I wrote this as a response on one of the forums I frequent. Thought I might share it with the group.
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That’s a misinterpretation. Cars aren’t “going away,” but they will be playing a much smaller role in life as we move into the post-cheap-oil future. Things like the typical present-day suburban development patterns which drive so much of car dependency are going to be seen as self-evidently unworkable. Transit will have to make a comeback. To make it really work, of course, will take a return to traditional neighborhood development – transit simply doesn’t work effectively in the typical post-WWII suburbs of America, because the design of things is so incredibly biased towards the car, in the (flawed) assumption that we would have cheap oil forever and everybody everywhere would like living multiple car trips from everything else (heck, even with cheap oil, modern suburban development tends to choke under its own weight). It’s a system built upon a shaky premise using well-meaning but fundamentally flawed concepts, and now we’re just beginning to see what happens when those concepts meet the reality of the premise.
It’s perfectly understandable that so many in America want to keep the Happy Motoring system going, because we have invested soooooo much into it over the years, and so many Americans have no idea that civilization existed without it that it’s inconceivable to them that they might have to do without it. What’s unfortunate (and is a symptom of bigger inabilities in this country to recognize problems) is that almost everywhere you go, all anybody’s talking about is “how are we going to run our cars on something other than gas?” That’s really unfortunate, because we have to talk about a lot of other things.
Only recently have people in the mainstream even started considering the whole “walkable, livable cities and neighborhoods” thing that thousands of years of human habitation built upon and which we tossed aside for Happy Motoring. We decided “We don’t need this anymore. All we need is traffic engineering and highways and we’re taking 5,000 years of architecture, urban design, and experience, and we’re tossing it in the garbage.” Traditional design doesn’t need any miracles. It doesn’t require massive investments in any heroic new fuels or technologies. When all is said and done, in a real traditional neighborhood environment, it’s absolutely the most pleasant and healthy way to live and get around. Anybody who’s gone to a great traditional environment, be it the center of Paris or the streets of, say, Alexandria, VA, and really payed attention to the feel of the places, knows this. This pattern isn’t some quaint historic oddity that doesn’t work today – it’s a real, living alternative to the mess we’ve placed ourselves in.
I’ve talked to people on these topics before, and invariably I get some nice, well-meaning sort who starts talking about his Prius. Good for you. Pin a medal on you, etc. Trouble is, that’s a dodge. The problem in America isn’t that we’re driving the wrong kinds of cars, necessarily. It’s that we’re driving every kind of car incessantly. We have to find a way out of this incessant, never-ending motoring binge and find a way that’s pleasant and happy to do it. Not a punishment way to do it. A happy, meaningful way to do it. There are options. Eventually, reality’s going to force our hand (though I tend to believe that it is already happening and we’re just in the beginning stages of it). I’d rather not be caught unaware.
I’d been considering doing that for a variety of reasons, but I’ve decided that it’s not worth the hassle to the rest of you. So, comment away.
Jeff Davis (District 9)
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