How the auto industry can bail us out

Quoting President Obama's announcement of the Detroit auto industry bailout almost a year and a half ago, Edward Niedermeyer's NY Times Op/Ed piece yesterday recalls how the $70 billion package was sold:

“This restructuring, as painful as it will be in the short term, will mark not an end, but a new beginning for a great American industry...an auto industry that is once more outcompeting the world; a 21st-century auto industry that is creating new jobs, unleashing new prosperity and manufacturing the fuel-efficient cars and trucks that will carry us toward an energy-independent future.”

Niedermeyer continues: "In particular, what Mr. Obama called his “one goal” — having Detroit “lead the world in building the next generation of clean cars” — is nowhere near being achieved." 

His Op/Ed piece highlights what has actually happened in Detroit these last 18 months, focusing on the products and their sales strategies that still aren't on course to attain even the lowest-hung among Obama's goals.  He indicts the industry's reproduction of a market in energy inefficient light trucks and SUVs (still by far out-selling their compact, 'fuel efficient' models), for its production/sales mismatch that mask GM and Chrysler's actual productivity, and the public trade of GM stock which, given these dynamics, incentivizes a long-term trend of over-production and cheap credit schemes used to stimulate sales.

But if we're going to revisit the bailout's decision and outcomes, let's talk about what it was really about.  If our future is crowded urban areas, why do we even have an auto industry, and why are we willing to continue greasing its expensive wheels when they grind urban circulation to a halt?  The ultimate purpose of the US auto industry isn't to manufacture cars.  Rather, the auto industry is meant to spin out an American lifestyle that presupposes single family homes, parking lot-rimmed shopping malls, interstate highways and local freeways, and a subsequent, created preference for at-will, solitary mobility over long distances among all these.  It is, in other words, a lynchpin for many other distance-dependent industries: home sales and much construction, retail and commercial development, public infrastructure construction, and of course oil and its various wars and machinations.

But as we know, spread-out single family home sales are a cash cow milked dry.  Suburban malls and strip malls are turning to ghost towns.  The lifestyles the car once afforded us are now responsible for escalating health costs of care for diseases of passivity.  And they obviously aren't helping our stress levels [PDF] and air quality.


Even as it bails out the auto industry, the federal government has recently begun to gaze more deeply into a future of sustainable mobility infrastructure--one meant to move people instead of cars, insure long-term economic growth, and keep communities healthy.  This year alone, the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER I and II) grant programs funded almost $2 billion worth of what the federal Department of Transportation is calling innovative, multi-modal, regional solutions to long-term transportation needs in and around US urban areas--a marked turn from the car-focused funding priorities that have long characterized federal mobility investment.  These infrastructure projects--a regional streetcar system in Atlanta, highway removal projects in New York and New Haven, a subway line extension in Los Angeles--all suggest that, while cars may play some role in our mobile futures, our paths are being actively redrawn.

Obama's decision to throw the rope to Detroit was about expedient political appeasement.  But sadly, the segment of the unionized middle class jobs still clinging to the US auto industry's emaciated frame, will not ultimately be preserved by it.  As when in the 1910s Henry Ford stimulated demand for his early car models by raising his factory employees' wages, Obama's reprieve for the US auto industry stimulated temporary demand for cars and temporary employment--in a world that can't any longer sustain automobile dependence on the scale it once did.  As the expiration of its energy-profligate, co-dependent industries (above) hollow out the country's suburbescape, the US auto industry won't have products that carry its workers or their neighbors anywhere worth going.  These places, once rich with a middle class that had 'survived' the city, are rapidly losing economic ground.

Perhaps when we re-visit the Detroit bailout at the 3 and 5-year marks, Congress and whomever is then signing bills in the Oval Office will see different mobility demands sufficient to justify re-skilling autoworkers.  These engineers and factory assembly teams could then play a meaningful role in constructing the street cars, light rail, smart buses, and even smart, shared cars that will carry us into the future.  First, though, we have to imagine that secure jobs, meeting our mobility needs, freedom and independence, livable communities, and conservation aren't mutually exclusive.  These qualities are already showing signs of overlap in certain modest-sized US cities.  But some of our largest cities, even if billed for their 'green' policies--New York is loudest among them--have growing wealth gaps not worth shouting about.  While less boastful of a green hue, Los Angeles, Boston, and other large metro areas offer models of what will befall us if the wealth gap continues to widen and more cities trade exclusively in knowledge-based industries and services.  We could start now to build the country's next, healthier mobility network, creating more secure jobs in the process.  But for as long as GM and Chrysler convince US taxpayers to buy their one-trick-wonders, we're all stuck.