In his introduction, Humes begins with an interesting but somewhat misleading story of “Carmageddon” becoming “Carmaheaven.” A 10-mile, 10-lane stretch of Interstate 405 that carried 400,000 vehicles daily in Los Angeles was completely closed during the weekend of July 15, 2011 to allow for the start of construction on a new lane. The predicted traffic jam that was expected to spread throughout the city was dubbed “Carmageddon.” To the surprise of all, including “professional traffic czars,” smog decreased, traffic congestion decreased citywide, no major traffic jams occurred, and accidents or deaths didn’t increase for the entire weak. “Carmageddon” was replaced by “Carmaheaven” in the headlines. According to Humes, “Every traffic truism held dear for the past sixty years had been turned on its head … when closing lanes lessens congestion instead of causing it.” He optimistically proclaims, “With Carmageddon, the lifeblood of our economy and way of life, the movement of goods and people from door to door, had reached an unexpected tipping point.”
Yet, his optimistic tone falters before the end of the introduction. He tells us that one year after the additional lane on I‑405 was opened, it took commuters one minute longer on average to travel the widened 10 miles than before. He doesn’t suggest closing the added lane to solve this problem. He also acknowledges that “the flow of goods [we depend on] has become so huge that our ports, rails, and roads can no longer handle the load” and we “desperately need investment in public capital that the nation does not seem to have. Yet it’s an investment that must be made.” Several times throughout the book, the importance of increasing investment in our transportation infrastructure is mentioned, but never the role of government regulation in diminishing, delaying, and distorting this investment.
Drinks and iPhones / Humes captures our attention early on with three chapters on the transportation that makes possible three ubiquitous consumer items: iPhones, canned beverages, and coffee. There are parallels here to Leonard Read’s 1958 “I, Pencil” (which discusses the transportation and processing required to produce a wooden pencil) and economists will find these three chapters impressive. Indeed, they will find them more impressive than Humes does by virtue of their understanding the importance of market prices in orchestrating these goods’ production and movement to market. This is particularly clear in the case of canned beverages.
In Chapter 1 Humes, without mentioning the cliché, proceeds to show that smart phones can be given only qualified credit for the “death of distance” by considering the travel of some of the parts that went into his iPhone 6 Plus. The parts he considers travel a combined 160,000 miles before they arrive ready to be assembled into an iPhone. And that doesn’t include the miles traveled by the different metals in the iPhone from mining to refining to assembly, or the travel of the chemicals and other agents needed in the refining, mining, and assembly processes. He estimates those considerations would easily add another 160,000 miles of transportation to the production of his iPhone, for a total distance equaling a trip to the moon and a third of the way back. The iPhone deserves some credit for the death of distance since Millennials can use it to conveniently arrange their meetings, including the one with the locavores talking about the importance of buying local.
Humes sees the “real breakthrough that makes the iPhone possible—along with most of today’s consumer goods,” as the shipping container. By significantly lowering the cost of shipping items long distances, the shipping container has made the iPhone commercially viable. Without faulting Humes for not writing an economics book, it is worth noting that without the global specialization and coordination made possible by market prices, the production process necessary for the iPhone would be impossible, no matter how impressive the transportation system. And, of course, without the information and incentives communicated through market prices, the transportation system itself would not be very impressive.
Chapter 2 takes us on the journeys that go into producing aluminum beverage cans, with a can containing one of Humes’ lime-flavored seltzers making occasional appearances. Without going into the details of the journeys taken by a number of resources—particular aluminum ore and recycled aluminum—that are part of the production of the cans, let me say they’re interesting. So are the journeys of the different ingredients that go into the wide variety of beverages and the shipping of the finished products to convenient locations in the right quantities to satisfy the demands of millions of consumers.
Interestingly, he states that “my can of seltzer is worth far more than the beverage it holds.” This is understandable because, as he emphasizes, it is important to be able to transport “massive amounts of single-serve beverages more efficiently and cheaply than any other container type,” and he makes clear that today’s aluminum cans make that possible. At this point I thought he appreciated the importance of comparing the value consumers place on convenience and the cost of providing it—and furthermore, that market prices are essential to making this comparison. But it becomes clear that he misses those points entirely.
Instead, he finds it maddening that 94 billion beverage cans, containing 95% to 99% water, are being transported to American consumers each year. He sees shipping all that water as wasteful compared to the good ol’ days when people either purchased the concentrated syrup and mixed their drink at home or had it mixed for them at a local soda fountain—with the heaviest ingredient, water, being transported very cheaply in both cases through water pipes. Over time, however, soda producers shifted to bottling their drinks, first in glass bottles, then in plastic bottles, and now primarily in aluminum cans. Why the shift to what Humes considers a “less efficient” practice? According to him the answer is profits. But this ignores the role of market prices and profits in informing producers that the convenience value of having ready-to-serve beverages available at home or in a nearby vending machine exceeds the extra transportation costs.
Humes is more relaxed in Chapter 3, which considers the miles it takes to make a cup of coffee. Possibly, he is comforted by the fact that coffee beans are typically shipped alone, with water added where the coffee is consumed—at home or the coffee shop—and he has no complaints based on naïve notions about profits. Interestingly, he mentions, without explanation, that the “bottom grades [of coffee] are too poor to be exported and are consumed locally, if at all.” Economists will appreciate this comment because they know the explanation.
Hazard of safety / It is not profits and transporting water that most trouble Humes; it is something far more upsetting. In Chapter 4, after making the obligatory comments about the carbon emissions from automobiles, he gets really serious by turning to traffic fatalities. He points out that they are so routine and scattered that they don’t command the attention of other disasters. To underscore this, he compares traffic fatalities to tragic events that do compel attention, like wars and plane crashes. In terms of deaths and injuries, we learn that “one year of car crash injuries and deaths in the U.S. is greater than all the dead and wounded from the entire duration of all [major wars in U.S. history] combined.” And the chapter title, “Four Airliners a Week,” emphasizes that every week as many people are killed on American highways as would be if four passenger jets crashed every week with no survivors.
In Chapter 5 he describes 27 different fatal accidents that all occurred on Friday, February 13, 2015. He provides enough information about the victims and circumstances to have an emotional impact. It’s a disturbing chapter, and one can sense his frustration as he intersperses comments on the dangers of speeding, driving under the influence, the distractions caused by digital doodads, and not wearing seat belts. To his credit, he ends Chapter 5 by pointing out that regulatory agencies, the legal system, and advocacy groups are more concerned with recalls to check out possible mechanical defects in cars that, compared to human error, have a negligible effect on traffic deaths and injuries. (See “Working Papers: Auto Safety,” Spring 2016.)
Humes puts the safety issue largely on hold during the next several chapters on ocean shipping, the logistics of getting ever-larger cargo ships into ports and unloaded, and then delivering the cargo to consumers. He returns to traffic safety in Chapter 12, in a discussion of self-driving cars. He is enthusiastic about the safety potential of these vehicles, as he should be. He also recognizes the difficulty of going from a few self-driving cars to almost nothing but such vehicles on the road, but he is optimistic that it will happen. When it does, he sees tremendous improvements in safety, which he explains with a list of “don’ts.” In his words, “Robots don’t drink and drive, or get distracted, or get drowsy at the wheel, or speed, or randomly cross the centerline, or blow through stop signs or red lights.” The items on his list are important, but no such list can be complete.
One point that Humes should have underscored is that robot drivers have the potential to remove the hazard of improved safety. By this I refer to the problem of moral hazard, which describes the general tendency for people to offset improved safety with greater risk taking. This is also known as the “Peltzman effect” after University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman who, in a 1975 article, found that people were responding to improved vehicle safety by driving more recklessly. Because of the improvements, fewer occupants of cars die in traffic accidents, but the number of accidents increases, as does the number of pedestrian, bicyclist, and motorcyclist deaths. More recently, Russell Sobel and Todd Nesbit found that safer race cars result in more accidents but fewer injuries to NASCAR drivers.
I’m inclined to believe that Humes is aware of the importance of moral hazard to safe driving. When discussing ways to increase traffic safety, he confines his recommendations almost entirely to devices that limit the ability of drunks to start their cars, prevent cars from exceeding the speed limit, and prevent cell phone use when cars are moving. He does point out when those who died in the 27 crashes he discussed in Chapter 5 were not wearing seat belts, and mentions that a 1968 federal requirement that seatbelts be installed in all new vehicles appears to have reduced traffic deaths, while parenthetically noting it didn’t reduce traffic crashes, leaving open the possibility that it might have increased them. But he never mentions the moral hazard of making cars safer for occupants. His discussion of traffic safety would have been stronger if he had.
Conclusion / Humes comes across as obsessively opposed to the automobile (more generally, to the internal combustion engine) as a social disaster for both safety and environmental reasons. Not only is it responsible for a death of an America every 15 minutes, but
no part of our infrastructure and daily lives wastes more energy and, by extension, more money than the modern automobile…. Our cars and trucks spew toxins and particulate waste into the atmosphere that … measurably decrease our longevity—not by a matter of days, but years.
The indictment goes on to include, surprise, “the global climate crisis.” I might overlook Humes’ ignoring the convenience value of canned beverages, but not the enormous convenience value of cars and trucks. Of course, there are costs to that convenience, but the value we realize goes far beyond convenience. Does he really believe more people would have been born, and life expectancy would have increased as much as it has, without the increased wealth the internal combustion engine made possible through improvements in transportation? He never considers that question. At least he doesn’t complain about the population growth that has occurred since 1900.
Interestingly, he considers some of the tremendous advantages made possible by the internal combustion engine in chapters I don’t discuss in this review. In particular, he has an interesting chapter on the incredible planning, calculating, and constant adjustments that make it possible for 10,000 UPS drivers to deliver 1.2 to 1.3 million packages on an average day in Southern California. Like a lot of amazing things, he points out that the public takes two-day delivery for granted, while hating the trucks that make it possible.
In another chapter Humes praises mass transit as an underappreciated opportunity to reduce our dependency on cars, and expects many car owners to soon start discovering that they will be able to save money by replacing their cars with Uber and Lyft ridesharing services. Curiously, he ignores the convenience advantage of these services over that provided by mass transit, and the strong possibility that increased demand for the former will reduce demand for the latter.
Despite what I see as its shortcoming, I found Humes’ book very informative, and I recommend it to those who are interested in fascinating facts about transportation. If you are interested in solid economic analysis of transportation, I recommend you also read Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do about It (Cato Institute, 2016) by Randal O’Toole.
