When I learned the old gray Toyota, which we’ve driven for the past four years, had a couple more confirmed issues I knew it was time. At 258,000 miles the car wasn’t worth putting another $2,000 into, even though it still runs well.

I loathe the process of shopping for and buying a car, although admittedly the internet has made the process much less painful. Yesterday’s adventure, ahem, still became a four-and-a-half hour ordeal. The car we wanted to test drive was at one of the dealer’s Lincoln locations so it had to be transferred. Just before they drove it to Grand Island, however, someone in Lincoln wanted to buy it. The local salesman and his manager fought for us (and their own commission) and in the end the car made it to our town, albeit two hours late.

Here's hoping the new car lasts us 10 years.

Regular readers will know, moreover, I loathe the fact that I have to own a car at all. I would rather walk or bike to work, and to the grocer and post office and church. I would rather spend the money that goes towards a car on a table saw, donation to charity, new kiln or trip to China than petrol, insurance, tires and then after it all, another car. I won’t go into more depth here since I’ve talked at length in the past about New Urbanism, community planning.

What was most interesting throughout this two week auto purchase process was that three people in the car business told me they also disliked the fact that they had to own a car, had to pay for an automobile. Two people at the dealership said this, as did the manager at the shop that changed the oil in the old car. I don’t know how sincere they were; the salesmen may have simply been commiserating with a potential customer. The oil change manager was easy to believe though.

James Kunstler’s book The Geography of Nowhere pointed out (if I recall correctly, it’s been 10 years since I read the book) how visitors to places like Disney World often can’t articulate one of the reasons they are so happy to be there: There aren’t any cars around. You walk around the park, take the ferry or monorail to your hotel. What will it take for us to realize how ingrained the automobile is in our culture? In our community design, our architecture, our economy, etc.?

The car we bought yesterday is a 2003 Toyota Corolla. It’s in fabulous condition and was a great buy. It should get twice the gas mileage of our old car — and it has a radio, and a working door handle.

I plan on it lasting 10 years. Or more.

First off, if state and federal governments were planning in a responsible fashion, shouldn’t there be money to repair roads already allocated in an existing fund (not that I actually believe they are planning in such a way, but they should be)? Secondly, in theory rail will lighten the load on interstates meaning there won’t be as much money needed to maintain the roadways.

The article, which starts with a quote by U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood — also a Republican — found on Twitter, also includes some interesting words from a LaHood blog entry:

We’re talking about nothing short of transforming transportation much the same way the interstate highway system did under President Eisenhower. Can you imagine if Ohio or Wisconsin or any other state had said, “No, thanks — we don’t think that highway thing is going anywhere?”

If you think the United States can afford not to compete with the European and Asian nations who have embraced high-speed rail and other innovative infrastructure . . .

While I’m all for more public transportation options — I’d gladly take the train to the in-laws for Christmas if I could, making that trip so much more productive than being behind the wheel on that seven hour drive — competing with Europe or Asia is an irrelevant point when it comes to interstate rail. Not applying a potentially useful technology in the context of our own country is silly, assuming we can come up with the funding in a responsible manner, but the context is key here. Just because something is good for other countries doesn’t make it good for America.

And as much as I’d like a high-speed interstate rail system in the United States, I’m personally more interested in seeing time and money invested in transforming our addicted-to-automobile communities. Travel via interstate is a much more logical use of a car than in town anyway, where we could actually be walking or biking to the grocery store and post office if we planned our communities in a way that was not wholly auto-centric.

Adding: Why can’t high-speed rail be a private venture?

It never ceases to amaze me how we’re such eager adopters of new technology ideas that we don’t stop and consider the ramifications of what we adopt — like 90% of soybean farmers planting one genetically modified soybean seed.

I eat locally when I can because, in general, the food is better and I have a better idea of where it came from. There are people who’ve made eating locally a religion, though, apparently in part because they think it a more environmentally friendly lifestyle. Writing for the New York Times, Stephen Budiansky informs us that’s bogus in a little article called Math Lessons for Locavores. “The local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas,” he claims.

Budiansky enjoys eating from his own garden nine months out of the year, but he breaks the energy consumption of foods down for us into layman’s terms. Locavorism has apparently entered pharisaical levels of legalism, resulting in “all kinds of absurdities. For instance, it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley.”

According to Budiansky’s math, driving to the grocery store and then refrigerating your loot consume most of the energy that goes into our food production, even if we can brag about our Energy Star appliances. The diesel fuel to truck or train it across the country uses little energy by comparison.

Guess we have to find another way to boost our own self-esteem.

Talbot makes some interesting observations concerning the trains in Chicago and their riders, how different lines possess different personalities, how riders in general react (or don’t react) to certain behaviors. I’ll let you read the article (linked to in the first paragraph) for the details after saying one thing: People in the city really wear iPod earbuds like they’re implants. I noticed this on the trains in New York back in February. It’s something we — and by we I mean American culture — made fun of a few years back. Here in our tiny midwestern town you don’t see it very often, hardly at all actually.

Photo from Wikipedia by Daniel Schwen.

On Conferences
I’ve attended a number of conferences and trade shows over the past six years — from two days to one week, a few hundred participants to 30,000 attendees. My wife and I agreed before I left for New York that paying for these kind of events is more or less a crapshoot. You don’t know if it will actually be of value until you get there. You pay to register, transport yourself to the venue, pay for hotel and food and hope for the best.

I’ve learned that such conferences, despite all of their planning with seminars, plenaries and exhibit halls, are best for organic networking. IAM Encounter was no different. Yes, I gleaned some good stuff from the seminars and even the plenaries — which, for the most part, exceeded my expectations — but the meat of the conference was in the people I met in the hallways and bookstore.

On New York City
I was actually a tad nervous prior to my first time in the Big Apple, for some irrational reason. The whole thing went off without a hitch, even though I ticked off the bus driver who drove me from the Newark Airport into the city. In my defense, he was in a bad mood before we left the airport.

That first experience interested me though, in that my uncle previously expressed how nice New Yorkers were in his opinion, at least compared to Chicago-ans. I was always skeptical of his assessment, mainly because people like he and I who haven’t lived in either of these cities get very limited exposure to a reasonable cross-section of the community. That said, most people in the Big Apple were personable; the exception seemed to be transit workers (even beyond the aforementioned bus driver).

The city is much dirtier than I expected. It was encased in a brownish-yellow dome of smog, so much so that I had to squint from the airplane in order to actually see the skyline as we flew into Newark. I was surprised at the volume of trash littering streets and subways, although with such a concentration of people in such a small area I shouldn’t have been.

I was In all likelihood comparing the actual city to my impressions of it in TV and film. I spent time in the Upper East Side, Midtown, Downtown, Chelsea and Tribeca, which barely scratches the surface of the metro but isn’t a cloistered experience wither. None of the neighborhoods looked like sets from Seinfeld or Friends that I could recall. Then I remembered hearing a number of years ago that a lot of movies set in New York City are actually filmed in Toronto, mainly because it’s similar in appearance and a lot cleaner.

Earlier this week TechCrunch posted a letter from Todd Dagres,
Founder and General Partner of Spark Capital, to the President. From the letter:

It’s time to face the truth: The people running the US auto companies are officious bumblers, the products stink, and the unions are a parasitic drain on the business. And yet the Government seems content to throw billions of dollars at the problem.

He goes on to suggest President Obama put Steve Jobs in charge of American automakers. Makes sense to me, although it wasn’t well-received by readers who thought Dagres didn’t know the first thing about the automobile industry. True as that may be (or might not; I doubt many of the commenters really know that much about Dagres), one of the earlier comments noted that many CEOs don’t necessarily have extensive knowledge of the products or processes of their company.

Today’s Wordle is from the Carfree USA blog.

“About 17,000 live here and about 117,000 — give or take — come to work here every day,” Lecos says. “So that incredible imbalance is why you have the absolute commuter nightmare of trying to get 117,000 people in, in one period of time in the morning, and out again at 5 o’clock.”

Commuter nightmare I’d say. The interview also calls Tyson’s Corner, which offers a whopping 167,000 parking spaces, a traffic engineer’s worst nightmare. The All Things Considered story focuses on a potential remodel for the community, trying to raise it’s population to 100,000 and cut down on the number of commuters. The key to that, it appears, is building up instead of out. This is a piece of advice my grandfather has suggested for years, long before the term New Urbanism was coined.

Sounds like a plan. Illustration from the Tyson’s Tomorrow website.

Everybody’s favorite treehugger, Al-Gore, was interviewed by NPR yesterday afternoon. The conversation focused on coal power plants and the potential for “clean coal.” I was amazed that Gore merely went along with the conversation instead of breaking out and mentioning the fact that coal is a fossil fuel, and not sustainable in the long-term. If you’re a vision casting celebrity like Al-Gore, why not move the conversation ahead by acknowledging the reality of coal in the short-term and pressing for sustainable energy solutions as soon as possible?

Regardless of Al Gore’s celebrity stump for the environment, the Democrats are typically strong in the green category. They are more likely to create green policy, and they are also more likely to spend money on environmental incentives, programs and research.

Also on the radio yesterday were reports of the big three automakers’return to Washington D.C., this time in hybrids, sans the corporate jets. Their change of heart, a direct result of being laughed out of the city last month, is humorous.

I’d personally prefer some tough years and a recession to more federal debt, be it for bailouts or alternative energy. Further, letting the automakers fail has the potential to bring about more lasting cultural change than new policies and more federal money for green research. The high gas prices of this year already did that to a degree; more people are riding bicycles and taking public transit. A few more years of this and there might be an even broader openness to New Urbanism, to well designed cities that don’t use the automobile as a crutch. I’m also generally a fan of letting the automakers reap from their own short-sighted business models. Washington bureaucrats bailing out industries is no more a sustainable model of government than coal is a sustainable means of creating electricity.

Will it be worthwhile to sink billions into alternative energy sources as the Democrats might do? Where will the money come from? When will we have a balanced budget? I was horrified to hear Obama’s upcoming economic adviser say something to the effect that “balancing the budget isn’t important” in a recent interview. It was in the context of the current financial crisis, but I don’t care. The federal government should be able to balance the budget, or that government should be replaced with leadership that can. The one exception I might allow for is a time of war (particularly something like a World War, when our own soil is threatened, as opposed to whatever it is that’s happening in Iraq right now).

I hope that the United States will achieve energy independence in the near future. Our country should be self-sustaining. Trade is all well and good, but the strings that come with things like oil dependence are anything but good. See the current Iraq conflict. I would rather see our nation’s role in the oil-rich Middle East as peacemaker.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

A multitude of energy options already exist. Coal, natural gas, oil, hydro, wind, nuclear and solar for starters. There is no energy production that is completely free of environmental impact; sorry, Al-Gore. In a conversation with a friend a few years ago he pointed out that wind turbines desertify surrounding land. Solar involves development of panels and batteries that wear out. Fossil fuels bother the global warming crowd, and besides that they just aren’t going to last indefinitely. Development always bears a certain impact that can be viewed as negative, but that’s part of humanity subduing the earth as God intended. We just have to do it in the best way possible. We cut down trees, we plant more. We create a hydroelectric dam, we do it in the most enduring and least invasive way possible.

Simply put, we act as good stewards of all of our resources, as a country, as states and as individuals.

Image from PostSecret.

The fact that the car companies of today not only do the R&D for their industry but also run the factories that put the cars together and manage huge networks of dealerships put them at an economic disadvantage. He compares this to Apple, who does all of the R&D in house but outsources all of the manufacturing.

Where’s the iPhone of the car world, Arrington asks?

* 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