There's No Need To Go In Reverse

Old things:

• In November, Chevrolet will celebrate their 100th anniversary.
• Last March's Indy 500 was the one-hundredth anniversary of that race.

I've often thought about how there is really nothing new anymore: The telephone, the electric light, and the automobile are all products of the 19th century. That's the century before last! The airplane is 106 years old. And now, it has been 100 years since the first 500 mile race. That was quite an endurance race back then, lasting six hours and forty-two minutes, but the average speed of over 74 miles per hour, well, that's faster than you are allowed to drive on most freeways even today. If the fact that this occurred one-hundred years ago isn't the fact that establishes that there is nothing really new, well I suppose the hundredth anniversary of the first intercontinental telephone call four years from now will be the thing.

There are people today who wish that some of this, maybe all of it, would never have happened. Oh, they enjoy some modern conveniences, but some of it doesn't fit with their version of Utopia. They long for urban density, which they envision as a squeaky-clean environment where we all live in one-hundred story buildings heated and cooled by the sun's rays, and travel to our jobs mere minutes away on foot or on electrically powered trains or buses. There is no personal transportation in this picture, save for our feet and bicycles.

I'm glad we have people like that. I tend to believe that if their vision were ever realized, we would find that density is just another word for overcrowding, but I've always said that it's the radicals who get things to move in the right direction. It is they who will push until we get gasoline powered cars that are near zero emissions, and electric cars that are even more convenient than the liquid fueled vehicles of today. (My prophecy on that is 1000 miles per charge within 20 years, and we'll remember and laugh at having had to fill up our gas tanks every week in the old days.)  It is they who will push until public transportation actually becomes a convenient alternative for many people, allowing them to reach their destinations as quickly as if they were driving their cars. But they'll never be happy, because their vision of Utopia will never materialize. They won't be satisfied when the air and water are cleaner than nature ever imagined and the Earth's weather is perfectly pleasant all over the globe, because they will have substituted their imagined future as the goal, rather than as a means to reach the goal.

We've already increased our density to some extent. "Suburban sprawl" is decried by those who look for urban Utopia, but it is actually the result of more businesses moving to cities. What used to be small towns are now small cities on the edges of large cities, and while we still live in single-family homes, the sizes of our lots are decreasing. Small town far from large cities are getting smaller as people move to, or near to, the mega-cities. That's increased density.

Our cars are cleaner due to 50 years or regulation. Market pressure is now giving us even cleaner, more efficient choices.

And the roads, the highways... yes, the public works projects that the environmentalists believe are the enemy: They are part of the very solution the environmentalists envision. They help us to live closer to the cities where we work. The "problem" (which most people don't consider to be a problem at all) is that these amazing roads allow us to efficiently utilize high-speed private transportation. I can live 35 miles from the office and get there in 45 minutes.

Perhaps you've seen this film made on board a San Francisco streetcar in 1905. There are a few automobiles in it, apparently circling around many times to make the city look busier than it actually was, but generally you see a lot of horse-drawn wagons and a whole lot of people walking. People rode the streetcar then because it was easier and more convenient than walking long distances. Once Henry Ford made the automobile affordable (and created the middle class by doubling his worker's wages) people were less reliant upon mass transit. In crowded places like New York City, mass transit may indeed be more convenient, but for most of us the highways take us quickly from our homes to the city, then drop us off on surface streets very near our destinations — easy in, easy out! Highways began to progress in the 1800s, before the invention of the automobile, and both advanced, becoming better and more efficient, throughout the 20th century and now into the 21st. To become reliant on mass transit today would be to digress to a time before there was a middle class. While today's (temporary)  economic situation (setbacks are always temporary) seems to say that the middle class is shrinking, and may as a result increase dependence on public transportation, in general, we do not go backwards.

I'm an optimist, and I have reason to be. Yes, great societies in antiquity did vanish, but they were not as global as today's society. In general, life has gotten better and easier throughout the centuries, and we have become more mobile and less dependent. We'll clean up what's left of the mess, building on the environmental progress we've made since the 1950s, and at the same time continue to improve our personal transportation options. Maybe we'll add high-speed rail to supplement air travel, and maybe someone will actually come up with a public transportation system to serve the suburbs more conveniently than our cars, but we will not transition to a system that's more cumbersome than the current one. For the foreseeable future, we'll continue to improve upon my favorite option, commuting by car. (Or motorcycle... in an upcoming post.)