Human societies have always depended on having ready access to cheap, efficient means of transportation.
The Egyptians built their kingdoms along the Nile. The Greeks built their civilization among their islands. The Mesopotamians had the Tigris & Euphrates, the Indians had the Ganges, the Chinese had the Yangtze. Later, the Romans and Incas built vast empires laced together by paved roadways.
In America, the continent was [re-]populated first by ships & horses, then Conestoga wagons, then the locomotive, then automobiles and airplanes.
The topography of ordinary life is a reflection of this need to have access to transportation, balanced against other needs for agriculture, trade, industry, and so on.
From what I've seen of Germany, most of the old cities & towns are organized along roughly similar lines, with a dense cluster of homes & other structures, clearly demarcated from the surrounding countryside -- often by a literal wall. Of course, this probably has old medieval origins where the people would live together in town but farm in the fields, and occasionally would have to hide behind the walls as the town was besieged by some invading army or mob. But it also means that for ordinary life, the things you need are all within walking distance of home -- your job, the people you trade with, and so on.
Older American cities on the east coast started out along similar lines, but with less fear of invasion (after all, Native Americans tended not to have cannons & muskets) plus good roads and horses to get around with (not to mention the allure of an entire vast continent to stretch out across), they never really had the tight, walkable density that old European cities had.
And then, of course, the train came, and not long behind it, the car. If you look at how American cities are laid out, especially as you move west, and as you look at cities that had most or all of their growth in the 20th century, it's obvious just how much these places grew up with the assumption that the car would always be there, would always be cheap, and was strong enough to be the almost physical foundation of how society is built, lives, and works.
But what happens if the car goes away, or is just too expensive to use any more?
It could be grim, according to an
Atlantic article from March
It could be really grim, according to a
LA Times article from this week.
"You'd have massive changes going on throughout the economy," said Robert Wescott, president of Keybridge Research, a Washington economic analysis firm. "Some activities are just plain going to be shut down."
[...]
Push prices up fast enough, he said, and "it would be the urban-planning equivalent of an earthquake."
American suburbs just aren't ready for this. Hell, even the cities are mostly unprepared for this. With a handful of exceptions -- New York City, San Francisco, and a few others -- even most city dwellers tend to need a car to get around. The transit systems aren't in place in most places, and where the are, they tend to be running near capacity (and over budget, accumulating debt), and are not equipped to service a big uptick in ridership in a short time frame, which is what we could see if oil prices continue their climb towards $200/bbl and beyond (they hit $140 this week).
(And, as if it needs to be said,
nothing the next president can do is going to change any of this.)
So -- and I'll probably break out this section into a post of its own later -- given the choice of where to live, where
does it make sense to live now? The days of suburbia as the standard lifestyle for a large fraction of Americans seem to be numbered. The cities are getting nicer, but if you want things like good schools and low crime, the suburbs are seen to be the way to go, but how long will that assumption hold up? Can things really change as fast as the LA Times article suggests? I'm not betting against the possibility.
Assuming you can't pull up roots and move to New York, San Francisco, or heck London or Paris, then where
would be a good place to live for the next 10, 25, 50 years? What criteria would a "nice", "smart" place to live be? Good access to public transit, preferably rail, but bus should work too (there's always biodiesel or electric
trolleybus options). Being able to walk to things like jobs, schools, and supermarkets would be good. Access to a river would be nice -- just in case we get reduced back to Egyptian levels, though I'm not quite that pessimistic yet -- but I'm willing to assume that some kind of motorized means of transportation is going to be a permanent fixture of human society now, even if
individual, personal motorized transportation may not always be taken for granted the way it has been for the past century. What else? For that matter, what kind of physical home makes sense? Should we all move in to Manhattan / Soviet style apartment complexes, or is a patch of lawn still an option? Is an oil heated home any better or worse than gas or electric? The time to plan seems to be now.
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