The Next Big Thing: Changes in Commuting, Working, and Living (Part 2)

I seriously doubt it, based on the Principle of Minimum Astonishment.

The automobile is the basis of suburbia. We knew this when Levitown was built in the 1950's. The automobile is not going to go away. It will just be converted to an electric car. The pluggable hybrid is the transition vehicle. The reason for the conversion is worry about global warming and CO2 emissions, not the price or availability of oil.

We have all the oil we need or want. The tar sands in Wyoming alone hold more oil than the Middle East. The tar sands in Canada hold about 8X as much. We are already getting oil from this source. And we pay half the price the Europeans pay for gasoline. We also have plenty (a century?) of coal for electricity, old style. If CO2 is bad, we have solar which will soon supply electricity cheaper than coal, and we have nuclear, without even mentioning wind farms.

If the car stays the same except for the power train, there is no drive to "change our way of living" except for artistic reasons. I like small towns and pre-automobile cities, but that does not mean that new cities will be built along these lines.

There is and will be a movement by the retired back to pre-automobile cities that are walk-able and livable. This will provide some pressure for new, walkable living environments for this group. However, planned retirement communities are also a way of creating this environment - and perhaps a more effective one since it is designed with the retired in mind. Old-style cities are not the only choice.

The young marrieds want housing, however, and the suburban house is and has been the affordable solution. The suburban house is built where land is cheaper, and you drive to work (downtown or industrial park) where land is much more expensive. Telling them to wait in an apartment until things get better or pay a lot more for a smaller living space probably is not going to work.

From our - European - viewpoint it is a little bit ridiculous how the Americans cry-out about the fuel prices. We pay more then 4$ per Gallon since more then 10 years now! Comparably higher prices do we also pay for cars and anything else with wheels. In the average it is and was here as long as I can think back always about 1.5 to 2.5 times more expensive than in the U.S.

And one side-result of these high costs of individual mobility is our excellent train grid. Many Europeans actually DO commute in trains, buses and trams. The governments did partially do very good work to support public transport and there is several possibilities to get price reductions for nearly any means of public transportation.

Also companies support public transport for commutation. My company pays me about 350$ per year in train coupons for not using a parking lot and biking to work. Other companies like e.g. the Swiss Federation and all of its accompanied subsidiaries pay the half price reduction (200$ per year) to all of their employees country-wide and so on.

On the other hand do they also constrict car traffic by reducing the number of parking lots, exorbitant high parking fees (Zurich is comparable with Manhattan) and they also put obstacles into the main roads to slow down the traffic and force cars to 15 MPH and the like. Since land prices are very high in Switzerland it is also hard to find a cheap garage and even in village centres the people have to pay a monthly fee for parking the car on the road. The police cruises through the streets during the night and watches who has left his car during subsequent nights on the official ground. If it was recorded during more then e.g. one month they check your numberplate and send you the invoice for overnight parking, which is usually worth 10 Gallons per month.

However, in comparison to the U.S. we do live much closer to our companies. We have much less space in our cities and also at the countryside and thus we have way shorter distances to commute.

In that sense I even less understand why there is no dense grid of railways in the U.S.. I'm not certain but I doubt that you have a continuous train from east to west coast.

In Europe we have also a system of night trains with comfortable beds where you can depart in the evening and arrive next morning, after having breakfast in the train. They become meanwhile cheaper than flights and arrive just in the city centres.

And beside all those facts there is one which is IMHO the most important:

Trains can be operated without CO2-emission.

Thank you for your good information.

I think the US has a problem that Europe does not share. Most of the cities in Europe were built before the advent of the automobile. They were built around the transportation of that time: walking for individuals (with an occasional horse) and horse drawn wagons for commerce. Businesses were within walking distance of where people lived, whether houses or apartments. Otherwise, retail businesses would have no customers. These conditions also apply within older cities in the US, such as Boston, New York and San Francisco.

There is (still) a lot of open space in the US. The automobile allowed new homes for an expanding population to be built on cheaper land away from the city. This let many people buy a house that could otherwise not afford them. Suburbia was born.

Cities built or greatly expanded since 1900 have tended to be suburb based. Los Angeles is a prime example. The Los Angeles area is now approximately 100-200 miles in diameter and consists almost exclusively of suburban houses with business centers of various sizes dotted among them. My guess is that more than 50% of the US population now lives in the suburbs (I am open to correction.).

Suburbs are designed around the automobile. You use the car to get to and from work, typically 20-40 minutes from your house. You can not walk to work: it is too far. With the car, shoppers also drive to the retail businesses rather than walk to them.

Because workers drive to work, the same mechanism of using new, cheap land applies to businesses, too. They build on cheap land within the suburb. Economics discourages the grouping of businesses close together because grouping tends to drive up the price of the land containing the group.

The result is that houses and businesses are spread-out horizontally with a low density per square mile (or square KM, if you wish). This is why public transportation does not work in the suburbs. With low population density (homes and businesses), public transportation cannot pick up enough riders at a fare competitive with the automobile to make it pay. There are no natural high-density points for riders to accumulate. Public transportation only works if you have an old-style, pre automobile city at each end of the train or bus line.

Actually, public transportation does work in the US - between cities, even suburban cities. The cities are natural congregation points relative to the hundreds of miles between cities. Airlines provide most of this transportation, with trains as a supplement. Airplanes are probably favored because they have low cost per passenger mile for long distances, competitive with trains, and the transportation time is in hours rather than days for trains.

People would love to ride clean and efficient public transportation. I know I do. But in suburbia, you have a problem. If you take a train or bus, it seldom stops within walking distance of your destination. Likewise, it is seldom within walking distance of your home or business. And because the economics do not support public transportation, schedules are minimized to save cost = reduce the unavoidable losses.

So, I do not see the US converting away from cars any time soon. Perhaps 50% of the population cannot live and work without them, in whatever form. And saying that we will move 50% of the population to old-style, walking based cities in any reaonable period of time is Utopian, indeed.

LA and SF/San Jose are good examples of post WWII Western US development gone awry. With people now driving 2 hours from where they live to the working centers of these cities. Admittedly, better planning is needed in the West. However, there is still a huge demand amongst people within and outside the US to immigrate to these areas of California no matter how they have to travel to make a living. You will not see City planner change their concepts until they start to see the demand for those living environments severely curtailed, and they feel some need to promote the city under some more community friendly plan. Regarding Rail travel, this is not very likely form commuters, it doesn't get them where they need to go very well except in the densest cities, and in the West the terrain is more rugged than most of Europe (except the balkans and switzerland). We do have passenger trains that travel all over the US, they just do not get much for customers and are always on the brink of bankruptcy. You can travel from anywhere on the east coast to anywahere on the west coast. The US actually was the first country to implement a rail system that spanned the entire country, from San Francisco to the eastern seaboard. It was a huge deal in the 1860s and 1870s, major work for the irish and chinese, and governemnt land grabs in the mid west. There are many major rail lines that cover the span of the entire country. There is just not much demand for their use outside of large scale transport of non-perishable commodities.

This doesn't seem to be off topic. This seems like a good post and I mostly agree with your points, but I have a few issues:

There were voices in government who spoke out about the looming energy crunch - the much reviled Jimmy Carter was one. Many progressive lawmakers called for higher taxes on gasoline to both cut demand and fund public transit. Governor 'moonbeam' Jerry Brown of California had similar concerns. But conservatives won the rhetorical battle. That's not the government's fault - it is ours for not arguing forcefully enough while there was still time to act. It is our fault for letting the defenders of the status quo distract us with an endless parade of 'social' issues. Those masses of 'sheep' need leadership - not scorn.

Its true that the US auto makers have never really put their hearts into building good, small, safe, and efficient cars. But the Japanese and Germans filled the gap, and a huge chunk of the public (sheep) bought imported cars. But I think what you say about Detroit always upsizing is a real lesson in how businesses are not always 'rational' actors in the market place. I don't believe for a minute that they couldn't make a good product. I think they just didn't want to make 'sissy' cars (that was what those weird foreigners did), they wanted to build big heavy powerful 'American' cars.

I've been living in Oregon for about a year now and I am amazed at the number of people of all types who bike around town pulling small trailers to carry groceries, and the number of people with hybrid and all electric cars. Some people are already adapting. For others it will be rough. I pity the poor suckers who live in oversized and overpriced suburban house they can't sell, making payments on a Hummer, forty miles from a job they can't quit.

As for natural gas, I just got notice that my rate is going up 30% to 40% this fall. Still a bargain? Maybe, but probably not for long. Watts are just watts. If they are easy to move around (oil, gas, electricity) then pricing (not cost) is going to get more uniform.

But ultimately it is cost we need to deal with, and the cost of raping a state or two for tar sands (for example) needs to be balanced against the cost of periodic war. The costs for solar and wind are coming down slowly, but even with massive research programs these vital sources don't help much in the short term. Maybe nuclear is ready for prime time. But right now our short term hope is conservation. High prices will force this. Too bad we didn't do this earlier with taxes, so that at least the money would have stayed here.

I agtree with the Japanese leading the way in the auto industry. however, not the Germans, they build cars on the same perfrmance basis US automakers use. BMW's are not particularly any safer, or more fuel economical. The Swedes are good on safety issues. But the Germans and Italians want to compete in the same upper class expendable capital market as Detroit. I was watching a british car program the other day and they were addressing how a few years back the Ford focus and economy was the in thing in upper middle class british business society, now they are switching more towards BMW 3 series for the emblem and elitist exclusionist attitude (but as they indicated when everyone has a 3 series, it is no longer exclusive). these are the markets the Germans, Italians and many American automakers want. These people will pay a lot of money for cheap crap. This equals high profitability. Operating cost and the resources of the people drive this demand, and as long as demand exist these companies will seek those markets. It just happens that Americans have consistently had more money available to them on average and cheaper operating costs. Thus they haven't ever really felt the pressures and real need for something smaller, or more economical for a long enough period to casue change in Detroit.

Hi John,

Great discussion.

I think there are a couple of new housing developments in Massachusetts incorporating old-fashioned green ideas like sidewalks (my development outside Saratoga has none, a pretty common thing) and proximity to the work location in their design, but not many (at least to my knowledge) in the Capital Region where I live. It's only a matter of time though, as consumers start demanding here what is offered elsewhere.

What urban-renewal by government couldn't do in the '70s, peak-oil might accomplish.

Wish I could take the "S-bahn" to work as an option, but it's not there for me, and for now, I'll continue to make the best of my situation by car pooling and traveling down the Eisenhower Interstate System (Northway Route 87) to work. :)

-april05