This morning I interviewed Steve Meyer, Founder and CEO of Mainstreet Pedicabs, on my BlogTalkRadio Show. Steve started off studying both Ecology and Economics, worked in real estate development for a few years, and then started Mainstreet Pedicabs. Mainstreet is the largest manufacturer of pedicabs in North America, and ships pedicabs to major cities all over the world. The Pedicab story inevitably weaves into a bigger conversation about land use, urban economics, and the role of government in transportation.
We talked about the role of the car in the ecology of the urban landscape. At a time when there is so much discussion about saving the American auto industry, it’s useful to take a deeper look at what the car actually is. Bailout notwithstanding, what are all the other costs of auto transportation that we have subsidized, externalized, or ignored in the conversation? The auto industry is already deeply subsidized in a number of ways. Public monies are spent to build and maintain roads and bridges. Enormous amounts of real estate are devoted to parking, and the runoff from those parking lots is a toxic stew of old oil and tire dust. Much of our foreign policy, subsidized through our taxes, goes to maintain advantageous relations with oil producing regions. The effects of carbon emissions include global warming and health impacts. Our entire built landscape has been created in response to the existence of the automobile.
Steve likened the bailout conversation to the debate over suppression of forest fires. We now know that letting fires burn is good for the forest system. If we let a forest become overgrown, the effects of fire, when it does inevitably happen, are far more devastating.
So too the auto industry. The human consequences of a Detroit failure are enormous, and just become worse the more that the industry is protected from the true costs of auto addiction.
Is insisting on higher fuel efficiency standards enough? Steve suggested that this is just becoming more efficient at doing the wrong thing. Sure, it’s better to use less gasoline, but is that really the big question? We are talking about an interdependent system of transportation, land use, economics and sociology, in which the automobile, and the auto industry is one player.
The real challenge of our times is not to get things back to the way they were. It’s to see through the current crisis and write a new story about how we live, work and do business.
Posted by sustainableleadership 