Looked at one way, automobiles are a virus. The would not exist in the form we know if there were not roads. I still have some questions about how this happened:
Why were railroads developed first? - Well, for one thing, rail roads were invented before locomotives - as an improvement over running carts on the rutted mud trails that passed for roads back then. Before this innovation, you needed pack animals to really haul cargo. (‘Teamsters’ drove the ‘team’ of animals.) And to travel swiftly, you needed a horse. Adding rails didn’t make pack animals obsolete - riding on rails reduced friction. But then, someone realized they could take advantage of machines to pull the load. And the machines they had were stationary. Suddenly it is possible to have cable cars. As with most technology, some minority desperately needed the improvement, and then once the improvement was visible, everybody else came up with new reasons to need it.
But don’t forget efficiency: A mine operator could splurge on a big honkin’ steam engine. The power needed for all the tough jobs was so great that efficiency didn’t seem to matter. The kind of engine that was small enough to fit in your cart but powerful enough to move it just didn’t exist yet. Even the locomotive was a stretch - until efficiency reached a certain point. They had to machine the parts a lot more accurately, and improve on the design a bit. Then it seemed possible. So in the march toward small efficient engines, you reach the locomotive first. Not so small or efficient, but enough power to pull a few train cars.
For a while this means that railroad demand is much greater that car-road demand. Carts are still being pulled by pack teams, and the muddy roads are good enough for hoof and wagon wheel.
Early adopters or automobile technology remind me of the computer kit builders of the 1970’s: Not a lot of infrastructure or support - just a loose network of hobbyists. Calling the Internet an “information superhighway” is really apt, because just as the early personal computers weren’t quite ready to surf the Internet, those early autos wouldn’t have fared too well on the Interstate.
My thesis - if it can be said that I actually have one: We built roads with trucking in mind, and automobiles took advantage. I always love the term ‘Motorist’. It suggests that these are people who believe in ‘Motorism’. And, that’s not so far from the truth. One of my friends has been suggesting that I read the Robert Moses biography. Perhaps it will explain Motorism to me.
In one possible scenario, rail does all the long-haul and heavy lifting. Roads are for local deliveries. With the rising price of Diesel fuel, there has been a lot more interest in this model. The railroad companies that were not run out of business may still have a future - but for me the irony is clear: The price of Diesel doesn’t have any effect on the efficiency argument. If trains can haul the same load with less fuel (must be those rails reducing the friction, huh?) then the price of the fuel is irrelevant.
But then, trucking is profligate because it can be. We must tend to value the flexibility as a fixed cost - and it matters less as those variable costs go up. I still can’t understand why cross country trucking would be so popular.
There Seems To Be, um… Something Wrong With My Lifestyle
I enjoy driving. I think I know why other people enjoy it too. But, I can’t see myself driving three-four hours a day to commute to work. Force me to do something, and suddenly it’s not so much fun anymore.
I am also fascinated by highway design and traffic control. If you get me on a roll, I’ll start laying out all sorts of neat interchanges and flyovers.
There’s just something about cruising down that highway, isn’t there? People enjoy that freedom; that individualism; that self-determination… Of course, you know it’s all an illusion, right? You can reach those speeds because we poured so much money into constructing the highway system. We shrank distances, but we’re pretty much at the end of the line. How much faster do you think we’re going to go? Rocket cars for everybody? Think it through. And, anyway, you’re probably stuck in rush-hour traffic on the Beltway.
The big obstacle is in baggage. Cars are perfect for luggage. No need for porters to get you on and off trains; No need to find storage lockers while you go do your thing in that faraway place. And you can still reach your toothbrush, because it’s not being shipped to your destination to meet up with you later.
I figure whatever future you’ve got is going to include a lot less travel. But look on the bright side: that travel will probably be more accommodating. Remember how you could take a lot more luggage on a train than you can on a plane?
Despite the “oil shocks” of the ’70s, my family drove to Ohio and back each summer when I was a kid. We lost nearly three whole days driving out of the one week we spent there. It must have been easier than flying with two kids, a pet and a vanload of luggage (yes, even for one week).
People are still going to want to go places, even if they can’t. I don’t know what we’ll do about this. We are scattered, and some times we don’t want to be scattered. We always just assumed that it would be possible to meet up. So what if that’s not true anymore? Maybe travel will become a luxury good. Maybe most of us will be scraping for tips from a wealthy few who had some reason to come to our neighborhood.
And cities are the key to survival: Not necessarily the megacities you could imagine. You’re more likely to see a pattern of small, dense settlements, not so far apart. Every city has a footprint, much larger than the foundations of its buildings. Cities are organisms that need to eat, breathe, and excrete waste, so just like the animal kingdom, enormous size comes at a cost - and with some ingenuity.
Okay, So You’re Probably Not Convinced About the Virus Thing Yet…
It is not so easy to see it - I look at city streets first: It seems like a plague of automobiles. And, as I mentioned, if you want to carry stuff with you, the subway is not convenient. Between commuters and the locals who appreciate the freedom and convenience, I assume that automobile traffic will plummet with rising fuel costs. This will leave mainly the working vehicles. Deliveries. Their jobs will be easier without all those cars in the way. (Maybe the bikes will become a real menace, though…)
The empirical evidence suggests that as we build more roads (in the misguided attempt to alleviate traffic), traffic increases. Work backwards to crappy little roads with less traffic. It doesn’t go back forever - an original reason to have the roads is for trucking. But with really high fuel prices, I think this logic will break down. New traffic will not leap in. New roads will not have to be built. This suggests automobiles were simply taking advantage of the existing infrastructure.
Why it’s hard to see is because in the intervening years, motorist advocacy drove the roadbuilding agenda. A feedback loop is created. The virus also has tools to alter the host. Use the existing machinery to it’s own advantage; Start managing the factory to produce a more parasite-friendly environment. But that won’t last forever: First there is stasis (death is a kind of stasis), then new facts may come into play. And, cheap energy is one of the things that supports our stasis. It could become really expensive to build and maintain roads. And, the short roads in town will probably survive that reality longer than the long roads out in the country.
Posted in urban-studies, economics | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 15 Jun 2008 23:22:00 GMT
I am one of those people who think that high gasoline prices are a good thing. You have probably guessed that I do not drive a car. I know some people who do drive cars, and who rely on them quite heavily.
This is not my opportunity to stake out a radical environmentalist platform. I just think we’ve organized our world wrong.
Beside all this are the price manipulations. I will usually trust markets to find the correct price of a commodity, but there are other issues at work: Taxes that vary by state. Oil companies that may or may not be in collusion. Extravagant and destructive uses for fuel (ahem!, NASCAR). These are the things that bend markets. And, I suspect that $4 for a gallon of gasoline is quite low. We will probably look back at this time in history and say we didn’t know how good we had it.
Some people are just determined to keep driving. They can’t really be blamed, though. Somebody spread their world out over a vast expanse. I wouldn’t presume to tell people they should never leave their square mile. But, I do think that making it expensive to do will cause a change in priorities. At first it will be painful: A lot of people don’t have much going on in their square mile. There may not be a grocery store. Or employment of any sort. That sounds like a mistake to me. How can people stand to drive so much? I like to drive. But not every day. And, I hate to commute. It is time wasted, whether or not you pay for the gasoline.
I live in a city. I grew up in the suburbs. I would never go back there. As it is, the city is bad enough. Suburbs are absurd. I can imagine making the city better, but I can’t imagine making the suburbs better. Some days my city seems weirdly hollow and empty. If you thought cities would be crowded, you don’t live where I do. In part, I blame the automobile, but it is a side effect of the road infrastructure necessary for truck deliveries. The public space is practically all road. In my daydreams, I think of burying all the roads, just like the water and sewer pipes. We need those roads, but I don’t want to have to look at them - just as you wouldn’t run the sewer pipes down the middle of the road, and have to climb over them to get anywhere. I like having a grocery store across the street, with the grapes from South America and whatnot, but some day one of those 18-wheelers is going to run me down backing into the loading dock.
Human communities need density. There have to be some other people nearby. Try to imagine for a minute that we used our energy and industry creating livable cities.
Come to think of it, suburban development is just like drilling for oil. The faster you do it, the quicker that resource runs out. Are you going to be pleased with how you spent that resource, or are you just going to be pleased that you had the opportunity to make a quick buck? We have this terrible history of racing to use up our resources. Actually competing to see who could destroy it all quickest - rewarding the ‘winners’.
For all the people who think that some new technology will solve all our problems - can we start talking about how that is going to happen? All the past solutions came from people who started working on the problem before it was a crippling disability. Science and technology are often driven by a kind of intellectual play: Not intended to be solutions to anything. In other words, we stock our shelves with solutions. If we stopped doing that, would you notice? Alternative fuels are a good example of this. But if you think this process extends to the gross phenomenon of matter, I think you are mistaken. When we run out of rural land to redevelop as suburbs, what is the next step? Glass domes? Moon colonies? Drain the oceans? There are sure to be solutions proposed.
Posted in urban-studies, ontology, economics | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:10:00 GMT
It can be hard to tell, with the mountain of books I have in my apartment, that there are a few real gems in there that are more important than the others. “Ways Of Seeing” is such a book.
It’s a slim Penguin volume. I was shopping at one of the long gone Olsson’s stores one afternoon, and probably flirting with the manager, when I spotted it. The book is the companion volume to a BBC series from 1972. The essays talk about the status of great works of art in the age of mechanical reproduction and communications technologies (conjuring up Walter Benjamin), the treatment of women as subjects in the era of paintings as wealth and ownership, and the uses of art in publicity (I would say ‘advertising’) to make us insecure enough to buy and fuel the consumer society. So, that’s a lot. For the moment it’s the advertising chapter that interests me the most, but they are all related.
There is a picture in the book of Piccadilly Circus. A current photo looks a bit different, but you still have the Coke, TDK, and Sanyo billboards. I’m used to thinking of Times Square or the Ginza in these terms. I notice that in Washington DC, we don’t have anything like that. Soon maybe Gallery Place - I’ve got the pictures to prove it.
In the background, I have all sorts of thoughts and opinions about independent versus corporate retailers, the destruction of small towns, and the value of local economies.
“Publicity is usually explained and justified as a competitive medium which ultimately benefits the public (the consumer) and the most efficient manufacturers - and thus the national economy. It is closely related to ideas about freedom: freedom of choice for the purchaser: freedom of enterprise for the manufacturer. The great hoardings and the publicity neons of the cities of capitalism are the immediate visible sign of ‘The Free World’.”
All right. But I still have one question: If I see Coke for sale in the store, why do I need a neon sign to remind me of its existence? As a consumer, I am still free to make choices without advertising. Today, I am unable to mask my contempt for marketing. Every kind of product is a little different. I could buy a coke every day, but I couldn’t buy stereo equipment or a car that often. Is is really the advertising that creates the free choice of the consumer? Would that free choice really wither away without it? More specifically to the quote: does advertising really benefit the most efficient manufacturer, or just the one willing to spend the most money on advertising?
[…]
Just thinking about the site - the place with the billboards and the neon signs -
Posted in urban-studies, economics, books, media-studies | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:21:00 GMT
It is hard for me to balance the mundane and the sublime. Or, maybe I should say: When I catch a glimpse of a big idea in my head, I lose interest in reporting factual information. And in explaining the big idea, I have trouble figuring out my first move.
And, I don’t know if this indicates any real attention-span problems, but one idea triggers another in rapid succession. It might be easier for me to describe one of these ‘chains’ as an example.
What is the future of Architecture? Is it the brutal modernism of glass block towers, or is it something more humane? When I was reading thet book about getting rid of dams, I tried to imagine some of the little towns, and I fell back on both my memories of actual places with a good relationship to water and the places in my dreams.
Specifically, I used to work in the Georgetown neighborhood of DC. Most of that place is soulless. It remains interesting to the extent that the rich residents can control policy and keep big development out of their back yards. This is a double-edged sword: Public transit and parking are both problematic, which is a disadvantage to the people who work there. The main drag is not particularly quaint anymore, so everything breaks down into leafy residential areas and barren consumerscapes. The interesting part is that a few places in Georgetown bridge the public and private realms in a graceful way: The C&O canal cuts through the old industrial district, and some good choices were made to integrate this feature, taking the textures of a canal town and updating them. But don’t be fooled: if the canal were not part of a national park, it surely would have been torn out long ago. This bothers me.
All the necessary elements of a working town can be full of muscular grace, or they can be abandoned moonscapes. Railroads come to mind. I was sorely disappointed when the rail yards between Arlington and Alexandria were converted to big box stores - you know the kind - with the chain restaurants orbiting them at the edge of the parking lot. Sure, they landscaped the edges, but they also nixed the proposed subway station. I guess they was never any danger of that place being developed in a sensible way. But could you imagine? They could have extended the street grid from Alexandria or created a little nucleus like planting a seed. But Planning with a capital ‘P’ is all about big parcels.
I would enjoy more canals. Not because I think we will be forced to go back to donkey power and barge traffic, but because channels of flowing water create an interesting sort of connectivity. When I walk somewhere in Georgetown, prefer to walk along the canal and avoid the busy streets. I don’t expect to eliminate traffic altogether, but I have always thought that places in the city where people go would benefit from hiding the traffic and emphasizing human interactions.
In “Watershed”, Grossman emphasized how dams alter the ecology of rivers, by blocking the spawning of fish and the distribution of sediments. I agree in principle, but I think it is possible to respect the flow of rivers and still create pleasing diversions. And I prefer small scale manipulations for aesthetic effect. As I read, I could picture little towns with rivers running down the middle. Some places have taken the idea and exploited it commercially. Turning the interface of land and water into a circus of commercialism. Even though it seems like a public place, you may learn to your chagrin that it has its own security force. And, they don’t want you loitering around of taking photographs. There is another good book “Ladders” that explores the rampaging of suburbia and the absurd urban development schemes that are due to shortsighted land use policies.
Beautiful places are a quality of life issue. They are a feature of the landscape, and therefore, something that rich and poor can enjoy equally. Maybe rich people resent this - I completely understand the urge to wall yourself off in your own private Versailles. But in the world of tomorrow that we are likely to have, this defection from the public hurts everybody.
Posted in urban-studies, DC-roaming, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:31:00 GMT
