09-28-2019, 04:31 PM
(09-28-2019, 02:44 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: So far efforts to reduce our dependency on the private automobile, as was referenced here, have fallen flat on their face. And the ride share and food delivery enterprises have had the opposite effect of what was originally intended in that they actually increased car traffic and usage because so many, myself included, jumped on the bandwagon many thinking they could make a killing on it.
Rideshare has the effect of allowing people to take longer commutes. One needs a car to get to the park-and-ride site. The original idea was that people would share ten-mile commutes, but that is ultimately impractical. The good effect is that people in isolated areas can take rides to places outside of the usual range of commuting, which expands personal opportunities. Food delivery still needs a vehicle. It might serve people who cannot drive... but I would be leery of it for picking up produce or most meat. Were I to live in Chicago (I have used public transportation while visiting; it is just an insane place in which to drive a car) I might use public transportation for commuting to work or taking trips to the Loop, but I certainly would not use it for schlepping groceries around. If I wanted to go to Michigan or Wisconsin for recreational activities, I would use a car. In a rural area one needs a car unless one is to work cheap -- really cheap.
Quote:It has now been closed to half a century since auto dependency was first called into question when we had that big gasoline shortage where many waited in long lines just to get gas. There are a lot more cars on the road now then there were then. In 1997 author Jane Holtz Kay wrote a book title "Asphalt Nation" which took a closer look at our over reliance on the automobile. I communicated with her for a time, and she emailed me having to confess that not much had changed in the now two decades plus since the book was written.
At what price of gas do people go back to horse-based transportation? Bicycles make some sense except in brutal weather. Where I live, some automobile garages were once horse stalls. It could be that motor vehicles are more practical than horses.
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What probably is going to have to happen is that the suburban areas are going to have to back down on their fetish for single family homes and nothing else. What is true and cannot be denied is that the way most suburbs are set up don't make the idea of mass transit suburb to suburb really viable. Over on the old forum I had a thread titled "Will We Ever Reduce Auto Dependency". So far it doesn't look as if it is going to happen anytime soon.
The wave of the future seems to be increasingly-cramped, unpleasant high-rise apartments in gigantic complexes. Some apartments might not even have windows. That will happen if we either have a population of about 500 million (which will happen in the event of global warming, and America will have super-cheap labor that used to be peasant farmers in densely-populated lowlands) or concentrate almost all the good jobs in a comparatively-few large cities while letting the rest of America rot (as is ideal for the class of urban landlords in a few cities... be a software engineer in Silicon Valley and most of your after-tax income will go to a landlord).
...One of the oddities that I have noticed of America is that the cities have had the concentrations of poor people and the suburbs have had the middle class (although that seems to be changing). In America, Detroit is a place to avoid but its suburbs are well off --- but in Paris the opposite is true. Commuting will become increasingly unpleasant, barring the self-driving car.
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.
