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.

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.

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.