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Notes: energy, parking, automatic, planes, automatic, public transportation

	In these essays, we shall often argue against prevalent points of
view. Mostly we will be concerned with environmentalist and politically
left points of view.  While most environmentalists and leftists differ
in some way in their views from the "core opinion" we shall describe here,
still there is a substantial consensus on them.  We won't make anything
about exactly who holds these views.  If the reader wishes to regard them
as a straw man, he is welcome to do so.  We merely mention them,
because the reader may be inclined to take some of them for granted,
and we wish to make our own dissent explicit.

	1. Technological pessimism.

Find the quote from Philip Handler to the effect that the world cannot
enjoy the U.S. standard of living.
	American transportation has come to be based mainly on the
private automobile.  Standard environmentalism tends to regard this
as a mistake and asserts that had we only known (say in the 1920s)
what its consequences would be, America would have decided to do
something quite different, i.e. develop a transportation system
relying more heavily on public transportation.  My view is that
basing transportation on private cars was not a mistake even though
it was mainly the result of millions of individual decisions rather
than the result of a plan.

	We regard the following advantages of private cars as decisive:

	1. Individuals meet their own transportation needs, allocating
their resources between transportation and other goods according to
their own ideas.  There is a vast cost range between buying a Cadillac
or Mercedes every year and making an elderly used car last another
ten years.

	2. A person can change his mind about his route.

	3. The road system can withstand greater temporary overcrowding
than any public system.

	4. It permits great flexibility of decision in where a person
wants to live.

	Therefore, our view is that future transportations will
preserve these advantages of individual transportation.  In fact,
any plan that proposes to give them up to save energy or even to save
lives will (quite properly) not be accepted by the public.

Innovations in cars

	The automobile is a very democratic means of transportation.
The purchaser of the best car money can buy has only a slight advantage
over the user of an old used car.  He can rarely go much faster and
has no advantage in flexibility.  A chauffeur is a real advantage, but
that has nothing to do with the car itself.  A rich eccentric who had
a chauffeur drive him around in a decrepit old car would get most of
the advantages of the chauffeur; the eccentricity is merely that a
good car is much less expensive than the services of a chauffeur.