06-23-2022, 09:50 PM
(06-11-2022, 10:54 AM)beechnut79 Wrote:(10-07-2021, 11:39 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Some of us discuss technology; some of us discuss (economics); some of us discuss engineering projects. The automobile as a one-size-fits-all solution to middle-class travel (except in New York City, where personal automobiles are restricted due to costs of parking and garage space to at the least the upper middle class) is such because of the huge investment in infrastructure to accommodate it, with such infrastructure committing people to the automobile in part because the automobile renders other transportation (such as bicycles, scooters, and vehicles resembling golf carts) too dangerous for such use.
P1: Bicycle riding has picked up within the last few years. Chicago has many dedicated bicycle lanes. True that the fetish for blown-up highway funds nearly starved out alternatives such as passenger rail and the long-distance bus model highlighted by firms such as Greyhound (leave the driving to us). A Chicago Tribune editorial way back in 1993 stated that back when the interstate highways were built, we had no serious economic competition, therefore we could afford to be wasteful. We no longer can, so let's stop making like we are still living in the 1950s. We may no longer be living like "Leave it to Beaver", but the fetish for the car culture and single family homes hasn't seem to have budged much. Only difference may be that car owners no longer seem to be giving their cars (mostly female) pet names, such as Miss Linda B.
As climates warm, private vehicles may have their ultimate nastiness of cooking their drivers and passengers. Sure, there is air conditioning, but when one first gets into a car that has been in a parking lot for a day it will be a kiln. Warming weather may make bicycling more pleasant, at least during the winter. I'm not going to say that people will go to two-wheelers even during the much-rarer blizards and (more debilitating) cold rains. Bicycles will be good ways to get to the park-and-ride from housing areas.
Quote:Quote:Railroads would have been wise to collaborate with the rental-car business; railroads were competing with highway travel and had such advantages as safety. The private vehicle offered flexibility once near the destination. This of course was before air travel became the norm for long-distance travel.
P2: There is some variation of this in what some call the "Kiss and Ride" programs where one spouse might drop the other off at the train station and then head home or to wherever. Single people most likely would have to park and ride, and there are designated areas for that. We might initiate a discussion on whether high-speed rail will ever really take off here in the US.
Well known. This practically assumes that we will go back to the post-WWII pattern in which "Wifey" took male bread-winning "Hubby" to the commuter train and returned home to be the stereotypical housewife. Or she had only a part-time job to make ends meet... a poorly-paid, numbingly-awful job. The historical cycle can bring back patterns that seemed tolerable at the time but odious soon afterward. Nobody works as a maid, convenience-store clerk, or sweat-shop worker as an assertion of Self.
Quote:Quote:Air travel is even less efficient in fuel than private automobiles... but far safer and swifter. It was originally a luxury, but it is now more efficient than driving an automobile more than about 200 miles. If your ultimate destination is less between 20 and 100 miles or you have multiple stops, then one might as well rent a car. Rental cars are of course cars that one does not own.
P3: While I haven't flown since 2007, I have rented cars a few times since, last in May of last year to travel to Michigan. I am right outside of Chicago and drive an older car that I have had a lot of work put into. Therefore if I need to travel outside of the local area I would invest in renting a car to avoid the possibility of a breakdown in the middle of nowhere. But there is currently a severe shortage of rental cars available. Just heard that yesterday.
This may be one way to keep a car from having to be scrapped after ten years. Cars with over 100,000 miles are living on borrowed time, and I am not sure that I want to be stuck in Cleveland with a broken-down car where I know nobody. (This is also a good reason to develop a network of friends in cities in which you do not live),
Many people are keeping their cars longer, which is possible with oil changes to protect the engine, car washes to protect the undercarriage, and defensive driving to reduce the frequency of severe collisions.
We are likely to end up with electric vehicles to replace contemporary "gas buggies". To be sure, electrical energy isn't without environmental cost, but it costs far less than hydrocarbon fuels that one must literally carry in a fuel tank.
Quote:Quote:Transportation is inseparable from housing. In the last forty years we have had some of the most perverse social policies in housing... zoning that requires quarter-acre lots prices multitudes into very bad housing or even homelessness. Stalinist-style housing blocks (such as Pruitt-Igoe) might fit people accustomed to facing imprisonment if they gripe about anything in the "Workers' and Farmers' State" or such a right-wing nightmare as Pinochet's Chile. For basic dignity it is best that we solve our 'housing problem' some way other than building prison-like warehouses for poor people who actually do the work and punish them for ingratitude for being priced out of anything else. The freedom to complain about inadequacies in life is essential if we are to do anything to relieve people of those inadequacies.
P4: This one falls into the "don't get me started" category. Ever since the late 1980s the nature of our job and housing markets has helped to create a homeless problem which seems to continually grow more acute. California probably is the worst culprit, and one saving grace is the fact that they don't need to experience the bitter cold winters found in much of the rest of the country. We need to expand Right to Shelter laws. Currently MA is the only entire state that has it, along with NYC. A Reddit piece recently stated that the time has come for us to end our love affair with single family homes. But the true paramour here might be government zoning commissions and home owners' associations. I feel that if nothing else rooming houses need to come back. This would go a long way toward alleviating the problem.
Our tax laws and our pro-landlord policies practically condemn us to overpriced, awful housing, Profit is the only recognized virtue in our plutocratic society, and human values are tossed out as if they were obsolete fads. To build high-rises one must build them as self-contained communities, complete with retail and service businesses. The bottom floor may need to be dedicated to restaurants, retail shops, medical clinics, repair shops, bank branches, a library, religious bodies, maybe elementary school, postal and delivery stations, fitness centers, and perhaps even a police station. Obviously such depends upon people having income adequate to support the small businesses in the self-contained buildings. This assumes that poverty is not the norm. I can't imagine even a grocery store located in Pruett-Igoe Towers. A town of 10,000 can support that stuff unless it is a spent mining town or an industrial wreck. Why can't a giant apartment block?
We will need some semblance of nature to maintain our humanity, but that is an architectural issue.
3T ways have atomized us, often into swine. We reverse that lest that become part of the national character. At the best the generational cycle breaks bad habits due to cultural conflicts and economic failures. We let this work lest we build damaging and ultimately ruinous rot into the system. Big trouble arises if the generational cycle stops.
Quote:Quote:I expect much real estate to be 'repurposed' to accommodate higher densities of population. Much of what we have is ideal for an America with half its current population, and then less concentrated geographically. We need to revitalized cities that globalization has ravaged. The neoliberal ideology of the last forty years has basically rewarded people for being rich and well-connected and punished people for being poor. To suggest that neoliberal ideal will further entrench itself and make life harsher for anyone not already rich ignores the egalitarian trend in Millennial and likely Homeland ideology. To be sure, X learned quickly to suffer with a smile on the job and endorse the reactionary politics of bosses and owners while on company property... but they griped about work to their Millennial and Homeland children (and still do), which may explain why people under 40 so reject the plutocratic order that we now have.
P5: Another one in the "don't get me started" genre. First sentence described something that went on back in the seemingly placid postwar era. Especially with what was then known as Urban Renewal. When much poor yet mostly liveable housing was destroyed and not enough replacement housing was offered. And let's not forget all the folks who lost their homes to make way for the Interstate highways. Many jurisdictions are eager to employ the power of eminent domain to force people from their homes to make way for more upscale develoopments to private developers. This was largely ignored until a Connecticut woman, Suzette Kelo, had the audacity to sock it to 'em so to speak. She got to keep her pink house but it was moved to a new location. And as of a couple of years ago the land the house and others were forcibly taken from continued to sit empty and undeveloped. As a result, Ms. Kelo became what, in a thread on the original forum, referred to as an accidental celebrity. A movie was even made based on her story. The rest of P5 more or less self-explanatory IMO.
Two tendencies lead to the destruction of archaic infrastructure: economic irrelevance from obsolescence, and things being pushed to service long beyond their expected life. What seemed reasonable in the immediate post-war era in which some farmer on the fringe of the ever-advancing urban sprawl could subdivide his cornfield or ranch into suburban tracts of "ranch" houses may not be possible this time. All housing must either be demolished or gutted after a certain amount of time.
In rural areas, the Interstate Highway System was a boon to rural areas through which they passed. So if Interstate 63 met State Highway 22 on your farm and the state DOT decided that your farm would be the site of the interchange, then you would get paid for your land, and some motel, restaurant, and gas station chains might be making offers that would solve all your economic problems. You might do less farming and simply take in the rent or invest the proceeds. Hey -- Gulf Oil (which then owned Holiday Inn) paid good money for your former cornfield and dairy barn, so you become a shareholder with the proceeds.. An Interstate interchange brought plenty of retail traffic to your community that was never going to be there otherwise.
The problem came with urban Interstates in which the urban renewal that came with them often became "Negro removal". Destroying an established community to put in a freeway and interchanges was not going to bring new business on the whole, but it would splinter communities. Even worse, leaded fuel was the norm. so those communities got a huge new dose of environmental lead and some vile consequences. As we all should know, environmental lead as dusts or fumes cause a loss of intelligence and of impulse control. That means crime. The disappearance of environmental lead in the 1970's led to falling crime rates and delayed recoveries of educational attainment. but in the meantime great damage arose. Where freeway traffic was heaviest and slowest just before entering the central business district, lead pollution was most intense and so was the damage.
Quote:Quote:The last 1T demonstrated a large investment in affordable housing. with huge tracts of farmland and orange groves becoming huge tracts of single-family housing. Much of that housing has approached the end of the service life of it as well as the infrastructure (schools, streets, and sewers) that allowed millions to live like the fictional Ward Cleaver family of early television.
.P6: I grew up in that time and there wasn't much talk of insufficient or unaffordable housing. But the Levittown style development were the precursors of the so-called McMansions we now see. Most likely none of the primary posters here will live long enough to see it, but one day many of these might be the next generation of flop houses.
It was so affordable that people took it for granted. People scream bloody murder when gas prices go from a gallon for roughly 15 minutes of work to a gallon for half an hour of work. It means that vacations become staycations, with people finding alternatives to taking road trips -- like painting the house, putting in a garden, relying upon local attractions, or participating more in such local life as there is. People might still have their twenty-minute one-way commutes, but one might wangle oneself into working close to home if one has a job in a low-paying place such as a convenience store or fast-food place. Maybe you work at Chez Mac when the job available was 20 miles away and there was no job where you were. Then such a job opened up locally. That's a pay raise without getting any more cash.
Quote:I expect housing patterns to change. I expect vehicles to change -- with electric vehicles and vehicles that drive themselves. (You will submit to giving responsibility for driving a car to a very smart computer just to keep your auto insurance rate from becoming prohibitive).
P7: Falls into the we shall see category. Part of me hopes that the SDCs won't appear until after I am gone from this earth.[/quote]
Isn't that how things go? Fuel prices have typically been cyclical. Real estate has its ups and downs, with 'ups' for landlords being dreadful times for renters and vice-versa. It always seems that high prices are the optimum for profiteers who have every incentive to institutionalize their gouging indefinitely, but that usually breaks down. Price-cutting is one way to get a larger share of a seemingly-shrinking market.
The COVID-19 crisis has shown people that many of them can work at home or at least closer to home. The problem is that much of the work that can go from New York City to Scranton, Pennsylvania can then go to some place where living standards are far lower than those in Scranton.
Unintended consequences are never predictable for content and character, but they are certain to happen. We have yet to see the full consequences of COVID-19 (and don't fool yourself -- over one million deaths compares to any American war except the Civil War for demographic effects) in economics, politics, technology, and culture. The neoliberal era of super-low pay for expendable workers that began with Ronald Reagan becoming President is likely over. People made adjustments such as delaying marriage or childbirth, staying with parents after completing their intended schooling,. or even turning to illicit means of making money (such as drug trafficking). Many who have lived their entire peak years of productivity and income in an era of low wages and high rents are now entering 'elder care' after miserable lives, and what did they achieve through their misery?
I see something terribly wrong with doing a job for a pittance, having no meaningful opportunity for advancement, and then having the obligation to put on that big, bright "Happy to Serve You!" smile that I have seen but never believed. No, workers were not lazy or incompetent. We got plenty of cheap restaurant meals and low retail prices, but at a great price to those who made those possible. Two of the companies in the best position to take advantage of such, Sears and K-Mart, are practically dead. I shed no tears except for those who put in several dedicated toil in such places only to find themselves destitute.
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Finally,
Quote:My2c: With gas approaching 6 dollars a gallon in many places, just yesterday I ask the woman behind the convenience store whether she has seen any drop in consumption due to the record high prices, and she replied with an emphatic "No Sirree"! She refused to discuss the issue any further though. What do you feel the tipping point will be? 10 dollars, or even more? Have we gone beyond our love affair with cars and now consider them just as a necessary evil for most? Having to have a car is, after all, a huge financial burden. Not only the escalating cost of gas, but also insurance which is required by law nearly everywhere, maintenance, licensing, parking in many locales, and since most folks have to buy their cars on time, there is also financing. Plus the cost of the car itself.
People will adjust. They always do. At some point, people find some alternative.
High prices, except for Giffen's paradox (which applies to the Irish potato famine, so I need not go into the details) always result in lesser consumption. The pleasure trips vanish. People consolidate trips or even start taking dial-a-ride services. (I am finding that the local trips within a town of 12,000 devour gas rapidly and cause much wear on my car, so I might as well take the bus). For the gouger, changed habits make less-reliable customers in good times. I didn't take super-long road trips with sub-2-a-gallon gasoline during the worst of the COVID-19 crisis; there was simply no place to go. Now there are places to go, but geting there is fiendishly expensive.
I see gasoline prices already dropping from recent highs. People have written off this summer as a fun one already.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.