal in low density areas, and working via the Internet, is a great way to live.
It is a good post. If you live in a death trap, depending on public transportation is quite risky. If you can't afford a car, living in a death trap is not one's best strategy. Move to Atlanta, move to Houston, move to Dallas, but move, away from the gulf, where mother nature is quite angry at the moment, and she is not finished with her anger. She will be back, again, and again.
Actually, everybody is misreading this rule in the plan. It says that "School and municipal buses...may be used to provide transportation for individuals..." It doesn't say they must be used for that purpose.
The mayor made a bad call: the proviso makes it his or her call to use the busses. His call was not to. That's not a deviation from the plan. He 'may' choose to use buses, and he chose not to.
It was the wrong decision, but not in violation of the plan.
Not likely. Private automobiles give people freedom and independence. The "libs" don't want your average citizen to have these things. Thats why they have brought "smart growth" soviet style housing and transportation to America.
THANK YOU!!! Cars, my butt ... they just needed a mayor and governor who were conscious and could hear.
New Orleans is also an advertisement for owning a gun, too!
Travis, excellent graphics!
So lets put this into prospective. All they had to do is trudge 1.2 miles to those silly stored school buses...hot-wire them (which over 15,000 NO residents are very capable of)...put at least people on, and drive out. Of course, it wouldn't have taken care of all SuperDome folks in one trip...but if you just drive 10 miles up the road, and return for more folks...you fix the problem. And 24 hours after the hurricane ends...no one starts to think of that? I wouldn't have stayed in the Dome more than 12 hours max...and I would have hit the road. I just can't understand the lack of survival skills in this town. They know how to be corrupt, and sell drugs, and rob you...but they don't even have the basic skills of survival.
Unless they can make money or somehow keep them dependant, they'll try. Most likely, you're correct. But, if there is a way to give them a 'free' car, they'll surely look into it.
You may live in or near a city that had "free bicycles" to encourage people not to drive their car.
A person could pick a bicycle up at one spot then ride it to where they wanted to go and leave it for the next person.
They were painted horrible fluorescent colors so no one would steal them.
Guess what happened next?
Now if they give away cars, what do you think will happen?
The huge hurricane that hit Galveston in 1900 and caused 6,000 deaths came almost without warning. But if they had known it was coming, could the residents have possibly gotten to high ground in time? Don't know. How many trainlonds would it have taken?
I do recall several times in the past few years, Florida was hit with bad hurricanes. The highways were clogged with cars, of course. The ones who stayed behind to "ride it out" were taking extraordinary chances, IMHO.
A car does provide a rapid means of getting to higher and drier ground, although it sometimes involves getting stuck in traffic. That's better than the altenative, isn't it?
They stole DVD's and plasma tv's. It's the government handout mentality. Until that's changed, until we rid this country of socialism, what we saw in NO is just the tip of the iceberg.
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