I-5 LA is now pretty much the scene for I-5 everywhere/Wikimedia Commons

Traffic – America’s common denominator

OLYMPIA, Wash – The flood of Interstate 5 traffic that thunders past the capitol of “The Evergreen State” day and night nicely underlines the July warning from the U.S. Department of Transportation that even if 80 percent of American vehicles are running on electricity by 2050 the country is not going to reach its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050.

And the exclamation point at the end of that warning would be the high volume of hydrocarbon-fueled trucks and sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) in the crush here on I-5.

Blue-state Washington likes to believe itself a leader in a national greening. The state Department of Ecology brags on its website that “electric and plug-in hybrid sales made up 18.8 percent of Washington’s new vehicle sales in 2023” while dissing national reports of declining sales of those vehicles.

“There have been recent news stories about a supposed slump in the transition to zero-emission transportation – that growth in electric vehicle (EV) sales has leveled off and manufacturers are scaling back plans for new models,” the website says.

“Here’s what you didn’t hear: None of that appears to apply to the West Coast, and it certainly doesn’t match what we’re seeing in Washington.

“2023 was a record year for sales of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles in Washington! Manufacturer data and newly available industry sales data show EVs and plug-ins accounting for about 20% of all vehicles sold in Washington last year.”

What the website doesn’t mention is that trucks and SUVs, most of them powered by gas or diesel fuel, remain the state’s most popular vehicles, or that Washington ranks among the upper third of states for poor fuel mileage.

Poor mileage is likely due to the fact that iSeeCars reports that more than 42 percent of the “most popular” vehicles in the state are SUVs, and trucks account for another 17.1 percent. Together, SUVs and trucks account for 61.4 percent of the state’s most popular vehicles.

The Motley Fool Money website, in a December assessment of the economics of motor-vehicle ownership in the U.S., also tosses some cold water on Ecology department claims suggesting an EV takeover with its report that EVs comprise less than 5 percent – 4.28 percent to be exact – of the registered vehicles in Washington.

Texas, a red state, does better with 6.38 percent of the registered vehicles there recorded as EVs, according to the Fool. But Washington does rank better than the neighboring blue state of Oregon, which also likes to think itself green, with EVs reported to comprise 1.8 percent of vehicles.

That’s barely more than half of the 2.56 percent of Arizona, another red state, and way behind the 7.02 percent of Florida, a very red state. But better than Minnesota, a true-blue state that hasn’t voted for a Republican president in 52 years.

Minnesotans, however, don’t seem all that concerned about global-warming-driven climate change with only 1.03 percent of state’s motorists electing to go electric.

Some like it cold

Then again, some (maybe many) in Minnesota like many in Alaska (0.08 percent EV ownership) might well favor some global warming even if it undermines the state’s effort to rebrand itself as the “Bold North” in the hopes that the cold will attract global-warming refugees, preferably highly educated ones interested in jobs in the state’s steadily growing tech sector.

Despite a climate sometimes too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer, the Cloudwards website has the Twin Cities – Minneapolis and St. Paul – bracketing Denver in its list of “Top Tech Cities in the U.S.” for 2025. St. Paul is 65 with Minneapolis at 75 and Denver in between at 71. 

Anchorage also makes the Cloudward list, but it’s dead last with a score only 60 percent that of St. Paul. The ranking of the state’s largest city is dragged down by it placing last in tech community connections, 99th in internet coverage and quality (only Memphis is worse), and 90th in livability with Memphis winning the honors for the worst in that regard.

The website defines livability as “cost of living plus safety plus IT salaries.” Climate and traffic were clearly not considered with sweltering southern cities dominating the top-10 rankings for livability and Chicago sneaking into the top-20 despite its U.S. News and World Report saying data showed it had the worst traffic in the country in 2022 with the average driver wasting nearly six and a half days stuck sitting still waiting for everything to get moving again.

WTF sort of defines the driving in Chicago these days as it does much of the time here. Suffice to say, I-5 ain’t the German autobahn where the traffic flies regularly flies along at 80 mph or more and often significantly more. 

The I-5 speed limit is in many stretches 70 mph, but the traffic often moves along at a significantly less given that Americans don’t seem to understand what the Germans call “lane discipline.” It is one of the great ironies of U.S. interstates that as lanes are added to accommodate more motor vehicles and ease traffic congestion, traffic just gets worse.

Some of this is due to motorists subsidizing the trucking industries’ use of the highways to such an extent that the railroads, which once moved freight all over the country are a mere shadow of what they once were, while heavy trucks with trailers, or sometimes two trailers, are everywhere.

Much of I-5 through Washington is now three lanes in either direction but the trucks largely take up the middle lane, and few drivers want to be in the “slow” lane on the far right, so it is sometimes near empty while drivers battle for the “fast” lane on the far left where, invariably, someone inching past a speeding truck at 67 mph thinks he’s going “fast” when he’s actually obstructing traffic.

The backup leads to long strings of motor vehicles behind because of driver fears that if they move to the middle lane they’ll never get back into the “fast lane.” Meanwhile, the more aggressive drivers dangerously weave around in traffic like a high-speed version of Geroge Costanza with the Frogger Machine on a busy New York Street only to regularly end up stuck by one of the few slow drivers in the slow lane with an endless stream of trucks blocking an exit into the middle lane.

There are reasons “road rage” has been on the rise in this country for years. A Pew Research survey in November found 46 percent of Americans, nearly half, now of the belief that “people in their area are driving more dangerously than before the coronavirus pandemic.”

As of October, Pew added, “116 people have been killed in road rage incidents involving guns this year, versus 109 through the first 10 months of 2023. Injuries in these incidents, though, are running a bit lower – 302 through October, compared with 320 in the same period last year.”

Pew did not report non-firearm deaths, but they happen as well. KUTV in Salt Lake City in November reported that a man had been beaten to death there after a road-rage incident that stemmed from a driver slowing “for construction on Lehi (Utah’s) Main Street on June 2, which (the driver behind) reportedly assumed was Brown brake-checking him. This was followed by some honking and gesturing between the two” that escalated into a deadly confrontation. 

Even without terrorists recognizing how effectively motor vehicles can be employed as deadly weapons, as just happened in New Orleans, motor vehicles are arguably the deadliest weapon in the country because they not only kill more people than firearms, but because they can drive people to want to kill

Yet despite all this, most Americans appear happy to be addicted to their motor vehicles. And more than happy to overlook the contributions motor vehicles make to the country’s twin epidemics of obesity and sloth while boosting climate-change fears now reported to be causing “climate anxiety” among young people around the globe

A survey published in The Lancet Planetary Health, a medical journal, in 2021 reported that a sample of 10,000 young people ages 16 to 25 in Australia, Brazil, Finland, France, India, Nigeria, the Philippines, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the U.S  found 75 percent  “think the future is frightening.”

“Such high levels of distress, functional impact, and feelings of betrayal will negatively affect the mental health of children and young people,” the authors of the report concluded. “Climate anxiety might not constitute a mental illness, but the realities of climate change alongside governmental failures to act are chronic, long-term, and potentially inescapable stressors. These factors are likely to increase the risk of developing mental health problems, particularly in more vulnerable individuals such as children and young people, who often face multiple life stressors without having the power to reduce, prevent, or avoid such stressors.”

There are no indications, however, that the younger of these young people are demanding mom and dad drive less or allow them to walk or cycle to school, and there are no reports of those of college age and older abandoning motor vehicles en masse for what the Brits call “active travel”  – walking, cycling, wheeling, jogging, running, scooting, skating, pogo-sticking or some other muscle-powered form of transport.

This was how primitive humans got around for hundreds of thousands of years before they became Americans. Americans drive.

The Motley Fool reports the data shows the average Washington state household owns almost three motor vehicles (2.7 to be exact) as a driving necessity. One has to wonder if those Ecology Department bragged about EV sales aren’t just a reflection of those who can take advantage of the benefits of EVs in the Pacific Northwest states taking advantage.

An “Electric Vehicle Instant Rebate Program launched in August offered up to up to $9,000 off a new EV lease for low-income drivers at point-of-sale, bringing lease payments under $200 a month on several popular electric models at current pricing – well below the average gas-powered car payment of more than $700 per month,” according to that Washington Department of Commerce.

How many people reading this would kill for a car payment of under $200 per month.

Unfortunately, this government program didn’t last long. A month after it began, the state announced that “program participation is three times higher than expected” and the $45 million in funding was “expected to run out in October.” 

But there remains a federal tax credit of up to $7,500 to help to boost the sales of EVs, and thanks in part to hydropower, residents of the Pacific Northwest enjoy some of the cheapest electricity in the nation, which makes charging an EV cheaper than buying gas.

Energy Sage reports a Washington of 13 cents per kilowatt-hour, almost 20 percent below the national average. Only six states have cheaper electricity, according to the EnergyBot website, and not by much. It reports Utah the lowest at the moment at 11.42 cents down from 12.18 cents the month before when Louisiana led at $11.93 cents.

Alaskans pay more than twice as much at 25.5 to 25.7 cents. Nationally, the cheapest energy is centered in states with easy access to large quantities of natural gas as the Salt Lake Tribune has reported.

“Utah ranks No. 1 for the lowest electricity bills in the nation, but those rates are built on fossil fuels that rank the state No. 43 for the carbon and pollutants produced by electrical generation,” it reported in 2022. Utah has been in and out of the No. 1 spot regularly since.

Despite cheap electricity and government subsidies, however, sales of EVs in Utah trailed those of trucks and SUVs in 2023. The motor-vehicle tracking website Edmunds reported that the Tesla Model Y was the third best-selling vehicle but it was bracketed by trucks and SUVs.

The Ford F150 pickup led sales followed by the Chevrolet Silverado, another truck, and then the Tesla, the Toyota RAV 4, an SUV; and then Dodge’s Ram series trucks.

Thanks to those subsidies in Washington state, Edmunds had the Tesla leading sales there, but then came four SUVs followed by the Ford F-150 pickup, the nation’s best-selling motor vehicle.

A trend to smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles in the U.S. died more than 20 years ago.

“Over the past two decades, SUVs and light trucks have become the dominant choice among American consumers in the vehicle market. Classified as “light trucks” under standards set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), these vehicles have been heavily marketed for their safety and utility, contributing to their overwhelming presence as the majority of new vehicle sales each year,” the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy reported in November.

It went on to blame those vehicles for the statistical “rise in pedestrian fatalities (as if the vehicles and not the drivers were to blame), higher pollution levels, and greater urban congestion (though the smaller SUVs occupy no more space than large cars). The issue is not merely their popularity, but the uneven regulatory landscape that incentivizes manufacturers to prioritize these vehicles over more efficient and safer alternatives.”

The regulatory landscape was, in turn, blamed on “effective lobbying  by auto manufacturers” and “entrenched…regulatory advantages, making it politically challenging to implement changes that would promote road safety and facilitate a transition to electric vehicles.”

Wholly ignored was the reality that the political challenge really exists due to motonormativity fostering the persuasive belief, both right and left, that driving is a right not a privilege and as such should be largely unrestricted by government. 

It is this belief that explains why U.S. law enforcement won’t take away your driver’s license, even temporarily, if you run over someone and kill them with your car or truck while they are crossing the street in a supposedly “protected” crosswalk. 

And it is why all the talk about climate changes in state like this very blue one can be considered just so much hot air. There might be a lot of Teslas on the roads in and around Seattle where EVs make for cheaper commuting, but the major freeways into and out of that city are still dominated by big, gas- and diesel-guzzling vehicles.

Why? Because no matter whether people vote right or left they seem to like it this way. On the roads of most of America, it would appear the only difference between the red states and the blue states is that residents of the latter get to make claims to being holier about doing something to stop global warming while doing little, or nothing, to actually stop global warming.