Are Some Haters Of Government Sensing The Looming Regeneracy?

[Bob Butler 54]

(03-18-2017, 03:05 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: 3.  My experience with Boomers is that they were never really friendly with Urban living unless their previous experience itself was urban.  White boomers in particular seem to be the most prone to "wanting to get back to the land" even though they have no intention of taking up agriculture or actual rural living.

I'm kinda like that.  I grew up suburban and have always been suburban.  Well, I retired to the family cottage near Cape Cod.  That's not really rural, more like tourist country.  Still, I got a car in high school and have always had that mobility.

(03-18-2017, 03:05 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: 4.  When it comes to the notion of cars and "freedom":  Yes with a car you can go where you want when you want, yadda yadda yadda.  At the same time you have to make payments on the car, buy fluids and fuel for the car, maintain the car, pay taxes on the car, drive in shitty places, be stuck in endless hours o traffic.  In short you trade one set of non-freedom for an other set of non-freedom.  Honestly the freest I've ever felt was when I lived in Chicago or New York City.  Both areas where owning a car is not the best way to get around.

There are some other shifts that came with cars that should be kept in mind.  In the suburban Boston area, there was light rail everywhere in the form of trolly tracks and overhead wires.  My father as a kid, if he could gather a hand full of dimes, could travel all over the South Shore without a horse or a car, just jumping from trolly to trolly.  If this sort of service were to come back, they'd probably do it with busses rather than put all the rails back.

My home town and most of the South Shore region was shoe making territory.  It started with the local farms having cattle.  When you butcher the cattle, you have hide.  In the winter months, when there isn't as much to do on a farm, people would make shoes and boots.  As the Industrial Age kicked in, it became more efficient to make shoes with machines and on assembly lines.  The work shifted from the farms to the factories.

But you lived at most one town away from your factory.  You got to work by trolly.  Traveling more than one town too more time than you'd like.  Today, with cars, folk tend to commute much longer distances.  This might want to change back.

Retail worked differently.  Every town had a main street with a grocery store, a meat store, a hardware store, a cloth store, etc...  The town centers were for many too far away to visit casually, you'd want the trolly, but for serious shopping one could get most of what one wanted on main street.  These days, one town in five has a oversized mall surrounded by a huge parking lot.  If you like economy of scale, this can be a good thing.  If one is trying to wean a culture from cars, there might be a shift back to more smaller shopping centers.

There might also be a shift to delivery service.  In my youth, the milk man delivered every other day, the newspaper was delivered, and the fish man came every Friday.  That might be coming back with a computerized difference.  You can log into one of the local super market's web sights, fill in an order, and they'll deliver.  Amazon and other web commerce sites are pushing back brick and mortar retail.  While in the old days every town had a main street lined with retail, main street might not need to come back.

Convenience stores have also shifted since the first half of the 20th century.  In the old days, there was a small general store within walking distance of everywhere.  As a kid, I had a half mile walk east to get to a decent sized grocery store on Main Street, or I could go half a mile west to a tiny store that had a little bit of everything.  Today, in the car age, all those tiny stores have vanished, but there are clumps of convince stores and drug stores in most towns.  In Rockland, Burger King is right next to McDonalds.  CVS drugs is one block away from a competing drug store.  Cumberland Farms is a classic convince store, sitting among two gas stations with attached convince stores.  This hub of small stores are right together, a half mile away from the old town center.  Given that no one walks, that everyone goes everywhere by car, why scatter stores around so that everyone can easily walk to get milk and hamburger?  Everyone wants to be at the prime location, where two major roads meet, and everyone ends up at the same prime location.

Another shift is porches.  In the days of horses, walking and trollies, the tradition locally was to build a front porch.  One would sit out there on a rocking chair and chat a bit as people passed by.  As cars took over, the front yard became noisy and casual conversation with passers by ended.  The emphasis shifted from the front yard to the back yard.  One had patios and swimming pools rather than porches.

Anyway, it's not just the transportation infrastructure that might change.  Change the technology, and there is often quite a bit of fallout.