Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
I hate just to point and laugh, but when your piece for the New York Times Sunday Magazine begins:
Like a lot of carless New Yorkers, I am generally confused by bursts of populist outrage over high gas prices.
it's hard to do much else. The author says he's checked with a single economic study, determined that it's not rational to be outraged over gas prices, as large majorities of Americans are, and ends:
[T]he best possible future for most Americans may involve much higher gas prices. As billions of people, throughout the world, enter the middle class in the coming decades, there will be an enormous increase in the demand for gas. This, along with rising environmental considerations, is likely to send the prices far higher than they are today. But at that point, we will all probably be driving solar-powered hovercars anyway.
I'm pretty sure this was the same tune the media was singing about gas prices during the Bush presidency, right?
(h/t Jim Geraghty)
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Dec '10
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
I'm sure the reaction would be just as subdued if it was a shortage of arugula and tofu.
May '10
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
Cars bad. Populist outrage bad. Posturing moral virtue good. Commas good. Environment good. Snark good.
Mar '11
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
In related news, international demand for paper coupled with rising environmental considerations is likely to send the price of the New York Times far higher than it is today. But at that point, we will all probably be getting our news from Ricochet anyway.
Mar '11
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
I work with Europeans. They say the same thing, until they realize how far you have to drive to get anywhere around here in Maine. Add in the cost of heating (some 70% of homes in Maine use heating oil) and even the most enlightened among us are none too pleased about rising gas prices.
May '10
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
I wonder if the writer could have begun this piece: "Like a lot of childless New Yorkers, ..."
Mar '11
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
The shortages will start with arugula and tofu. When it starts to be other items, such as bread and milk, we'll get to find out if carless New Yorkers can eat snark.
May '10
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
I read that headline as "Careless New Yorkers." To elect one idiot politician is misfortune, to elect Obama, Schumer and Cuomo just looks like carelessness.
Mar '12
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
I always find it weird when progressives are thrilled with high gas prices. These are the same people who consider taxing higher incomes at higher rates just, after all. Soaring gas prices are highly regressive--generally, if you are poorer, you spend a higher proportion of your income on gas costs. My husband and I are lucky enough right now to be in a position where the rising gas prices don't affect our standard of living much, but I know that isn't true for everyone.
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
I thought the same thing. To the point that I almost began doing an internet search to find out if the author had any children. One certainly doesn't get the sense he does.
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
Lets please remember that not all New Yorkers live in the island paradise of Manhattan. A great many live in the other 4 boroughs, are not careless, own cars, and drive them a lot. The real audience for these types of Times stories are people in cities and fashionable suburbs all across America who drive around with their car radios carelessly tuned to NPR, which, as it happens, employs the author of this Times Magazine piece applauding high gas prices. It's toward this weird, elite feedback loop that we should direct our populist rage, not the good, hardworking people of New York City.
May '10
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
Mollie Hemingway, Ed.
I thought the same thing. To the point that I almost began doing an internet search to find out if the author had any children. One certainly doesn't get the sense he does. · 17 minutes ago
I suppose it's easier to imagine an urban transit utopia when you don't have a couple of small kids to tote along with you.
Jan '11
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
Don't they care about the price of jet fuel? Perhaps the high speed electric train between New York and Lisbon will be operational.
Sep '10
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
This guy is such a joke. As if I was not mortified enough by his comments, I was more so by the readers' comments on the NYT article. These robots appear to have no idea that petroleum is used for more than fuel. I would pull my car into my garage and leave it running if gasoline weren't so expensive. We are doomed.
May '10
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
The population of Manhattan is about 1.6 million; the population of New York State is just shy of 20 million. The price of gas in NYC and the suburbs is sufficiently high that this kind of piece may actually serve to inflame non-Manhattan-ites. Getting to Jones Beach, or the Jersey Shore is going to pinch hard this summer.
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
Some practical, forward-thinking imperatives from the comments:
They vill haf to be! Jawohl. In my town the trolleys weren’t destroyed by GM - it was a combination of unprofitable lines (fares were set by the city government, which fought any increases, which led to fewer lines, which led to a freefall in fare revenue) and the advantages of buses. They could go anywhere; didn’t need rails. They could pull over to the curb and let traffic past while loading and unloading. Best of all, the elimination of the trolleys meant that ugly power lines went down all over town.
Jan '11
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
Sorry. I really don't have anything to add here. But since no one ever wants to be the first to comment after James Lileks, I figured I'd take one for the team here.
Carry on.
Aug '10
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
During a high school debate competition, the topic was whether renewable energy sources could reduce emissions from cars.
At one point my partner and I, taking the negative proposition, wound up arguing against the other team's glowing endorsement of solar power. We challenged their efficiency and output numbers, demolishing their factoids with the formalized debate trick of citing more recent studies with different numbers. We basically won on the "we have better raw data than you" technicality. But the whole time, a friend in the audience was waving his hands, and shaking his head, and rolling his eyes at us in exasperation.
After the debate he rushed up to us. "You idiots! All you had to do was ask them how they planned to install a 10x10 solar panel on a car that goes +40mph!"
(This was way before plug-in electric cars were dreamed up. The other team was literally advocating using the old, massive, inflexible solar panels types to power moving cars.)
Moral of the story: sometimes utopian ideals are dumber than the half-decent ideas you argue against in good faith.
Mar '11
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
To the average denizen of New York City (which, in this context, means certain areas of Manhattan and perhaps Brooklyn), the "environment" means (1) the area outside their apartment or condo, (2) Central Park, (3) the Adirondacks or Catskills - which they visit by driving gas-guzzling cars, and (4) those interesting or exotic locales they visiting by riding immense, gas-guzzling airplanes. The reality that millions and millions of their fellow citizens live in locales where they must depend on cars to get wherever they're going either does not occur to them, or strikes them as an example - as James Lileks points out in a separate comment - of why the government must move us toward a future of increased use of trains, electric cars, and trolley systems (all magically powered by solar, wind, and biomass fuel, of course). That all this new infrastructure would despoil the environment they allegedly seek to preserve does not occur to them; that it would not eliminate the use of roads, but merely make them more expensive (less use, but still necessary to maintain for long-haul truckers, emergency vehicles, some number of commuters, etc.) does not occur to them.
Jun '10
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
Since Manhattan is not a known region of wheat farming, dairy production, tofu molding (or whatever they do with tofu), or bottling of expensive French fizzy water, carless New Yorkers may wonder why all their prices are going up fourfold.
Sure, the streets are quiter, but the shelves will be barer.
May '10
Re: Carless New Yorker To America: High Gas Prices Are Awesome
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Edited on March 30, 2012 at 11:11pm