From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

Issues & Insights Editorial Board article is Take A Hike: Driving Will Be Verboten.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

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 are well past the point of being fed up hearing 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.

Footnote:  Au Contraire Say the French People

French MPs vote to scrap low-emission zones

BBC

A handful of MPs from Macron’s party joined opposition parties from the right and far right in voting 98-51 to scrap the zones, which have gradually been extended across French cities since 2019.

But it was a personal victory for writer Alexandre Jardin who set up a movement called Les #Gueux (Beggars), arguing that “ecology has turned into a sport for the rich”.

The low-emission zones began with 15 of France’s most polluted cities in 2019 and by the start of 2025 had been extended to every urban area with a population of more than 150,000, with a ban on cars registered before 1997.

Marine Le Pen condemned the ZFEs as “no-rights zones” during her presidential campaign for National Rally in 2022, and her Communist counterpart warned of a “social bomb”.

The head of the right-wing Republicans in the Assembly, Laurent Wauquiez, talked of “freeing the French from stifling, punitive ecology”, and on the far left, Clémence Guetté said green policies should not be imposed “on the backs of the working classes”.

Green Senator Anne Souyris told BFMTV that “killing [the ZFEs] also means killing hundreds of thousands of people” …

The legislation still has to go through the upper house, though it is expected to. And it doesn’t stop tyrant-municipalities from imposing their own small tourist-deterrent zones. But spread the word in case any of our politicians think this idea is not radioactively awful. They need to know it’s been tried and failed so we don’t have to repeat the experiment.