My car, my self

As I left the grocery store today with 3 bags of groceries, one screaming boy, and one grumpy girl, a man with a clipboard made eye contact with me. “Would you like to sign a petition to lower gas prices?”

I said no. What I wanted to say was, “Actually, I think they should be tripled.”

I have no idea what Mr. Clipboard’s shtick was or what the petition was actually about. I don’t sign petitions anyhow. But of all the things to protest: lowering gas prices?

I mean: Please. Hello. Wake up, people.

We are on the cusp of a new age here in America folks, and the faster we wake up to it, the faster we adjust. Europe and Japan have been adjusting for decades, so we have a lot of catch-up to do.

The era of cheap gas is over. O-VER. Oil-producing countries are at peak production right now and without vast improvements in their production infrastructure they can’t produce any more. Not that many of them will be able to for very long: as I mentioned in a previous entry, check out the concept of “Peak Oil” and you’ll find out why. And of course our Glorious Iraqi Adventure has pretty much slowed down or killed the production of the second-largest oil fields in the world.

Demand for oil isn’t going down, of course: there’s a little country called “China” that’s making gigantic in-roads in manufacturing, which requires, natch, oil. And all those recently wealthy Chinese are tired of riding everywhere on a bicycle.

Unfortunately, our country decided long ago to bet on cheap petroleum forever and ever, so we’re going to hurt for a while.

I don’t know exactly how I got interested in this topic. I’ve always enjoyed visiting European cities or New York, where I don’t need to have a car—I could walk or take mass transit. I hated walking in LA, despite the fact that we had a major supermarket 2 blocks away. In our new house I love walking—but only in one direction. We walk downtown all the time, but I hardly ever walk the other direction, even though there are plenty of shops that direction too. Why?

I found the answers to that and other questions in Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck. The book is pretty much a manifesto by the New Urbanism movement. They analyze the American problem of sprawl and how we got there, and how we’ve designed most of our society around the needs of the car instead of the needs of the pedestrian and bicyclist. They also discuss how they design new communities (short version: tighter, mixed-use communities with housing and shops in close proximity focused on public spaces that are pedestrian friendly).

The reason I like walking downtown is that the sidewalk headed downtown is very pedestrian-friendly: few curbcuts, no parking lots in front of buildings, intersections with tight turning radii that make cars slow down. Walking the other direction I pass a lot of driveways and curbcuts, plus intersections with those big wide curbs that are great for cars that want to turn without having to slow down.

After reading this book, I realized why I hated walking to the Ralph’s that was two blocks away from our house in Los Angeles: not only did I have to cross Ventura “built for speed” Boulevard, but I had to cross a gigantic parking lot to get to the front door. It was not friendly to the pedestrian. It was made for someone in a vehicle.

The history of the American civil engineering canon—you know those extra-wide streets and gigantic cul-de-sacs? designed to allow multiple fire engines access in case of nuclear war—is way, way more fascinating than you’d expect it to be. The idea that “skinny streets” (streets only twenty feet wide, with parking on one side) are actually illegal in most of the nation is obscene.

The iron grip the automobile has on the American soul is achingly detailed in Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took over America, and How We Can Take It Back by Jane Holtz Kay. She’s got it all here: the Henry Ford assembly line, how the GI Bill led to suburban wastelands and the destruction of the city, and why there’s no such thing as a “clean car” (the bit about car tires and the ecological hazard they pose is enough to make you crazy). She also discusses the various grassroots organizations that are working to change the equation from the car’s favor to the person’s.

What Holtz Kay discusses some but not enough for my interest right now is: from how did the great American need for “freedom” get translated to “three car garage”? Why should each of us be as mobile as we want all the time, particularly when our choice of the car needs to be so heavily subsidized by society as a whole? Holtz Kay estimates each and every car driver gets subsidies in the form of road construction, garages, parking lots, and of course gas prices to the tune of $10,000 a piece per year. Hardly free choice on our part. If car drivers had to bear the true price of owning and operating these monstrosities, maybe we’d have a hell of a lot less congestion in our lives.

If you are interested in a discussion of how to make gigantic boulevards pedestrian-friendly, check out The Boulevard Book: History, Evolution, Design of Multiway Boulevards by Allan Jacobs et al. Jacobs and his co-authors discuss the layout and use of giant boulevards and how they can handle massive quantities of car traffic and be pedestrian friendly. They look at boulevards all over the world: Paris (mais oui), Barcelona, Brooklyn, and Chico. Yes, Chico. Read the book to find out why.

Evidently these books, and many others in the field of urban planning, owe a great debt to Jane Jacobs’ seminal The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I haven’t read it yet. But I did pick up her Dark Age Ahead, which warns that we are the verge of our own Dark Age, because the main pillars of our society are in danger of becoming decayed and corrupt: community and family; higher education; science and technology; governmental representation; and self-regulation of the learned professions. Jacobs argues that as we lose knowledge of our culture, we experience mass amnesia, which leads to the decline of the culture.

Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture. Most of the million details of a complex, living culture are transmitted neither in writing nor pictorially. Instead, cultures live through word of mouth and example.

One of the main agents in leading to this Dark Age is, of course, the car. Living in our cars as we do has allowed to become separate from the society. We can drive past problems and never have to come into contact with anyone not in our strata. Living separated from our neighbors as we do leads to a sterile, forgetful existence. Jacobs makes this point a lot more cogently than I can on this page and I won’t attempt to summarize her entire thesis in a paragraph. But on many fronts she’s definitely right.

Most of the pro-car choices we’ve made in the past century have clearly been driven by the desire for corporate profits and an amazingly short-sighted drive to be forward-looking and avoid the “mistakes” of pre-automobile urban planners. But the undercurrent of racism in many of the pro-car choices that we’ve made as a society is hard to avoid in these books. Robert Moses, according to Jacobs “the nearest thing to a dictator with which New York and New Jersey have ever been afflicted (so far)” rammed an expressway through the Bronx, destroying communities, leading directly to urban blight. We all know what “inner city” means, and what “suburban” is code for. American society, never particularly integrated between white and black, rich and poor before, has stratified to a degree not possible when the vast majority of people moved on mass transit, not in their own cars.

I’ve started investigating train fares for visits to Los Angeles (unfortunately, the downside is, we need a car once we’re there) and other places. And I’m finally digging my bike out of storage for an overhaul. I won’t be able to give up the car entirely, but I can start to do a little here and there.