August 2008

From the Washington Post:

“Cheap oil, which helped push the American Dream away from the city center, isn’t so cheap anymore. As more and more families reconsider their dreams, land-use experts are beginning to ask whether $4-a-gallon gas is enough to change the way Americans have thought for half a century about where they live.

‘We’ve passed that tipping point,’ U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said.”

So, why does Secretary Peters want to take money from transit and use it to build suburban roads?

Because George Bush is an honest man- when he’s bought, he stays bought.

For twenty centuries the structure of the European city has included the urban riot and the flight of the patrician class to their estates in the country. In the late 19th century the railroads elaborated this theme and the ‘upper classes’ commuted into the city in the morning and out at night. We are, therefore, hardly amazed that in the democracy of the automobile millions of essentially common Americans followed the same pattern.

It is seldom remarked that Americans using the interstates to establish vast suburban aggregations were, in the 50s and 60s, leaving cities not only polluted and old, but ruled by criminal gangs. In Seattle, for example, not only did the Teamsters blackmail employers and employees, and the police blackmail gays and rob the blacks, but the Fire Department and the Building Department served as very partial ‘enforcers’ for a gang at City Hall that punished enemies and rewarded friends.

By the mid-70s the fruits of these policies, nationally, were bankruptcy and riot in almost all our major cities. From the ruins citizens, with varying degrees of success, began to reconstruct city governments with more legitimacy. Sure, Seattle has great scenery, but the houseboats are there because they fought the Fire Department and won, the Regrade is vital because the zoning laws were changed, and the Market and the electric trolley buses were saved by citizen’s initiatives.

The pendulum has swung and the cities are now where you go to escape the gangs of the suburban and rural areas. The great traffic flow is still in to the city in the morning and out at night, but with the large cohort of Boomers beginning to retire, it seems not extravagant to anticipate more outward commuting in the morning and in at night, or even a densification of the city core, with residents who both live and work in the city.

Would not such residents be better served by streetcars and trams than by heavy commuter lines? Considering that, with the exceptions of some King County grand juries, the improvements of Seattle governance were made by residents of Seattle, shouldn’t Seattle residents try to improve Seattle, and let regional governance look to the region?

Predictions are always hard, especially when they involve the future, but one thing seems certain- the daily ritual of traveling 30 miles to work in the morning, and 30 miles home in the evening, will, for most of us, become a memory instead of a reality. It was, in a sense, the industrial mass-production of a patrician ideal that, even in Rome or Renaissance Italy, never involved the actual patricians in a daily commute. It’s an idea whose time has come- and gone.