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Message |
| Posted By: |
UT |
| Date: |
22-Jun-2004-13:00:05 |
| Subject: |
A less-than-positive thing about France, maybe... |
I've spent the last year in Paris without a car, the first time in my
life I haven't had one since I was 15. And it's been kinda neat,
partly because the public transportation here is so good and so
much more efficient than driving a car that I haven't missed having
one. When I want to get out of town for a weekend, I just rent a
car, at about 20 Euros a day. And when I do I rent a turbodiesel
that gets about 60-70 miles per gallon, a wise choice when filling
up a 10-gallon tank with gasoline would cost you 50-70 dollars US.
But I know a bunch of people who own cars, and occasionally I
get their side of things, too. And it presents an interesting dichot-
omy between self interest and social interest, so I'll comment on
it a bit.
The current government of Paris is very Green. As such, when
they assumed power some years ago they didn't think much of
the high levels of traffic choking the streets and the equally high
levels of pollution choking the people. So they set out to do some-
thing about it. They made traffic worse.
Seriously, they did. On purpose. They completely revamped the
street plans of Paris and made many, if not most, of the major
streets one-way, with a special lane on each of them going the
other way that is reserved for public transportation like cabs and
buses. As a result, the public transportation now flows smoothly
and efficiently, but the drivers of personal autos endure even worse
traffic jams than before. And it's on purpose -- the Green guvmint
wants to convince Parisians that having a car in this city is a
*drawback*, not a positive thing, and having learned the lesson
of California, they realized that the *only* way to get this point
across is to *make* driving a car a drawback.
To that end (and to support very real accident statistics), it costs
50% more to insure a car registered in Paris than anywhere else
in France. Parking is hard to find and costs a fortune when you
find it. Parking tickets make you say Ouch! when you see one on
your windshield, not like the $5 slap-on-the-wrist kind that so many
Americans collect like baseball cards.
So many in the Parisian middle class and upper middle class, who
after all were brought up on the 80s and 90s version of the Great
French Dream (not terribly different than the Great American Dream --
house, nice car, 2.5 kids, lots of toys) are annoyed that now that
they have financially achieved the Great French Dream, they are
being penalized for having done so. And they are right -- that is
*exactly* what is happening.
On the other hand, public transportation now flows efficiently and
the air pollution in this city is starting to go down. So I don't
expect the policies to change any time soon. They may, in fact, get
worse, because Paris officials are already talking about imposing a
heavy tax on drivers of SUVs. Again, the reason is sound, from a Green
point of view -- the SUVs are space hogs in a city with a minimum
of free space, and more important, they pump out an average of 4X
to 6X the CO2 and other polluting gases that cars do because they
are exempt here to air quality rules and regs, just as they are in
the US.
So it's a weird conundrum. On the one hand, a party committed to
improving the overall quality of the environment for the majority of
the people it serves is making inroads in doing just that. On the
other hand, it is doing so by *forcing* car owners to face up to the
realities of being a car owner, and take responsibility for those
realities. The message is clear -- "Want to pollute our city? Fine,
we'll let you, for now...but you're going to have to PAY for it, in
many ways."
As you can imagine, the folks who are more committed to the Great
French Dream than they are to a viable environment are not reacting
to this very well. But in this city at least, they are heavily
outnumbered by folks who like to walk, and breathe as they walk, so
the complaints of the car owners go nowhere. In this day and age,
Marie Antoinette's message would probably be changed from "Let them
eat cake" to "Let them take the Metro."
I just find all this fascinating, because a few years ago I did a
small writing project for a Rama student who was a noted expert in
the field of transportation. And one of the things that kept coming
up in the materials I was working with was The California Experience,
which basically is that it is *impossible* to change the driving
habits of the population via incentives. You can offer them more
money in their paycheck, you can offer them benefits up the ying-
yang, and it does no good. They keep driving their single-passenger
vehicles anyway. The *only* thing that has ever successfully changed
the driving habits of motorists is to penalize them, both financially
and in terms of loss of their valuable time while stuck in traffic
jams.
So while there is *no question* that the policies of the Green party
in Paris are intrusive, and cut down on that elusive idea of "freedom,"
they are actually working, whereas *all* attempts to accomplish the
same goals in the past via positive incentives have failed. It's an
interesting situation and, I think, a harbinger of the future. We
live on a planet that is rapidly approaching "critical mass" in terms
of its ability to support human life, and the humans themselves have
shown no indication that they intend to change their polluting behavior
on their own. So I would tend to "see" many more such policies being
implemented in sensible countries around the world in the near future.
And will it be intrusive and cut down on our personal freedoms? You
betcha. But might it actually help in the long run? We'll see...
|
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