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IT’S A TRIP

Communication technology has radically changed in my lifetime – think cellphones, 84-inch TV screens, the whole freakin’ Internet.

But we’re pretty much using the same transportation technology that existed since before I was born.

I don’t imagine a President Kamala Harris is going to be as bold as to push for magnetic levitation, vacuum or anything else short of the impossible (see: “Star Trek,” transporter). So I’ll settle for improving and rebuilding our systems of getting places – and that’s a commitment that will be more of a continuation than a change.

President Biden should go down in history for what’s he captained in terms of infrastructure. It might be frustrating to get stuck in traffic caused by the umpteen highway improvement projects around the country. 

But making these roads safer and more efficient is a job that’s long overdue – and Biden did all this while boosting employment and, yes, keeping the inflation inherent in such an expansion in check. (Yes, we had inflation problems, but those were more about supply chain shortfalls caused by the pandemic.)

Improving highways isn’t the best way to meet our nation’s transportation needs. The idea is to get more people out of cars rather than into them in order to combat climate change and move people more efficiently. But that will take time.

Fortunately, the Biden-Harris administration has been clear-minded about pushing for alternative fuel – particularly, electric – vehicles. And it’s making a difference – there are lots more hybrid and electric vehicles on the road. People are starting to realize how much better life can be when you don’t need to unburden yourself of $40 or $50 to fill a gas tank each week.

Harris wants to expand the network of charging stations so that you’re never more than a few miles away from one. Her administration would also need to push automakers to improve battery life and length – long-distance trips are still a problem because of limited vehicle range.

Biden’s being a train freak has been a boon for public transportation. Improvements in intercity rail and commuter lines were prioritized – New York and New Jersey are finally building a new tunnel to replace century-old infrastructure under the Hudson River.

Now it’s time to expand. Europe and East Asia thrive on high-speed rail. There’s no reason the United States can’t. If it took less than five hours to from midtown New York to downtown Chicago by train, wouldn’t you rather take that than schlep to LaGuardia, wait for a 2-hour flight, then schlep from O’Hare to the Loop.

Secretary Pete Buttigieg – whose high profile has been a reassuring sign that Biden and Harris took transportation seriously – has pushed for an expansion of high-speed rail projects across the country. It’s going to take a while to build them – probably beyond the lifetime of many of us.

But let’s at least start.

One other transportation thought.

This summer, New York was on the verge of a bold experiment, the kind that doesn’t happen often in this country. Like several other cities around the world – London, in particular – New York was going to initiate congestion pricing – making drivers pay a toll to enter midtown and lower Manhattan.

The idea would be to unclog the narrow streets of the nation’s largest city, making it easier for vehicles that absolutely need to get around. Nothing terrifies me quite like seeing an ambulance stuck in gridlock on an impassable side street – imagine the poor person fighting for his or her life inside.

People who live in the suburbs squawked. How dare New York charge us extra to bring our pickups and SUVs into town? (Forgetting how they bar non-residents from using their parks and pools.) So the state’s governor, Kathy Hochul, caved and put off the plan’s implementation.

Should Harris win the White House, she should push to get the experiment started. And she should also, after making sure officials keep their promise to fund mass transit with the revenue from the program, pump federal money into the city to help improve the subways and buses.

Getting people from here to there – safely, quickly and cleanly – appears to be a goal of the Harris-Walz campaign. And let’s face it, it’s the only campaign thinking about something that serious.

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11 – CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT

By 1954, Americans could again buy a wide range of vehicles, now that the restrictions on building cars during World War II and the retooling of plants were over.

Wide range, of course, of cars built in the United States.

The fact is that the Big Three automakers – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler – accounted for about three-quarters of all the cars produced in the whole world in the early 1950s. It was a domination that did not seem likely to end.

It did.

The first car I remember my Dad driving was a beige Dodge. Most of his cars, which were given to him by his employer, Firestone, were Chevrolets. He once drove a Studebaker Lark, which he wasn’t crazy about – Studebaker stopped making cars in the mid-’60s. He also had a Chevy Corvair for a few weeks – it was a car that, as a 7-year-old, I could not fit in its back seat.

The Corvair is what some people see as the start of the decline of American automotive dominance. It was an attempt to build a smaller car for people who wanted one – and it was not particularly well thought out.

It was, in fact, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” the title of the book written by attorney and journalist Ralph Nader, who researched lawsuits filed against GM about the Corvair. 

American cars, once thought to be the paragon of the industry, were starting to be seen as poorly made, with constant recalls and safety issues. And as gas prices rose in the 1970s, they were also seen as not economical, often getting less than 10 miles per gallon. “Lemon” and “gas guzzler” entered the vocabulary.

The exact opposite was happening on the other side of the world.

A Japanese company, Toyota, had struggled to find its place in the vehicle industry. It needed a bailout from the Bank of Japan in 1949, but only after management and labor agreed to cost cutting and productivity improvements.

They succeeded. In 1952, Toyota built its first passenger vehicle, the Crown. Six years later, it tried the U.S. market – and failed. 

But it kept coming. Toyota and the other Japanese companies, Honda and Nissan (originally Datsun), found the niche in economical smaller cars. And they focused on quality as the Americans foundered.

By the 1980s, it was an intense battle. The Big Three saw it as a point of pride that Americans should buy cars made in the U.S.A. But more and more Americans just didn’t want them – the Japanese cars were safer and easier on gas.

For a while, the Honda Accord and Ford Taurus battled for supremacy. Then came the Toyota model named for its original vehicle: the Japanese word for crown is Camry.

Meanwhile, across the Sea of Japan, South Korea began to have ideas about building cars. Some businessmen built its first one in 1955, two years after the truce halting the Korean War. Hyundai built its first car twenty years later.

The American auto industry almost died for good in the Great Recession. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama intervened to bail out the industry, and American carmakers have recovered a little of the ground lost to the companies from Japan, South Korea and luxury vehicle makers in Europe.

But it’s somewhat political. On the East and West coasts, non-American cars dominate the roads. In the middle of the country, where the nation’s remaining auto plants are located, GM and Ford hold sway.

My Dad was disappointed when my wife and I started buying Toyotas in the 1990s. Firestone was closely aligned with Ford, but my first two cars were Fords and they were not particularly reliable.

He finally sort of came around with my Highlander, an SUV that was a lot easier to drive and maintain than the clunkers GM was still cranking out.

Dad didn’t live to see me switch to Hyundai in 2018. 

And that’s what led me to this thought: How would you go back to 1954 and explain to anyone – maybe even anyone in Korea – that there would be millions of Hyundais and Kias on American highways in 70 years?

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