From: montyb@alpha.aosg.gsf.dec.com (Monty C. Brandenberg)
Subject: Re: Shopping Hours, etc.
Organization: AOSG
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1992 17:30:58 GMT

In article <92246.002819U09416@uicvm.uic.edu>, Pankaj Saxena <U09416@uicvm.uic.edu> writes:
|> 
|> For example, someone mentioned that German cars are better made than American
|> cars, and they are also more expensive. Aside from differences in "work ethic",
|> I can think of other reasons why American cars are of relatively poor quality.
|> Commuting in most of the US involves large distances and non-existent public
|> transportation. Therefore, a car is a neccesity, rather than a convenience. And
|> that makes affordability a more important factor than workmanship.

This is a nonsensical argument.  If an item is a necessity, then quality is
of paramount importance.  A heart is a necessity.  If you needed an artificial
one, would you get an expensive SIG/Sauer Blutmeister or an inexpensive
Jarvic-12 econopump?  Seriously, the greater one relies on a particular device,
the higher the quality one should try to secure, yes?

In the particular area of automobiles, I believe one thing has changed in the
US.  The line workers are making the vehicles as well as the designs and
manufacturing processes permit.  The American autoworker really is the equal
of those of any other country.  The deficiencies in American cars are now
almost solely the result of anachronistic designs and minimum-cost manufacturing.
*Look* at a Big-Three car.  It's as if the companies have kept the old 1950's
Chevy, Cadillac, and Studebaker designers alive.  They work with boxes.  They
want to decorate with fins.  They like big, slow automatic transmissions and
pedals the size of small states.  Driving one should feel like sitting in the
living room in the Barc-o-lounger with a six-pack of Bud Lite and twelve
hours of football on the tube.  Compare this to just opening and closing the
doors of the new BMW's.  *This* is a sensuous experience, believe me.  The
doors just glide into place with a firm feeling that screams, "Yes! This is
good! Let's do it again!"

|> How well a
|> car is built depends largely on how much time (manhours) is spent building it,
|> and the US manages to build cars with fewer manhours than any other country
|> (except possibly Japan). As for the issue of the dismal state of public trans-
|> portation in the US, it's obvious that it depends very closely on the resources
|> available. A good public transportation system requires lots of capital. Again,
|> geographical factors are important. Resources depend upon your tax base, which
|> depends upon population density. Every country starts off with virgin land.
|> Then you have people who share the effort (through taxes, these days) of
|> turning the land into an urbanised cityscape. The US has about 4 times as many
|> people as Germany, trying to urbanise an area about 15 times as big as Germany
|> (pre-unification figures) with a shorter history (time-span) to do it in. It's
|> not so strange to think that they haven't made the remarkable progress that
|> Germany has. Hence the sorry state of mass transportation in the US, and the
|> need for cheap cars.

The tax base argument may also be wrong.  The same factors (density, income) 
which increase the tax base with which to undertake public works projects 
also increase the costs of those projects.  Land values increase.  Construction
costs increase faster than linearly.  (Research how many government offices
and private firms get involved when you try to stick a shovel in the ground
in Manhattan.)  This is why the first high-speed train in the US will be 
built in Texas and not in the Boston-NY-Washington megalopolis.  The economy
of scale is there.  Something to keep in mind the next time someone suggests
the 'obvious' benefits of some huge urban public project.

Unless you intend to build subways in cornfields in Nebraska, the population
density arguments are misleading.  Eastern US urban areas have densities
comparable with those of Western Europe.  The important difference between
US and European population densities is that in the US, densities decrease
more slowly with distance from the urban core (the suburban effect).  Originally,
these suburbs were feeders for the cities.  A hub-and-spoke transportation 
system could serve a large majority of the commuters.  Now, the suburbs are
self-supporting and have established their own business cores.  Commuter
routes are now a dense, random network that will not necessarily involve
the core city

As one suburb is pretty much the same as any other, businesses are more
likely to relocate as conditions change.  Thus, traffic patterns are constantly
undergoing small- and large-scale evolution.  The classic public transport
system, medium- or heavy-rail, were acceptable in the hub-and-spoke days
but they are uneconomical today if they are to serve more than, say, 10 or
15% of the commuting population.  It costs too much to install and too much
to change as populations shift.  There are more flexible alternatives (buses,
light-rail, commuter vans) but these carry their own problems which I'll
gladly go into later.

Finally, the one-size-fits-all approach that seems favored by so many
public transportation proponents tends to leave individuals without 
alternatives when the system breaks down.  Remember the threat of an
Amtrak strike a few months ago requiring President Bush's intervention?
How would you like your oxygen supply under the control of a single
government-sanctioned monopoly?

The problem with so-called urban designers of this type is that they have
a 'City of Tomorrow' image of the world from the Le Corbusier/Bauhaus
thinking of the 20's and 30's.  The world didn't work out the way they
thought.

Also, the 'Ancient Europe' image is relatively incorrect.  In the past
200 years, what European city hasn't been burned or bombed?  Berlin, 
Dresden, London, Paris, St. Petersburg, etc.  In all that time, we've
had a few bombs dropped in a harbor and Washington, DC was burned by
the British and I wish they'd to that again.  Okay, and the SF earthquake
and the Chicago fire.  The problem in the US is that we have too *MUCH*
old crap laying around.  You can't move a clump of mud here without some
preservationist group trying to have it registered as a National Landmark.

|>  [stuff about Japanese/American/German cars that I'll let pass]

|> Another factor is that the American market matured in a way very different from
|> the European markets. For example, consider the question why the American car
|> industry could never make *any* really good, world-class car, even as a limited
|> production model. Aren't there any quality conscious consumers here? If not,
|> couldn't we sell it to the Europeans and improve our exports?

Up to a point, we did.  American cars were exported in the 40's, 50's, and
early 60's.  But industrial design died in the US while it thrived in
Europe.  American companies designed rectangular cars, rectangular appliances,
rectangular furniture.  Everyone was sick of it except, for some reason
I can't fathom, Americans.

|> Aside from the
|> obvious fact that the car companies are lethargic monsters and other such
|> simple explanations, I think there's something else involved here too. It's an
|> attitude that has grown among the American people, without their being
|> explicitely conscious of it. It's a very closed and inwardly focussed attitude,
|> perceived in the local newscasts that spend half an hour every evening telling
|> you what happened within a radius of 15 miles around you. I don't think there
|> is any industrialized country in the world that spends less time on the news
|> with international events, than the US. Why should we bother with making better
|> cars- we can buy German or Swedish or Japanese cars so easily, it doesn't
|> infringe upon our personal freedom to choose high-quality products. Why should
|> we care about exports- less than 5% of our GDP comes from exports. As I said,
|> the American economy has matured in a way quite different from Europe's.

This is a point made often but let me counter it with this:  Instead of
considering border crossings, consider distance.  How much news does the
US get from 10,000 km away?  Compare that with how much news a German will
get from 10,000 km.  Not *that* different.  The old West Germany was about
the size of Oregon.  News in Germany of France, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium,
etc. is equivalent to someone in Oregon hearing about California, Washington,
Idaho, etc.  Nothing extraordinary about that, no?

But I agree with the comments about the market maturing differently.  I just
can't quite understand why.  Democratization of taste?  

|> 
|> I think that the new global economy in the next decade or two will force the US
|> to adapt itself more to the way the rest of the world thinks. There's a lot we
|> can learn from Europe, and from Germany in particular. I would welcome comments
|> on this posting, and on anything to do with the US and German economies, busi-
|> ness practices and consumer-goods markets in general.

I agree.  But as for the manufacture of cars, I think the Big Three will
have to die.  For 20 years, the writing has been on the wall:  'stop 
designing junk.'  And illiteracy seems endemic to Detroit.

					Monty