Schadenfreude
The Guardian's Paul Harris looks at the history behind America's obsession with the car, including the deliberate destruction of mass-transit systems across much of the country in favour of massive state-subsidised highway construction. He gets a sense of schadenfreude at the fallout from rising fuel prices.
The focus on the car was a tragedy of human planning. Nor is it ending. Though much has been written about the revitalisation of American downtowns in recent years, by far the more important socio-economic phenomenon is the growth of the exurbs. These are the suburbs of the suburbs and - believe it or not - or even more car dependant. They are so spread out, so distanced from city centres and so utterly car-centric that mass transit is inconceivable for them.But they are also now in pain. The current American obsession is not Iraq, it is not NSA wiretapping or even the never-ending abortion debate. It is quite simply petrol prices. Americans are being squeezed at the pump, now paying more than $3 a gallon. That is still cheap by most European standards but the shock is palpable in America. It also undercuts the economic model of the exurbs, rendering commuting costs so painful that suddenly, at long last, living by the car alone is starting to become unattractive.
Thank God, I say. There is little political or cultural will in America to tackle the love of the car. But brutal economics might just achieve it. Whenever I see those petrol prices ticking higher I give a lonely little cheer. I keep it quiet of course. I'm already seen as nuts just for liking small cars.
Of course I expect most petrolheads to dismiss this as typical Guardian posturing. I would guess most Americans from outside of half-a-dozen of the oldest cities are about as aware of their own car-dependence as a fish is aware of it's dependence on water. Where else in the world is "Looser Cruiser" slang for a bus?
Posted by TimHall at May 18, 2006 07:44 PM | TrackBack"Schadenfreude."
I've never heard "loser cruiser" before, but that's probably because buses are even farther below the radar than that here in Wichita. Kansas, as you might guess, has no shortage of land, so Wichita is a bit spread out. Okay, a lot spread out. Car-dependence started out as horse-dependence (founded 1871) and it makes mass transit just darned impractical, therefore bus service is inconvenient because there's so much territory to cover, therefore nobody rides it if they don't have to, therefore bus service gets sparser, etc. No chance of a car-sharing program here, either.
I'm really looking forward to moving to Newton, where if we buy in the right place, we can get by with a single vehicle. In the meantime, though, Carl's stuck with a 40-mile (60+ km, one way) commute. Gas is relatively cheap here (I think it was $2.59 yesterday) and we downsized considerably, so it's not a financial hardship, just a conscience one.
That's 'schadenfreude', with a 'c', and happens to be one of my favourite words. ;)
I'm not gloating (no smug little cheers from here), but just observing: both I, in Lancaster, UK, and my gf, in Warszawa, Poland, have reached our mid-thirties without having felt the need to own cars. At least in relatively densely-populated European cities, cars are a luxury, not a necessity. I'm afraid I have limited sympathy for people paying, and paying a lot, for luxuries and mere convenience.
Okay, it must be tough in very rural areas, and even in urban areas so spread-out as Wichita, but more condensed town planning (hopefully, future developments won't be built 40 miles from workplaces!) and such schemes as park & ride must have a role.
Posted by: NRT on May 19, 2006 12:56 AMThe 40-mile thing is because Carl just took a job in a small town up the road a piece... there's plenty of housing there, and we're going to buy some there soon, we just are having some issues getting the place ready to sell... Carl's mom just had her third brain surgery in a year, my mom just had a knee replaced last summer and just learned she's having the other one replaced this summer too (which would, now I think about it, mean HER third surgery, though that'll be over almost two years in her case), I somehow got caught up in getting my sister's place ready to sell because she and her husband both work (scuse *my* schadenfreude), etc. It's been a pain, gas prices aside, because we're used to very short commutes, and as I said, once we move to Newton rather than Wichita that pain will ease.
And yeah, Wichita goes from urban to suburban to rural pretty fast (I live as close to downtown as is residentially possible, and I can get to wide-open wheat country in about ten, fifteen minutes... city's spread out, but there's just not that many people) Even the old-order Mennonites cheat by driving their tractors places.
Park & ride programs are somewhat of a problem here because it's a heavily blue-collar, three-shift town... employers are factories (generally aircraft) scattered all around the edges of town (though some have been swallowed up by expanding suburbs) rather than concentrated downtown, plus there's the whole staggered-shift thing. (Since the oil/gas industry bust in the 80's, such office space as there is downtown is mostly empty... someone recently bought up something like 60% of it to turn it into apartments, which should be interesting.) The closest to park and ride we had was back in the aforementioned 80's; I used to drive a mile or two in to a grocery store and catch the bus downtown because I didn't want to pay for parking. It was entirely unofficial, and periodically the store would get all hostile and have the police issue citations.
The problem is, it'd take an entire restructuring of the city to make cars a luxury instead of a necessity. That grocery store? It closed, part of the whole consolidation-into-superstores thing. That whole trend, and a jillion other consumerist-driven ones, would have to reverse. Even if people wanted to, and they don't, it'd be *really* expensive... you'd be completely restructuring the city, after all.
Posted by: Karen on May 19, 2006 04:07 AMI'm not sure where he is palpating this shock, but I'm not seeing it here in Texas. It wasn't a tragedy of human planning. It was a blossoming of freedom. We go where we want to go, not where some central planner decides we should go.
Posted by: Phelps on May 22, 2006 11:27 PMUnless of course you don't have a car. Then you're completely stuffed.
Posted by: Tim Hall on May 23, 2006 12:28 PMI almost rode the city bus the other day, for the first time in many, many years, since I'd loaned my truck (our second vehicle) to my brother-in-law... but then I looked up the routes on the web site, and they were terrifying. Buses haven't come down this bit of Second Street in years, but so it informs me the routes go. Which would be nice, since Second is four houses away, versus the quarter mile to the probable (probable!) actual route... though it's sort of a wild guess where it might take me after that. And we won't even go into the map graphics' whole "north is where I say it is" hubris. I won't cheapen the word "freedom" by applying it to a mere convenience, though.
And yes, with no car you're out of luck. You're limited to houses and jobs that the buses serve. And you know what? They don't serve much in the way of those big factories 'round the periphery. And they won't give you a job without you have a way to get there. Catch-22, anyone?
I reluctantly celebrate my so-called blossoming of freedom by driving an ancient, bitty pickup truck and mocking the Barbie trucks and SUVs that never did a lick o'work in their leased lives. (Being that it's a foreign vehicle, I suppose this means it's an immigrant doing the work Americans don't want to do... I think it predates the Tijuana plant, though, and is an actual Japan-built Toyota.) And loaning it to folks, my li'l part toward a car-sharing program, which if everybody did it would reduce the number of vehicles needed, if not the actual mileage driven.
(Reason #154 that Gamehawk is better than other blogging software: Gamehawk has wiki-style diffs so you can see when the blogger has altered his post to render corrections in comments redundant. Nyeaaahhhh.)
There area places in the USA which have viable public transport systems.
I was very impressed with Seattle. The busses have bike racks on the front and some of them are hybrid trolly-busses which dive under the central city area in tunnels running on electricity but use diesel on the suburban legs either side.
I was very puzzeled when I first encountered a "bendy bus" as we call them, but with obvious trolly poles on its roof, aproaching my bus stop without any overhead wires.
Posted by: Michael Orton on May 29, 2006 11:22 AMSure, but only places that have been forced to it. Seattle's got crazy, crazy commutes no matter what. Here, because of the aforementioned weird distribution of work (and because Wichita has this crazy habit of building roads before they're needed, at the expense of maintaining the ones we have), we have the shortest commute times of any city our size. Carl's 40-mile (37, actually) commute is pretty much a 40-minute commute, though of course it's not a typical commute pattern (there's a certain amount of live-in-the-small-town, work-in-the-big-city traffic, but less of the other way around) even for here.
So there's no pressure, ergo no problem. Hey, we've got plenty of wind to send the pollution off to Nebraska, right?
Heck, even when I lived out in the suburbs and worked downtown, I only rode the bus because downtown parking was relatively expensive, not because there was serious traffic. Or expensive gas, even on my low-rung computer operator wages.
(And of course, I wasn't a tree-hugging hippie back then. That's been a recent development.)