Take A Hike: Driving Will Be Verboten

Anyone who thought electric-vehicle mandates and policies designed to force Americans out of their cars and into public transit or onto early 18th-century technology (bicycles) are intended to protect the environment is either naive or an accomplice in tyranny. The evidence has been helpfully provided by a Massachusetts senator who wants to limit how far people can travel.

We have heard well past the point of being fed up that the world has to sharply cut greenhouse gas emissions or we’ll scorch our planet. Carbon dioxide produced by man, the fanatics assure us, is an existential threat.

The transportation sector is the largest source of direct greenhouse gas emissions, so of course it is a ripe target for cuts for eco-tyrants. The starting point has largely been a focus on vehicles that burn fossil fuels. They must be replaced with EVs and other “emissions-free” vehicles (there are effectively no true zero-emissions automobiles), public transit, bicycles, and our own feet.

But those are only interim steps to the ultimate goal.

Massachusetts Senate Majority Leader Cynthia Stone Creem believes she knows how to cut emissions. She’s introduced a bill that would “set a statewide vehicle miles traveled reduction goal for the year 2030 and for every fifth year thereafter.” It includes a “a whole-of-government plan to reduce vehicle miles traveled and increase access to transportation options other than personal vehicles.”

It’s an example of “textbook extreme, out-of-touch policymaking,” says the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, which suggests that mileage vouchers might be ahead for Bay Staters.

“Creem says EVs aren’t enough – Massachusetts must limit how far you can drive, too,” the organization warns. “Her bill creates a panel to track your mileage and fine you if you go too far. She says just walk or bike instead.”

This “new” and “additional” strategy, as Creem calls it, is simply another effort to separate us from our cars in what we could loosely call the autozoic era. Similar actions include:

• California’s EV mandate, which spread like a virus to more than a dozen other states.
• The same state’s “road diet.”
• Traffic filters, a diktat “you might expect in a totalitarian state.”
• Fifteen-minute cities, neckdowns, and permanently closed roads.
• Mileage taxes and bike lanes taking up ever-larger swaths of concrete and asphalt at the expense of motorists.
• The termination of the private ownership of cars, and the elimination of parking spaces.

Do not think we are exaggerating, that there is no war on cars, because there is.

The authoritarian urges behind the assault on unfettered free travel are strong. The social engineering and malign central planning in the service of “sustainability” and “green” initiatives are hostile to freedom.

Naturally, elected officials, their high-ranking staff members, and senior government functionaries won’t have to abide by any limits. They’ll have some privileged equivalent of Zil lanes, the low-traffic VIP avenues that showed Muscovites that while everyone was equal in the Soviet Union, some were more equal than others.

No invention has liberated humanity or boosted economic prosperity more than the automobile. People choose to buy and drive cars out of convenience and need, and for their love of independence. But the political left wants to take away people’s right to make their own decisions because it suits both lower-case and upper-case “d” democrats’ tyrannical impulses. If anyone needs to take a hike, literally and metaphorically, it should be anti-car warriors.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board