Orphan Road

At first, Americans replaced Old Dobbin with a car, and that was good. We soon noticed you could use a car as a sort of small home temporarily, a happy alternative to dubious hotel bedsheets. But then we began substituting cars for transit, liveable city cores, and other amenities, until we reached our current state of regarding a car as the one essential item to own. Today, nursing home aides making $9 an hour make payments of $400 a month to get to work in a car- a bad bargain.

In a sense, cars really are like cigarettes. I have asthma. I smoke handrolled cigarettes with good tobacco- no problem. I walk past a guy on the street smoking a crap ready-made cigarette and I start coughing and choking. Those things aren’t good for you.

People with real muscle cars or classic cars don’t drive them every day. Believe me, if you have 14 coats of hand-rubbed metal-flake paint job, or you’re driving a 1932 Packard, you don’t want to rub shoulders with the hoi polloi.

Some liberals do carry their feelings of natural goodness too far. It’s important to remember that if you’re a liberal. Mistakes were made. Prohibition was in part an effort to clean up municipal politics, but actually created mobs which outlived Prohibition by a good 40 years.

Make housing as affordable as car payments, on a functional transit line, and people will buy condos instead of cars. Visit Seattle- they already do, and the transit there is just barely functional.

The problem is not with any individual car- it is with the substitution of car ownership for a transit system to get to work, or an emergency response system to get you to the hospital, or local parks you can walk to. For decades to come some people will own cars even if they can only buy enough gas to drive around the block once a year.

Most of us, however, will be vastly relieved when we don’t need to own a car.

For most of our history Americans had the best standard of living in the world. This may not have been actually true, but we wanted to believe it, and there was enough truth in it to make other stuff, like American medicine, "work". Our doctors were, and are, largely greedy numbnuts, but we survived because of good food and, yes, the clean air of the suburbs, as it turns out.

Americans still believe we have the best healthcare, but eventually we'll notice that if you're #39 on one list and #32 on another and #22 on a list that only has 24 countries, you're not #1.

While it lasted, our belief that "all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds" had one major practical (or impractical) result- if it wasn't broke, we had no intention of fixing it. Americans didn't join unions and were the last to create public pension plans, workman's comp, or national approaches to national problems.

In short, we're the rubes, the noobies, the people who, lacking experience, simply lack the know-how build a public health service, provide low income housing, cluster growth on transportation nodes, build innovative tech industries that export goods instead of jobs- and the list could go on.

Fortunately, there's one thing we're really good at- admitting that we are bankrupted addicts who need to change or die. And we all know that the first step on the road to recovery is admitting we were wrong.

Most of these twelve-step programs advise you to leave the heavy lifting up to God, but our Constitution endows our government with powers derived from the consent of the governed- rather a good thing, really, as God has built no trolley lines that I am aware of. Turning the powers of government to solving problems instead of creating them will be easier as people realize that we are not actually Number One.

Still, like our roads, our infrastructure of self-government has suffered neglect. Expect some major washouts and bridge failures as we journey towards the future.

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.

The recent problem with the Critical Mass ride points to some deeper problems with our "love affair" with the car. First and foremost would be the bias shown by the police and mainstream journalism. Initial reports described a driver terrified by an unprovoked attack that broke his windows, causing him to flee and "accidentally" hit some cyclists.

Those of us who have read the interviews, including those with the driver, now know this story was completely false- but there's been no prominent retraction. The police quite obviously are trying to "take down" Critical Mass and using a credulous press as one tool to do so.

This is a big mistake. At the core of Critical Mass is an anarchist (and by "anarchist" I mean "intensely self-disciplined") spirit that revels in revolution. They will love a challenge, and it's hard to scare people who are accustomed to riding bikes in American traffic.

The Cascade Bicycle Club has weighed in with disapprobation for Critical Mass- according to Cascade, drivers should be gently encouraged to tolerate cyclists. One big problem with this theory- the driver of the car was formerly a bicycle commuter.

Any such discussion will include the guy who hates cyclists because they "run red lights- the laws are for everyone" and blah blah blah. But if the talk turned to cameras to ticket drivers who run red lights, the guy is against it, and, wouldn't you know, has studies to prove that strict enforcement causes more accidents.

What we're left to deal with is an institutional bias in favor of cars, and the fact that, behind the wheel, we do things we wouldn't otherwise do, and sometimes profoundly regret. None of this, of course, would matter if the oilfields of Texas were infinite, and the laws of physics suspended so that global warming would not occur.

But in the real world, our "love affair" has turned into an ugly situation in which our mistress, the car, seems likely to ruin our marriage to civilization. Some years ago, possibly before you were born, Jean-Luc Godard took one look at this problem with a film called Weekend. It's not as though we weren't warned.

The Switchback looks at the current effort to build Bus Rapid Transit in Boston:
"If the Silver Line were a rail project - as basically every public-transit using citizen would prefer it - the MBTA could simply reactivate the rail tunnel leading from Boylston Station down Tremont to the Church of All Nations, and build a portal at Eliot Norton Park. There are already platforms for it at Boylston Station. That would make most of the tunnel work unnecessary.

The current plan calls for the state to spend several hundred million dollars of taxpayer money to dig a new tunnel down Boylston, then down Charles…to the Church of All Nations site at Eliot Norton Park."

And at Seattle Transit Blog a commenter looks at fast buses in Seattle:
"During the campaign, it was emphasized that buses could be brought online in terms of months, not years (a dig at light rail construction times). So, the measure passes, and we find out that RapidRide won’t see the light of day in Ballard or on Aurora until 2013. That’s seven years out from 2006."

What do these items have in common? That's right- BRT is neither cheaper nor faster to build. No matter what you might say about a mixed system or buses needed as feeders or matching the traffic requirements with the market, at the end of the day, BRT is most likely to be a fraud.

I'll let other people be "reasonable" and concede that, if you grant a lot of things that never will happen, BRT "might" work. When I look around at all these existing BRT implementations and find delay, financial ruin, and angry riders, I've had enough. BRT is a fraud.

"Bus Rapid Transit" (BRT) was never a solution, and it's even less so in the current era of peak oil. This point could be debated endlessly on the technical merits, if you ignore the proven long-term economy of rail transit compared with buses, or you could simply look at the implementation.

In Curitabo they're building rail transit, admitting they should have done it years ago. In Miami, people who ride the rail to the end of the line and then get on the BRT agree that it stinks. In Honolulu the BRT turned out to be too big for the streets. Pittsburgh has had buses running in dedicated right-of-way for decades, but nobody cites Pittsburgh as a great success story. In Boston BRT is turning out to be more expensive than upgrading existing rail lines. In Oakland the effort to build BRT is bankrupting the transit system.

There's a place for buses. There are places for express buses. But BRT is, basically, just wrong- too big for the little tasks, and too small for the big tasks.

To be sure, we haven't heard the end of this. There will always be some damn fool who thinks installing the rails is the most expensive part of building transit, or that what we need now is the ability to discontinue service without abandoning a costly investment in infrastructure. But in the real world, stick a fork in it- it's done.

For whatever reason, Art Skolnik has decided to disgrace and chip away at the concept of historical preservation by using it as a tool for his own personal desire to keep the existing viaduct. It doesn't matter to him if people look at his efforts and say "Boy, this historical preservation stuff is a real pile of crap".

Why doesn't it matter to him? Does he have a brain tumor? Has he himself decided that historical preservation is a pile of crap, something he no longer cares about and can denature with abandon, pissing in the soup, as it were?

Let's be plain- the viaduct was no engineering marvel. It met no need, there was no cleverness in design, no great challenge in building, and it instantly denatured and destroyed vital neighborhoods that didn't recover for 30 years. Lots of stuff happened in the past that is not worthy of historical preservation, and the viaduct is one of those events. Nor, in fact, is Skolnik actually proposing historical preservation, which entails painstaking repairs in the same manner as the original. Rebuilding the Cutty Sark in fiberglass, or adding a fiberglass skin, is not historical preservation.

Skolnik had a chance to go down in history as one of the good guys- and he's blown it. It's not the kind of thing we can be forgiving of, if we actually value historical preservation or why we do it.

They said Americans wouldn't start changing their behavior until gas hit $6-7/gallon. They were wrong. I just clicked on this P-I comment thread, expecting the usual dreary litany of anti-rail diatribe and, lo and behold- all is sweetness and light.

I understand the government does not include the cost of fuel or food when the calculate the cost-of-living index for Social Security payments, so things could get really interesting when gas actually does reach $6-7/gallon.

If you're like me, you probably assumed that the recent claim on television, that a railroad moves a ton of freight 435 miles on a gallon of diesel, was a little cherry picked- that is to say, that maybe on a straight level track in the desert the Southern Pacific could move a ton of freight that far on a gallon, but surely a conservative guess would halve the figure.

Not so, according to FactCheck- the 435 mpg turns out to be an industry-wide average. Not bad, I say, not bad at all.