I’ve been listening to all the angst about the high price of petrol. And watching the suddenly energy-aware do for their pocketbooks what they wouldn’t do for our planet. One co-worker has traded her solo commute for a bus. Another’s dad is dumping his premium-guzzling Caddy for a premium-priced Prius. The New York Times is hailing the decline of pickups and SUVs.
These inconvenient adjustments to Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth are all well and good. But there’s one fatal flaw: they’re all about lowering the cost of the trip instead of shortening or eliminating the trip.
One reason the ride is so expensive and our dependence on oil so high is that we’ve moved further and further from the focal point of our communities. We’ve abandoned the city for the suburbs, the suburbs for the exurbs. And as each ring grows more densely populated, we whine about crowded highways, add more lanes and drive even further.
The consummate environmentalist is no longer the organic farmer in the middle of nowhere. It’s the urban pioneer—repopulating abandoned acres, rehabbing historic homes, replanting trees, reinventing urban education, and yes, replacing that commute with a walk to work—no bus, Prius or SUV required.
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We moved into Indianapolis, just a few miles from downtown, so I would be closer to work. Now I live 5 miles from the office, rather than 25. I spend 15 minutes in the car, instead of 50. And I fill up every 10 days, not every 5.
I keep telling my wife I should get a scooter, but she won’t budge on that one. What’s wrong with a 41-year-old guy on a scooter?
Here’s the catch: My suburb has more of what I need than downtown Indianapolis does. My husband can walk to his job. We can (and do) ride our bikes to the grocery, Target, the post office, restaurants and more. The schools are good and my son’s schoolmates diverse, and my yard is big enough for an impromptu game of soccer. We love our 50-year-old neighborhood association and our 48-year-old house. Now if only I could talk my boss into moving my office closer to me….
The high price of gas is making it easier for me to look into buying that motorcycle I’ve always wanted. Less money at the pump, more fun. It’s possible I’m just looking for an excuse to buy one, and this is the best excuse I can muster.
It seems that brushing over the reasons why individuals have moved further away from the urban areas that we all now commute to is an easy way to simplify a much more complex series of issues; increasing cost of living within urban areas, declining educational standards within urban school districts, availability of jobs (many of our corporations have moved elsewhere along with “us”), and the quality and quantity of public transportation options . Shortening or eliminating the trip are admittedly wonderful alternatives to Prius buying; however, until the first domino is addressed more people will not realistically consider wrapping their arms around the infamous tree.
even though I need my car during the week for marketing calls and business appts. my goal on weekends is to park on Friday and not get back in car til Monday AM. I live near Monon Trail and can walk/ bike to just about anyplace I want or need to…it’s a great feeling to use my bike for transportation and not just exercise. Oh yeah I’m trading my 6 cyl. Honda (still gets 28 mpg) in for a Honda Fit which should get me over 40 mpg and is much more practical! (and Honda IS the greenest car company.)
Re: comments about scooters and motorcycles, I’m not so sure ’cause there’s still plenty of big SUV and trucks out there to run you over…owned 1 motorcycle in my life and walked (limped) away from an encounter with a car and never got back on one!
While I agree that we need to conserve energy I disagree with the inference that we are making changes only to save money. The co-worker that rides the bus may well have chosen this method of transportation a long time ago if it were available. Most people I know would love to live close to work but it just isn’t feasible for everyone. Many times you find a job close to home and then the business moves. This has happened to me 3 times and I have only worked for 4 employers.
I would give up our SUV but my husband had arthritis in his hips and knees and is unable to get into or out of any of today’s cars.
I think we should applaud anyone that makes any change because if enough people make an effort whatever the reason we all win.
Indeed, the safety issues keep me from buying the motorcycle. It’s nice to dream though.
I’ll stick with my 4-cylinder truck. It’s good gas mileage and good for supporting my garage sale habit.
Kasia, I’m right there with you. While a few extra bucks are always welcome, the biggest reason I bike and walk to work is for my own energy. No cup o’ joe could ever give me the boost that a breezy ride or a brisk walk could.
I won’t be walking much longer though - my company is also moving away from me and my city’s downtown. Within a few weeks, I’ll be forced to commute to and from work everyday, and I’m certainly not the only one. It’s not just up to the individuals - businesses must choose to invest in their downtowns too. When corporations move to office parks off busy highways, it becomes impossible for employees, even those who live reasonably close, to walk to work.
Sounds great.
But urban planners didn’t expect this would happen, at least the ones we have. The beneficiary was supposed to be the Simon Malls of the world, where we could do a one-stop shop instead of traveling to and fro. We built large neighborhoods with no groceries, or other walking-distance benefits. Even in downtown Indy, it’s a long way to a market. The de-centralized model was based on inexpensive transportation. The only way to solve the problem is through expensive redesign, or mass transit that will be used by all walks of life. We want to be mobile, and in our culture, we’re enabled by our mobility. $4+/gal fuel prices disable that mobility.
So it’s a bit disingenuous to glibly assert that high-carbon cost transportation like a Prius is going to be the solution, when the real problem is thinking about the very nature of manufacturing, product asset life-cycle, and urban/suburban/rural transportation problems that we’ve created over the past six decades.
There won’t be a fast cure to this problem, although we might just get a few more people to exercise. In the interim, if we address long-term solutions, we’ll get long-term benefit and not until then. Currently, mass transportation in Central Indiana is called I-465 (or otherwise an oxymoron). We have a huge new mid-field terminal, and yet we have hugely underfunded multi-county transportation– let along that of Indianapolis/Lawrence/Beech Grove/Speedway. We’re dancing around the real issues. Time to address them.
Hendy make a good point.
To be honest, I would like to live in Indianapolis, but with no infrastructure to support more sustainable communities, I don’t see myself moving. I also don’t see myself moving because real estate development in cities that are revitalizing the inner city cater to the waelthy — not me.
But that’s me just whining….
It will take a titanic shift in the perceptions of people to change how and where they live, and how and where they work. For example, I could sit a home and do all that I do at the office — and I could do it on my time. But the CEO of the company who employs me wants his minions at arms length. Which means, incidentally, I have to be in the office. That begets a morning and evening commute from the west side of Indianapolis to Fishers. That begets my ever expanding fuel bill. Which begets my ever shrinking savings account. There is the option of moving to Fishers, but with home prices in free fall, I’d loose my shirt and boxers if I sold my house — trust me, I already looked into it.
So what do we do. I’m going out on a limb here. It’s our elected leaders who should be leading the way. From a communication perspective, government agencies need to create and execute a massive public affairs campaign to begin affecting the behavior of its people. The federal government did that before and during WW II, and they can do it again. The Department of Agriculture conducted a massive public affairs campaign that created our national forest system and changed how we think of our wildlife. In fact, within the past decade, the agriculture department has been changing our perceptions again. So it can be done. It’s a matter of being bold enough, creative enough, and strategic enough to tackle such an undertaking. Alas, I’m skeptical of the leadership on high to get the job done.