EDK writes on Forbes about the changes we’re going to need to make for a better environment and to deal with Peak Oil.
The car culture we’ve cultivated since Eisenhower’s highway project won’t survive when gas prices get too high, and even the electric car requires power generation, which requires coal.
It’s not likely that solar and wind can power the vehicles of the future unless those vehicles drive a lot less. Alternative modes of transportation, such as rail, are a key ingredient.
Redesigning our cities to be more dense, walkable, and green will be another key. And the political forces arrayed against solar quite literally pale in comparison compared to the thicket of political resistance to improving zoning laws, increasing dense urban development, and putting an end to the suburban model of city planning.
I have to confess that I do have a little bit of a knee-jerk reaction to proclamations that the solution to a pressing problem (or more than one) are to redesign a society in a way that we would prefer society be redesigned even without the pressing problem(s). There seems to be an astonishing correlation between those who believe (a) suburbs are culturally dreadful places and (b) they will just have to change their ways because of such-and-such problem.
In a previous piece, I asked what if suburbanism and increased oil prices are not incompatible? Because they might not be. Granted, our current car culture is environmentally wasteful and may indeed be unsustainable. But this treats the question as an either-or. We can still be reliant primarily on automobiles and still consume a lot less resources than we presently do.
The issue with the car culture is not entirely one of a lack of density and public transportation. People can choose to live closer to their jobs, for instance, and still drive. Decisions within the car culture are presently being made with comparatively inexpensive gas in mind. As gas prices go up, people may start making different decisions. Those decisions may be something other than holing up in a condo or row-house less than half the size of their current abode.
The last three places we’ve lived have all been chosen specifically to be near my wife’s work. Walking distance, really. But she drives. And if gas were $20 a gallon? She’d still drive. Walking takes too long and biking isn’t an option for much of the year due to ice (at her previous jobs, ice wasn’t an issue but personal safety was). And $20 a gallon doesn’t add up all that quickly when you’re refilling your tank once every couple of months.
My commutes have, historically, been much longer. If gas had been $20 a gallon, that would have factored pretty heavily into my decision to work. I might have been more eagle-eyed towards finding work near me, but more density wouldn’t have been all that favorable to me seeing as how I worked and lived in different towns. For three straight jobs, I did this.
A lot of long (and therefore gas-eating) commutes are not the subject of the typical suburb-to-city (which is to say, sprawling-to-dense) situations. And when you can live within a few miles of your work, you can afford some pretty expensive gas. And, if we run out of gas, electrically powered cars fueled by other fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, or whatever.
When we talk about the things that make our day-to-day cost of living, one of the big ones is real estate. Sprawl, for all of its faults, can help keep real estate prices down. Maybe you can ease housing costs in the dense areas cheaper with ever-more and ever-higher construction, but I still maintain that there is a really strong chance that the price tensions will result in less density as jobs relocate and satellite offices are opened up in places more near where people actually live. And rather than a thousand corner markets opening up, people may instead make monthly trips to Walmart where they can get everything in a single trip.
In conclusion, tough decisions are going to need to be made. A world in which people have to live closer to their work would result in sacrifices. But those sacrifices are not necessarily the ones that urbanites are expecting or hoping for.
(Disclosure: I don’t actually have a strong aversion to urban living. Or density. I mostly want a place that’s affordable, has decent schools, and isn’t too far from economic activity.)
The market’s behavior shows that hipster preferences notwithstanding, most people prefer suburban environments for some reason — or more likely, for a blend of several reasons.
And high gas prices do not necessarily deter sprawl or commuting. Italians pay twice or more what Americans do for gas, and they have substantial amounts of suburban areas from which people commute to more urban areas or light-to-medium industrial concerns in rural areas where land is cheaper.
If we’re going to build rail networks or other infrastructure intended to increase density in cities and reduce resource consumption, we should do it knowing that it will only be partially effective at reaching those goals — and, as you point out, knowing that there will be unintended consequences.
Even if the energy equation is ever resolved, transportation growth is unsustainable. As population increases, transportation infrastructure expands exponentially, a consequence of bird-nested traffic, which requires expensive solutions such as traffic lights, overpasses, multiple lanes, etc. And by extension increased policing and traffic courts are needed to process violations and DUI. And let’s not forget more lawyers to handle increased personal-injury case loads. We might as well mention more hospital emergency rooms, too. Even if fuel prices remain stable, all these infrastructure costs still increase with population growth. Add in inflation, and the increased cost of overhead begins looking like hundred-dollar gas. My grandparents had owned a small farm where they walked out the front door to their garden, well, barn, etc. On Saturdays they shopped in a small town 10 miles down a dirt road. On Sundays they repeated the same trip to attend church. Otherwise, the car remained in the garage all week long. Before acquiring their car, they had commuted to town by horse and buggy. Already, affluent people are abandoning cities for Amish-like living. And already the natives of states like Montana reel when well heeled arrivals bid up land prices, destroying lifestyles of locals who can no longer afford higher property taxes. There simply are not enough resources on this finite earth to sustain what Henry Ford started. A billion new souls have already arrived on earth in very recent time. And there is no extra room for their cars to fit into the already overly bird-nested transportation infrastructure. Myself, I’ve been searching for a small sidewalk community to relocate permanently, a place where walking and biking minimize automotive transportation. Many small Midwestern towns already fit this lifestyle, but so far I’ve not found what I’m looking for in the Southwest.
do yourself a favor and flee the southwest. it won’t survive the next century without a few wars.
Finite resources are the cause of war. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say population increase causes war. It’s why Europeans displaced Native Americans, why the West is in the Middle East, relentlessly trying to sustain its insane appetite for oil. Forget that the transportation infrastructure is not sustainable, 8 billion souls will bring peak-food.
peak-food is tied to oil via the Green Revolution. Yinz has been warned.
(It’ll be water wars in the southwest. Tucson, Las Vegas, all the little oasises are massively overbuilt — and there are tons of places that weren’t built for any reason other than raillines).
1) You don’t know the folks who have an hour commute each way, over mountains.
2) Buying a house in a suburb right now is a Bad Proposition. You’re not (probably) pricing in the increased cost of gas, which will in turn decrease the price people are willing to pay for your house.
3) “No More Suburbs” seems… sorta silly. What I see is no more exurbs, and contracting nets of cities. And company towns.
4) Americans are at an extreme structural disadvantage, vis your proposition to “move close to your work” — double incomes mean two jobs, mean two potentially distant places to work.
5) When I think of getting rid of suburbs, what I mean is getting rid of a car-only philosophy, where kids must be driven to “play dates” and can’t go for a twenty mile round trip to the “next town over” because it’s a highway between, and that’s dangerous. I also think of walking on that highway while canvassing (dangerous from personal experience). This car only philosophy applies as much to LA as it does to Wexford.
A different proposition: if the price of gas goes up to $8 a gallon, the American economy collapses. The South would need to be by in large abandoned, and people without easy access to groceries learn to live the way I do, shopping once a month for everything.
(Typing this from my phone, so it will be short.)
Kimmi,
1. I am the guy that commutes for an hour over mountains. Just today, in fact. My commutes have ranged from a couple miles over 10 minutes to 60 miles in as many minutes to 40 miles in 90 minutes. I know commuting. I also know that it’s a product of choices we make (to some extent).
2. Buying a house far from your work is potentially hazardous, but not in the suburbs per se. The above mentioned 2 mile commute was in the suburbs. In my home town, almost every job I had was away from the loop.
3. I don’t see contracting cities being inevitable. I see it just as likely that more jobs move out than more workers move in
4. Most of the time I see in two-income families, at least one of the couple has some flexibility in where they work. Sacrifices do need to be made, but there is no telling where the sacrifices will be made.
5. Driving kids to a playdate is as often as not a luxury, particularly in family-friendly suburbs. That’s one of the easier adjustments. Other things, like shopping, can be accommodated with fewer trips as easily as walking to the supermarket.
6. $8/gallon comes out to .40 a mile in my Forester and .30 in my wife’s Camry. That means shorter and fewer trips and likely some shuffling around, but not the abandonment of an entire region’s infrastructure (or anything close to that). Particularly when, in the south, jobs and markets are rarely all that far a drive from residential zones.
The south, and sprawling America more generally (especially way from the coasts), have *a lot* of catching up to do before they are remotely as expensive as their dense counterparts.
1) so, nu, you make a choice, a very expensive choice — to pour your wealth into depreciating asset (car), instead of appreciating asset(house). It’s not a terribly wise financial move (moreso if you buy new cars, but we’ll assume you’re not as dumb as some people I know). This choice is furthermore bad for our economy (in general), as you’re not buying entertainment/exercising/ doing other leisure activities.
2) If your work is the only large employer nearby, you are still forced to bet that they’ll still be there ten years from now, and that you can find someone else who wants to work there. This creates an artificially constrained market (compared to a city, where there are twenty large employers).
3) Company towns are possible, but do recall that the price of transportation of goods Is Not Decreasing. Ikea only builds near airports — I see a lot of industry doing similar (possibly near canal/river/trainline) things. Your shiny “creative only” “not a city because we say so” that is out in the ‘burbs is still possible of course. [Seriously, you’re saying that people won’t live in a city because… they would have to live in highrises? For a singlefamily dwelling, it costs $100,000 on average for my city. The last house I looked at had a deer in its yard. Foxes live in our city, and we have grand, huge parks that are better than any in the suburbs — carriage roads and all!]
5) Methinks you and I are talking about two different things. How many suburbs near you do parents let their kids go for long bikerides, unattended? How about hunt up a squirrel for supper? (that story’s from New Jersey, by the way, and a long time ago…).
5b) Only if you’re “accomodated easily” means using powdered milk. (or, to be fair, organic).
6) The south’s infrastructure has been abandoned for forty years or so… Knowing the people I do, your cars are not terribly usable through large swaths of the south. When walmart writes that high gas prices are costing it customers, it’s talking about the South. I speak no hypotheticals here, just cruel reality. I used to have a graph on how much percent of paycheck people use, state to state — seem I’ve lost it. (It’s probably somewhere on dailykos).
Also, Atlanta isn’t terribly sustainable (no water supply to speak of).
1) The degree of freedom and versatility my car has given me is actually an economic asset as it allowed me to more fully utilize my human capital. It might be preferable for there to be a more robust public transportation infrastructure, but the freedom of mobility that comes with having a car means a lot. Even taking public transportation to the airport was a pain.
2) Very few places I have been rely on one large employer. Those that do have tended to be more rural than suburban. Each general area of the southern city I come from has numerous employers of many sizes. By pure chance, I had two consecutive employers within a couple miles of one another. Had I been looking on that side of town to begin with, I might have uncovered more. Also, if one doesn’t own one’s home, one can relocate within town relatively easily. The notion that housing is a superior investment or that buying is better than renting has become… strained… in recent years.
3) Groceries in Marietta, Huntsville, and Jonesboro cost less than in Pittsburgh, Chicago, or other non-southern places. It’s not just a function of size as it’s cheaper in Atlanta, too. Transportation costs may be higher, but I would guess inventory costs are lower. As you point out, we may be talking about different things.
3b) If you want to argue that Redmond (WA) is a “city” and not a “suburb”, feel free. My main point is that Redmond is not what density-minded folks have in mind when they talk about dense, walkable, and public transportation hubs. And I don’t think that gas prices are going to turn these places into ghost towns or something reliant on bicycle or public transportation rather than the automobile.
3c) Housing costs in Pittsburgh are unusually cheap, perhaps relating to the inventory, lack of natural boundaries, and stagnant population. Kudos to Pitt for having a robust enough public transportation system that you don’t need a car. That’s very atypical. It would be very hard to retrofit my home city with a great public transportation system that didn’t rely on a car to at least get you to the Park-n-Ride.
5) To the first question, almost all of them. Even the sketchier suburb where my ex-girlfriend used to live (where my parents didn’t even want me to drive!), she grew up being able to ride her bike and such. Refusing to let your kids roam about in a suburb is largely a choice (an overly cautionary one, in my opinion). Also, suburbs tend to be full of kids. Choosing the one that lives 20 minutes away rather than the one that lives down the street is also a choice and a luxury.
5b) Milk in a cardboard carton keeps for a while if it hasn’t been opened. In any event, I can’t think of a single commute I’ve ever had that didn’t have me passing a megamart or one not far out of my way.
6) The notion that the south (or significant portions thereof) is “undriveable” in any meaningful way is absurd. “No water supply to speak of?” Lake Lanier? Allatoona? There are concerns that it isn’t enough for the huge population growth the city has seen, and there are problems in times of drought, but Georgia isn’t Arizona. The growth of Atlanta may not be sustainable over the long term, but I think just about every area runs into a barrier at some point due to resources or boundaries.
Jackal, considering how far we’ve come with regard to accommodating the rapid, rapid expansion of automobile use, I am skeptical that we are about to be overrun absent a . The US is generally underpopulated and has a lot of room for outward expansion with smaller cities becoming larger ones and larger ones becoming collections of large cities and exurbs.
I’m glad you found what you were looking for, though.
Burt, that’s interesting about Italy. I was curious if there was a case study. I’ll have to read more about it.