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Getting Out From Behind the Wheel
Tom Zeller Jr., New York Times Green blog excerpted via Post Carbon Cities
…Nate Silver, a baseball statistician who last year turned his number-crunching craft to political and social matters at the Web site FiveThirtyEight.com (it refers to the number of electors who choose the president of the United States), recently asked this question in a column for Esquire magazine: “Is America Still a Car Culture?”
The question was occasioned, Mr. Silver said, by data showing that Americans, who began driving less amid skyrocketing fuel prices last year, continued to curb their driving even as fuel prices plummeted.
He concluded that Americans tend to react slowly to changes in fuel prices, and while it was too soon to tell the extent to which individual consumers abandoned car culture for the communal exploit of mass transit, a rebound in driving was almost certain.
Still, with the imperative of global warming and the vagaries of fossil-fuel dependence now, perhaps more than ever, embedded in the popular discourse, the axiomatic relationship between Americans and their cars seems ripe for re-examination.
…In a recent e-mail message, Daniel Lerch, the program director at the Post Carbon Institute, a California-based research organization focusing on fossil fuel depletion and climate change, told me he thought “a larger trend away from absolute car-centrism (in both city planning and individuals’ preferences) is quite evident and has been under way for some time” in the United States.
He pointed, for example, to the rise of New Urbanism — a school of urban design arising in the 1980s and grounded in the idea that communities ought to be oriented around accessibility, public spaces and, well, walking as a viable option for getting things done on a day-to-day basis.
The growth of car-sharing services like ZipCar, urban farmers’ markets, and “the well-established and growing image of the American suburb as a dissatisfying, unhealthy, and even expensive life for more and more people,” Mr. Lerch suggested, are evidence of “a continuing and growing trend away from absolute car-centrism.”
(19 May 2009)
Wishes, Hopes, Fantasies
James Howard Kunstler, Blog
Something like a week remains before General Motors is reduced to lunch meat on industrial-capital’s All-You-Can-Eat buffet spread. The wish is that its deconstructed pieces will re-organize into a “lean, mean machine” for producing “cars that Americans want to buy,” and that, by extension, the American Dream of a Happy Motoring economy may be extended a while longer.
This fantasy rests on some assumptions that just don’t “pencil out.” One is that the broad American car-owning public can continue to buy their cars the usual way, on credit. The biggest emerging new class in America is the “former middle class.” Credit kept the remnants of the middle class going for decades after their incomes stopped growing in the 1970s. Now, their incomes have stopped coming in altogether and they are sinking into swamp of entropy already occupied by the tattoo-for-lunch-bunch. Of course, this has plenty of dire sociopolitical implications.
Unfortunately, the big American banks did their biggest volume business in their biggest loans at the very time that that the middle class was on its way to becoming former. Now that the former middle class is arriving at its destination, the banks are so damaged by bad paper that they won’t make loans to even the remnant of the remnant of the middle class. In other words, the entire model for financing Happy Motoring is now out-of-order, probably permanently.
Even assuming some Americans can continue buying cars one way or another, I’m not convinced that we can make the kinds we fantasize about.
… The current wish is that the dregs of GM and Chrysler will hire low-paid elves with no pension or health benefits and pump out hybrid and/or electric cars.
(25 May 2009)
Meet Veronica Moss, A.U.T.O. Lobbyist (video)
Clarence Eckerson Jr., Streetfilms
Ever wonder what folks working for sustainable transportation at the federal level are up against on K Street? For this Streetfilms exclusive, we were granted unfettered access to Veronica Moss, lobbyist for the Automobile Users Trade Organization (AUTO). Veronica gave us a few precious moments inside her SUV to talk about roads, traffic, cyclists, and big cities. While instructing us on proper honking techniques for “old people” and children, she also offered up some choice bons mots. Here’s a sample:
* “People need to be able to drive their cars — that’s an American right!”
* “Bikers are a pimple on the butt of any city.”
(27 May 2009)
Recommended by Toban. Apparently satire since there is no “”Automobile Users Trade Organization.”
Government insists on business as usual despite heavy losses at BA
George Monbiot, Guardian
It would be madness to build a third runway when the aviation sector could be entering a period of permanent contraction
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… this could be just a temporary crisis. But it has two interesting features. The first is that the airlines have been hit much harder by the recession than most of the rest of the economy, even though the price of fuel has fallen dramatically over the past year. The second is that the sector which has contracted most sharply is business travel. Even before the recession began, almost all the business-only airline companies collapsed as a result of high fuel prices.
This is interesting because we were told by both the airline companies and the Confederation of British Industry that business flights were necessary and non-negotiable: civilisation would collapse if executives weren’t able to fly whenever and wherever they wished. The government repeated this creed, insisting that the UK economy was dependent on the expansion of Heathrow. Now we learn that these are the first expenses to be cut when a contraction begins. Businesses are discovering that there are other means of engaging with people overseas, such as email, video-conferencing and an outlandish new device called the telephone.
(22 May 2009)
