Um, let's see. Today's conventional (liberal) wisdom seems to be that living in a walkable (e.g., dense) urban environment complete with mass transit and a minimal number of tiny, underpowered urban vehicles is environmental utopia: cheaper; cleaner, and healthier.- no more car payments, gasoline bills, insurance payments;
- no more noxious fumes, less greenhouse gas;
- more room to walk, run, bike, and play.
Well and good ... except:
It costs more money to live without a car.
[A] car-free existence is more expensive. I live in Manhattan, so I can tell you how expensive it is to live here. It costs a lot less money to live in some non-walkable place in the midwest and own a car or two.
For whatever the reason, packing in people so close together that car-free life is feasible also has the effect of raising the price of everything else, and thus we can only conclude that densely populated areas are economically inefficient.
And taking public transportation may not be as environmentally-friendly as you think:
Two University of California environmental engineers, Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath, say seat occupancy and the underlying carbon costs can skew our understanding of emissions.
They maintain that in some circumstances, it is better to drive into a city in an SUV rather than take a train. That's because a car that is fully occupied may be responsible for less greenhouse gas per-mile traveled per-person, than a train that is only a quarter full.
I rather suspect that free enterprise is a much better mechanism for allocating resources than is conventional wisdom.
Which may be why liberals hate it.
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