The price of gas seems to have become reasonable filler for news reports. The following are a few observations from these reports.

* Ridership on public transit is going up, up, up.
* Sales of scooters are on the rise.
* A California man decided to bike 42 miles one way to work for a month — partly because he’d always wanted to, but in the process he’s saving about $400.
* One investigative story found that the price of fuel is artificially high. Yes, there is more demand than ever worldwide, but what Americans are paying now is more a function of other bureaucratic and speculative nuances than simple supply and demand.
* GM is closing four manufacturing facilities, all ones that produce large vehicles. And, heaven forbid, they may also discontinue the conspicuous Hummer.

In April I asked “Will the financial strain actually change the way we live?” So it seems the painful price of petrol is forcing people to make adjustments, positive adjustments. My next question is, then, will this change be long-lasting? If the price of gas returns to the low *cough* neighborhood of $2.00/gallon, will Americans stick with the changes they made when costs were high? Will those who moved closer to work move back to the burbs? Will trains and buses have empty seats again? Will General Motors bring back the big cars?

The prices don’t effect my wife and I quite as much as some. I already bike to work whenever I can — because I like to — and the drive from home to office is barely a mile as it is. This whole ordeal interests me, instead, because of its relationship to how we live and design/build our communities in the United States. I would love to see a cultural shift take place. If the cost of gas is the impetus for this change, great. I’m convinced that a pedestrian/transit oriented culture is better for community and also better for the visual environment. I don’t expect cars to go away; they are a useful technology. But they are also overused in our culture, so much so that they have, in essence, taken over.

A few past posts on petrol pain from The Aesthetic Elevator:

Will costs really force a change?
Gas prices cause Dallasite to move
Ethanol a Symptom: Get to the root cause

The price of gas is higher than it’s ever been.

The cost of rice went up 141% last year.

The cost of wheat went up 77% last year.

The ABC World News spot that prompted this post, not the first of its kind on this blog, played interview footage of a Texas man who is now using the bus. He used to put gas in his automobile seven or eight times a month — which is unimaginable for myself — and is now down to three fill-ups. I try and bike to the office as much as I can, although I’m not forced into this mode of transportation as much as I have been in the past. In truth I prefer to bike; the car is just too convenient.

My wife tagged along to Wal-Mart with me last night and couldn’t believe the tiny amount of food we got for $70. I usually do the shopping in our household. Most all of what we bought fit in the child seat of the cart. $20 of the bill went towards meat and cheese from the deli, and I don’t buy the most inexpensive of the turkey. Further, local sales tax — yes, we pay sales tax on food — is quite high. Our checkbook is feeling the pain.

Will the financial strain actually change the way we live? Will we be, if I can put it this way, a more reasonable culture? Will we forgo the debt and consumerism that enslave so many of us? Will we adopt a more sustainable way of life all around?

Adding: A couple snippets from a book review by David Taylor:

The enemy to this vision is Suburban Sprawl. Call it the Anti-Urban Experience. Bess reckons it a manifestation of fallen modernity: a functionally secular, therapeutic, individualist, technologically enamored vision driven by an oppressive demand for novelty and the “bottom line.”

Suburban sprawl, Bess contends, dissociates daily communal life from physical place. It is environmentally unsustainable and unjust; it makes people slaves to their cars. Usually it is also ugly; useful and mostly durable, yes, but architecturally unbearably dull.

I might contest the “usually durable” comment, but that depends on the exact part of automobile-slash-suburban culture we’re talking about.

I’ve been fascinated with various forms of large-scale transportation since I was very young. I grew up in a non-descript western Nebraska community that boasts the worlds largest rail classification yards. And after my first time flying — first time old enough to remember, anyway — I became infatuated with commercial aviation. Any time an airplane, small props such as the Beechcraft 1900 in the case of the North Platte airport, flew within hearing I would look up. Thankfully this wasn’t very often in the small town, or I might have acquired a permanent crick in my neck. More reflection on my interest in aviation is in this post from June of last year.

I don’t fly all that much, but in the last five weeks I set foot in airports for two separate trips. My layover was in Memphis in both cases. The Memphis airport is a dreary place to be (the one point of promise was the real-live art hanging on the walls). In the concourses ceilings are low, corridors are narrow and the tiled walls are a drab brown-gray. It may be the ugliest airport I’ve been in.

But a lot of airports look like this, bland and uninviting. Situation Terminal, from The New Yorker’s website, tackles the question “Can anyone design a nice aiport?” The story lays out a bit of airport design history, suggesting the logistical nightmare that is a large airport and tight finances fostered a more or less pragmatic approach to terminal and concourse design in the last thirty to forty years. Attempts at reinventing the airport were, while perhaps visually interesting, failures in function. The New Yorker cites Eero Saarinen’s efforts at JFK and Dulles in this regard.

“Since then,” the story says, “airport authorities have been wary of letting any architect have a say on what should go where. Now most architects don’t get to do much more than give the main concourse a big, swooping space with natural light — like the one in the new American Airlines terminal at Kennedy airport — which acts as little more than a distraction from the banality of the rest of the terminal.”

There are, however, two shining examples of a better way to design airports according to columnist Paul Goldberger. Norman Foster’s Beijing Capital International Airport’s Terminal 3 is the airport rethought, successfully according to Goldberger. Apparently the space is intuitive and logistically more sound than the comfortable — even if archaic — model airports presently defer to.

I’m not so keen on the aesthetics from what I can tell in the architects renderings, though, or the 500+ photos uploaded to Flickr. It looks like a very large commercial building, like so many other airports, from what I can tell. Sure, it appears as though the architect specified some attempts to cover up the generally cold underlying structure, but based on the images I’m finding online the attempt was futile. The one exception is the Ground Transportation Centre. This space actually looks pleasant to be in.

The second example of a new airport architecture Goldberger’s piece cites is Terminal 4 in Madrid. The column doesn’t say much about function in Richard Roger’s Barajas Airport project, but the images lend me to believe this is, overall, a much more inviting environment than Terminal 3 in Beijing.

My own experience lies more with smaller venues, such as the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport (XNA) or Lincoln [Nebraska] Airport (LNK). In many ways these smaller airports are much nicer to fly in and out of, even if there aren’t as many restaurants to choose from. I often wonder if the hub and spoke system major airlines use to get people from place to place is less than optimal. I suppose — that is, I hope — the airlines have seriously considered alternatives to this model at some point in their history. With all of the financial trouble most of them are in right now, one would think this might be a good time to revisit a variety of innovative options in order to say afloat and gain and edge on the competition.

“Corbusier” wrote an interesting post over at Architecture + Morality “in defense of car-based urbanism.” It’s a long blog entry I found worthy of excerpting and responding too.

” . . . I believe people will never willingly leave their cars en masse to walk exclusively. Despite all the added problems imposed by car use and the strains on the massive amount of required infrastructure, the enhancements cars have made [on] average people’s daily life have been dramatic as the fast-growing rate of car ownership throughout the world can attest.”

I wonder, though, if part of the reason for the rest of the world adopting the automobile isn’t related to its affiliation with wealthier culture. It seems like it’s the “in thing” for cultures looking up to Westernized locales and their economic success.

I’m not convinced (at all) that my own life is better because of the automobile — at least not at this point in my life. I’m glad for the invention of the technology in the past, but I often lament the beasts as necessary evils, particularly in smaller communities where there are no public transit options and city planners can’t seem to facilitate better community development. I’m convinced that my own quality of life suffers because of our vehicular vice; the felt need to own a car strains my finances, makes me lazy and generally uglyfies the built environment (even though it doesn’t necessarily need to be this way).

My second cousin in Denmark has never owned a car; in fact, she’s never driven, never had a driver’s license. She walks, bikes and uses public transit to get around. A few years back she injured her heel, and her first concern was that she wouldn’t be able to get around without a car in the future. Money that she uses for vacations throughout the year would need to be diverted to pay for a motor vehicle. To my knowledge, her heel healed and she has not had to throw her money into the rapidly depreciating money pit that is an automobile.

According to the blogger, author William Bogart suggests that

” . . . the monocentric view no longer applies to the reality imposed by the automobile, and suggests that rather than to urge a strict return to the traditional monocentric city, we should try to better understand and improve the dynamic nature of our contemporary polycentric cities.”

This is an important point, but not necessarily just in relationship to how cars impact culture. There is always a limit to the size of a city that is focused around a singular central node. You can only build up so far, and the natural progression of a large metropolitan area would seem to dictate the birth of new city centers as parts of the city are developed beyond a certain serviceable point.

“To many, auto-centric urban development has yielded dismal changes that have prompted a call for a return to pedestrian-centric development, with little interest to more skillfully integrate parking infrasture as part of a desired solution. They do not intend to improve the experience or the practicality of parking, they wish rather to eliminate it entirely.”

Personally, I think the best solution would be to strive for both. Cars are probably here to stay in some form or another. As I’ve already mentioned, I believe there is a genuine quality of life concern herein, something I’m expressing from personal experience at this point more than academic understanding. My advocating for better-designed, more pedestrian/transit centric communities isn’t in the slightest related to some kind of sentimental desire to return to “the good old days.” It is instead a hopeful response to observations of our present caraholic culture.

Let’s not forget the social implications of the car either. People are more easily isolated and independent — the freedom or independence the automobile offers is largely the thesis of Corbusier’s post, though I’d counter by suggesting the resulting isolation is detrimental — , vehicular aesthetics are often questionable at best and patience seems to be in more limited supply (in my mind) in a culture where the automobile has helped foster a mindset of instant gratification.

I’ve been thinking recently on how a successful shift in our culture would look, a shift that sees what I perceive to be a more balanced community where cars are viewed as tools and not as necessities. Of course, for this to happen a radical rearrangement of our personal and community priorities would need to take place, as I suggested in this post last week. I don’t have any answers yet, but it’s fun to ponder — actually, it’s important to ponder.

Another story pertaining to ethanol on the news tonight prompts me to write this. The report, on ABC World News, explained that a recent exponential increase in the cost of wheat — thus an increase of cost for bread, pasta and so forth — is the result of more farmers planting corn instead of wheat to take advantage of the increased production of ethanol.

Although I don’t really know much about the process or how it compares to other options, ethanol has been a household term for me for years — probably years before most people in the country on account of growing up in Nebraska (Cornhuskers, anyone?).

What I keep hearing, though, are the detractors. A few weeks ago an NPR story talked about how the production of the fuel actually leaves a larger carbon footprint than regular gasoline (granted, corn still has the advantage of being renewable). That same article said that one of the best plant sources for ethanol production is illegal in the states: Hemp. I’ve also heard that sugar cane is a much more efficient replacement for corn. And when my wife worked at the newspaper a few years back, a man claimed to have found a way to turn chicken crap into fuel (but couldn’t carry out his plan for lack of funds).

Where is all of this going though? The local news warned of higher gas prices again tonight and suggested people take drastic measures in response, such as selling their SUV. I’m all for more efficient vehicles, but my wife rightly guffawed when the commentator referred to this measure as “drastic.”

It seems to me a much more fundamental change is needed. In essence, things like ethanol or hybrids treat a symptom and ignore the cause. The cause in this case is an over-reliance on the automobile and subsequent lack of or plain ignorant city planning which allowed for an unmitigated proliferation of a car culture. People really concerned with changing the way Americans use energy should consider advocating lifestyle changes much more significant than purchasing a lower MPG. What about redesigning our lives and our communities in order to foster a dramatic lessening of our auto addiction so that we can walk to work, walk to the grocer, walk to the post office — and even if not walking or biking (which would also speak to the sloth and gluttony issues in America, i.e. obesity) to allow for shorter drives or possibly the use of scooters? What about installing and advocating efficient mass transit?

Yes, things like that will cost a lot of money, but isn’t the government subsidizing ethanol as it is? And isn’t energy independence for the U.S. worth a lot of money?

The great little book The Geography of Nowhere contained an anecdote I’ve always remembered. Author James Kunstler relays how people visiting a historical main street type museum all suggested their experience there was very positive, peaceful if I remember rightly. However, none of them were able to put two and two together in order to realize that what made this environment different was its lack of cars. Kunstler attributes the positive response of the museum visitors, at least in part, to the absence of automobiles.

Motor vehicles are so ingrained in our culture we can’t imagine life without them, which frankly I find more than a little sad. Isn’t the United States supposed to be full of innovators, people — including capitalists — thinking outside of the box to solve problems (preferably before they become problems) and improve our quality of life? Instead we live in a culture where the only thing the innovators (read “capitalists”) are interested in is the bottom line and keeping their shareholders happy (read “sticking with the status quo”), and the rabble behind the steering wheels are primarily concerned with preserving or improving their own comfort level in the near future while disregarding a possibly perilous more distant scenario.

Indeed, a more fundamental rearrangement of values seems like the better solution.

Haven’t posted much in recent months on community planning as I’ve had art on the brain, messing around with my new kiln and reading the books I received for Christmas. The last issue of Wired (Feb. 200 featured a fun compilation titled “Why things suck.” One thing that sucks is traffic. The blurb reaffirms something I learned in my singular community planning course in college: More lanes does not equal less traffic.

“Our nation is gridlocked. Congested roadways mean that each year, the typical US commuter spends about 40 hours in traffic. That adds up to $78 billing in lost time and wasted fuel, not to mention the environmental damage, road rage, and the proliferation of lame drive-time shock jocks. What’s worse, most jams aren’t the result of an accident or a breakdown; they have no clear cause at all. Drivers react to other drivers, and those drivers react in response. A tiny hiccup in traffic — your fiddling with the radio and get a little too close to the car in front, so you hit the brakes — can send a tremor rippling upstream for miles. One Japanese scientist found that in moderate traffic, a single erratic vehicle can trigger feedback effects that push the entire system into a new equilibrium: a standstill.

The reflexive response to congestion is to add more capacity. But that, alas, is self-defeating. As the history of cities like New York and Los Angeles shows, a new bridge or expanded artery just invites more people to drive. In the long run, it alters decisions about where to live and work — highways create suburbs, not the other way around. Pent-up demand around major US cities is so great, urban planners say, no amount of construction would alleviate gridlock. Singapore, London and Stockholm have tackled rush hour problems with “congestion pricing” schemes that use heavy fees to encourage people to share rides or limit downtown trips to off-peak hours. Can the US hop on the same bus? A similar proposal for New York City has stalled.”

Usually forgotten in the discussion about traffic are the aesthetic considerations. In this overly pragmatic country, we’re too quick to throw up new infrastructure regardless of how it looks. I did learn in my architecture studios to look for the beauty in everything, but I don’t find much to admire in asphalt as used in roadways as they are generally applied to the environment.

Interesting morning links:

Left-wing bloggers try to unioninize: Oh brother

Why people buy the Toyota Prius: Image is everything

Trash art installation in New York City: Oblivious pedestrians

Study says walking worse for the environment: But better for your health

I asked my good friend’s husband, an architect I’m getting to know when we travel back to Nebraska from time to time, what he misses most about Germany, his home country. He considered the question very briefly and responded with one word: “Proximity.”

By this he meant the availability of a pedestrian culture. In Germany you can walk to most places, if not everywhere, around town — at least where he’s lived. He went on to lament how everything in the U.S. revolves around the automobile. So true; so sad.

Later in the trip I was delighted to hear another friend say out loud “Cars are overrated.” My sentiments precisely, verbatim.

Parking. Ugh.

I learned yesterday that the inexpensive second-run movie theater my wife and I frequented while living in Lincoln, Nebraska, was demolished and replaced with a parking garage. From what I can tell, the city purchased the theater in order to stimulate growth, apparently in accord with their master plan.

How depressing. In the past I’ve held Lincoln up as a city with a much better planning record than many other cities, perhaps than any other city I’ve lived in. Lincoln has historically been very tight with their policies from what I understand.

Regardless, this seems to be a lazy solution in response to parking congestion downtown. Lincoln has a half decent trail system already in place, as well public transit via bus. Why not encourage people in the community to walk, bike or take the bus? Why not spend money on making these sustainable options more accessible?

I can’t, offhand, find a photograph of this new garage, although Lincoln’s other parking garages do at least look like more than purely utilitarian structures. The Starship, however, was a gem — especially when new. The hallways were black-lit, the dark with glowing flecks of neon. It was, the last time I was there, in need of some TLC.

As I type this, in the Grounds to Go coffee shop on the corner of Anna and Locust in Grand Island, my view out the window includes a car lot, a mid-size asphalt parking lot, a gas station and (yipee) mini-storage. A small yellow house still stands on the corner, trapped by ugly infrastructure necessitated by America’s addiction to automobiles. How much more pleasant it would be if the buildings were against the street and parking behind, with landscaping shading and buffering sidewalks from streets. Of course, I could be at the coffee shop downtown, which organically allows for somewhat more aesthetically pleasing vistas — but even then I would be looking across cars parked along the street.

How is it that, in America (and elsewhere) our communities are basically designed around one thing: The automobile?

I formulated the following response earlier this morning in an Arts and Faith thread talking about suburbia through the lens of David Goetz’s book (which I’ve not read) Death by Suburb: How to keep the suburbs from killing your soul:

1: I’m not so much against suburbs as I am pro-community. Stereotypically, urban areas foster greater community among residents in comparison to the isolation generally affiliated with the burbs.

2: Another advantage in urban areas is the potential availability of mass-transit, as well as the potential proximity of necessary services — within walking or biking distance — not necessitating a drive.

3: Presently, although it doesn’t have to be this way, suburbs waste space. Yards and homes are unnecessarily large. They waste time and resources. From The Suburban Christian:

American houses are larger by far than those in other societies - the average size of an American single-family home has increased from 983 square feet in 1950 to 2,329 square feet today. The typical American has 718 square feet of living space per person, compared to 442 square feet in Canada and just 170 square feet in Japan. Most American suburban homes, if set in other parts of the world, would be used to house multiple families.

This spread-outness also makes walking to the grocer or post office unlikely, if not unreasonable.

4: What people refer to as “new urbanism” usually ends up looking like a suburb more than anything urban, and this is OK (assuming it’s done well). Something doesn’t have to look urban to be a well-designed community. It seems, however, there are a lot of half-hearted attempts at community planning being thrown up these days (at least here in Northwest Arkansas) somewhat inaccurately referring to themselves as new urbanism. A community planner commented on my blog last year, saying he prefers what he calls “old urbanism.” That is, the revitalization and reorganization of existing towns. These already-established centers of living possess one thing a community or suburb sprouting on the outskirts of town doesn’t have: History.