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Michael O'Hare writes:
Schelling also noted, twenty years ago, that "now they empty the ashtrays into an ashtray" and of course by now the ashtrays aren't there in the first place. I remember well a time when, if a guest lit a cigarette in someone's home, it was incumbent on the host to apologize if he wanted the guest to stop and to have an adequate excuse, such as an allergy; a properly furnished house had cigarettes set out on the sideboard and coffee table. This is an astounding transformation in the use of a powerfully addictive drug; how did it happen?The history of de-smoking western society is complicated and quite interesting, but among the essential elements were:(1) Aggressive publicity for the scientific facts about the delayed costs.(2) Extensive public education about the externalities of second-hand smoke.(3) Regulations and constraints, putatively in the interest of non-smoking victims like airline flight attendants and restaurant waiters.(4) Constant, steady price (tax) increases making the externalities internal and immediately visible.(5) An education and social pressure campaign directed at Hollywood and TV to get the cigarettes out of its products.(6) Publicly and charitably funded programs to help people quit.(7) Legal action against the supplying industry to collect external costs in judgments.By now, smoking is shameful and rude. Barack Obama has never, to my knowledge, been photographed or filmed with a cigarette. Marriott and Best Western make a nice living in the competitive hotel business with no smoking allowed anywhere.Every one of these steps, especially (3), (4) and (5), proceeded in the face of confident assertions by people who should know that (i) smoking prohibitions could never be enforced, (ii) no-smoking restaurants would mean the complete collapse of the economy of one city after another, (iii) bleating about individual rights, (iv) pseudoscientific denialism.It strikes me that this list is a pretty good template for the assault on our addiction to cars. I say cars, because the social costs of cars do not go away even if they are fueled with the greenest, no-carbonest, most renewable fuel you can imagine (though an electric car fueled by the current generating mix is a lot better than one that uses gasoline).O'Hare goes on to make some points about the social benefits of pedestrianism that I think are largely wrong, or at least overblown, but the whole post is interesting and worth a read. The big cautionary sign, however, is that folks who've never lived in places where you need cars tend to think of them as useless, if pleasurable, accessories, like cigarettes. O'Hare, looking at his bio, grew up in New York, was schooled in Boston, and now lives in Berkeley. In those places, cars really are a fairly unnecessary luxury. That's not true for folks who live in Wyoming, or even Orange County. And though taking away their cars would indeed force new settlement patterns and transportation options that would make driving less necessary, it's going to be quite a bit harder than cigarettes. Watching the smoking patterns of my friends in DC, nothing has been more powerful than the smoking ban. But no one will ban public driving.
