Memorial Day II: Cars


 


One of the things I noted (could not help but noticing) when I was in NYC on Memorial Day was that traffic was definitely, absolutely light. Our family wedding was on Saturday, and we gave ourselves two hours to get to the church--and made it in under an hour. Even the legendary Long Island Distressway, while populated, moved along at a clip, stopping only for debris on the road (telegraphed to us by the digital sines well in advance.) I made eight trips into and around the city and back--and the legendary jams that we feel so good about preparing for never materialized. And of course the media had been saying that people weren't canceling trips because of the gas prices, no sir! I no longer believe them when there's even a thin reason they might want to lie to me. As of course there is here.
I'm the proud possessor of a 2006 Prius, and made the close to 900 mile trip from Elgin IL to Elmsford NY with only one 9-gallon fill-up, and had a good amount left over. Still, at $3-$3.50 a gallon that's not that cheap. Hephaestos help the family with a Ford Explorer.

Now I like cars. It is one of those uncomfortable points when, being among a bunch of like-minded progressives, somebody starts inveighing against America and its passive-agressive love of the automobile. Lots of nodding and agreeing, and extolling of mass transit, and only rarely am I argumentative enough to challenge that.
But a lot of the of-course-mm-hmm does not come from progressive impulses, but from the urban/non-urban division. Many urbanites I know (like my brother) don't own cars, and function perfectly well without them. Mass transit in a city like Chicago will take you pretty much wherever you want to go--as long as where you want to go is in the city. And the city provides it all, from your housing to your job to nice restaurants to theater et cet. And subconsciously the reaction of the urbanite to the problems of the rest of America is if only it could all be like my city.
But people who live the suburban life these days see a different matrix. The commuter model has died as an organizing principle. Vast numbers of people live in one suburb and work in another. And you may have chosen your house to be near work--but more and more these days you end up working somewhere else. One of the most significant things that has happened in recent years is the shift of risk to the middle class: companies lava-lamp themselves with increasing frequency: contract, expand, merge, pinch off, and simply move, and we have to follow, or else.
To the urbanite, this is mainly irrelevant: moving inside the city is a minor adaptation--and when you lose a job you get another one on the grid. You learn new transit routes and adjust your schedules. Resources leave the grid entirely (including, sometimes, your job) but new resources appear. So the answer is easy: extend the grid.
It sounds simple and is emotionally satisfying, but there are two big problems: one is the size of that development. In Chicago, extending a real functioning Chicago-like mass-transit grid would be to increase it at least tenfold. And the dead spots that inevitably crop up on the grid would be made that much huger by the lower density. There would be an awful lot of empty buses driving along roads late in the evening.
Thereby we get the semi-conscious response, then why live all the way out there anyway? And we get to a cultural impasse. Having lived on the grid for many years, I know its virtues and pleasures--and the temptation to feel that it's the proper way to live.
I'm not going to hash out the whole city/suburban divide, but will just bring up one important economic aspect: that businesses will seek to evade the grid, because the grid costs money. Unless there are vital reasons that tack it down to a specific location, businesses will tend to seek out low rents and easier, less congested access, all other things being equal. And that very often means moving from built-up areas to less built up ones--and off the grid. And since labor has very little say in this, they find themselves driving further out.
It's not a great situation, as corporations drag people's lives across the landscape this way and that, and it would be a nicer place to live in if work didn't resemble long-distance foraging. It would be nicer if the grid would meet people's needs, But lots of work avoids the grid because it costs--and still expects ready access to manpower.
When you have a big, labile system like the suburbs of a big city, the system of individual cars and trucks is not a bad system at all. It's far easier to build and maintain than an urban grid of similar size--and has the tremendous advantage of dynamism. A community can be planned and designed magnificently, but unless it can deal with the death birth, growth and shrinkage of the corporate lichen around it, it's doomed. A system that adapts instantaneously and at (relatively)low cost is a good thing.
Hence the car.
I think the wretched spectacle of the 50's and 60's parade floats of cars and the 90's Road Warrior SUV's turn idealists off cars, and there's much to decry there. But the gift that the automobile gave to the middle and working classes in the 20th century was that mobility. It increased freedom immensely. In the hardest times, it gave a leg up. Let's remember that the difference between The Good Earth and The Grapes of Wrath was that truck.
(Completely trivial aside: I wonder how the cast of The Beverly Hillbillies felt about going around in the Joads' old truck?)

I know the joys of a good transit system: when I have my druthers, I'll spend a day or two in a new city just taking every tram or subway line the city has. (Buses are less fun, but I'll do them too.) And a well designed system like Basel, Switzerland can give you a feeling of freedom and convenience that make you wonder why you want a car in the first place.
But the freedom of a car is real, tangible, and goes deep into the soul. To know that, even if you're going down to the store, that you could decide instead that you want to see where that road goes--or if, instead of going to work, you could make the left hand turn instead of the right and be on the banks of the Mississippi in a couple of hours. This is a real freedom put directly into the hands of people pretty low on the totem pole. It can be dangerous--but that only goes to show that it's real.
The gun is more controversial, and has been part of us longer, but the car has been recognized as very similar: it is a gift that America gave to the peasant, that European aristocratic culture had denied them. Hunting, and traveling. Beyond the simple joy of it (a less alloyed joy than shooting and killing) it's also an aristocratic prerogative, and don't think we don't know it. Americans love their cars, not really (or not just) because they are things to own, but because going where one wishes to go is a princely and magic gift.

I have little sympathy for people who think they can fix the car problem by designing good communities. Designs rarely work dynamically; if you think that it'll work because you're also going to redesign corporate America, see ya when I see ya; and there's something just too damn authoritarian about it all. I am absolutely not against a place where you can walk to get your necessities--except if you don't like the guy who runs the food store and what he considers fine cheese. I like communities with back yards and open public space--but that won't make up for my neighbors trying to convert me to Christianity or the Thompson boy trying to get into my daughter's pants. The Grand Design doesn't get you very far. {I believe there's supposed to be a "dagnabbit" in there somewhere.)
I do believe that any solution for how we live in America will involve the car. Grids are good, but a nationwide grid isn't. (It's possible to deal with a virtual grid in which cars are allocated in a basis other than personal ownership--I've blogged about it--but that's different from One Big City, however green and pretty). We are quickly going to be forced to get efficient in our travel resources, and that's a good thing. We can't simply go on as we've been living, and that's an inevitable thing. But what our future is going to be like, I think, depends on knowing what the real gifts are.
The gifts given to us are not tobacco, or beef, or gasoline; they're not property or firearms. And we don't love them. The gifts we have been given to us are freedom, and privacy, and the land to live on. And we've been given abundance, and stability, and the meeting of mind to mind and body to body as equals, and we truly love these.
And we've been given the open road, and we love it. I'm enough of an optimist to think that we'll be able to keep that. They may have three wheels and run on sawgrass and sunshine and be light enough to lift all by yourself--but the core of it, I think we'll keep.

For as an old friend of mine once said, "It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you may be swept off to."

Posted: Tuesday - June 05, 2007 at 06:32 PM        

©