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BS ‘n’ About…
Campusization
America needs to get over its love affair with the car. After a century of scarring our landscape, endangering our health, and overseeing the greatest single waste of natural resources in the history of mankind, the era of the automobile is over. Regardless of which side of the Global Warming debate one resides on, it should be obvious that the Earth cannot survive two cars in every driveway from Munich to Mumbai, from Boston to Beijing. The era of the automobile is over.
Cars were marketed in the post World War years as symbols of freedom. Yet, these days, they encumber those living paycheck-to-paycheck like a ball and chain, sucking our wallets dry as the single biggest source of catastrophic, unexpected expense this side of healthcare.
We can’t get that paycheck if we can’t get to work so the choice between a new transmission and this week’s groceries isn’t really a choice at all. Cars are no longer luxuries for most of us. They’ve become financially devastating necessities that keep us from getting ahead.
At least in the old days, when the clunker broke down, we pulled out the old toolbox, called up the brother-in-law, and spent our Saturday getting it back on the road. Nowadays it is going to cost more to keep an old car on the road than to buy a new one. We are not that far away from poor people not being able to keep an old car on the road and rich people just throwing them away when things start going wrong. The era of the automobile is over.
However, if we see the prices coming, maybe we won’t have to pay them. If we wean ourselves off of the automobile before it depletes our bank accounts and drains the national treasury, perhaps we’ll have something left to invest in the future, rather than squandering it trying to rebuild the past. …something left for America rather than squandering it overseas.
We are getting close to the day when we no longer make cars in this country. In the not too distant future, every car payment made will be money sent overseas, every mile driven will be an investment in our own demise that we’ll never get back.
That day is coming, if it isn’t already here. We need to start changing our ways, sooner rather than later. So where do we start?
Legislation needs to be passed to give us incentive to get out from behind the wheel. Cities need to be made pedestrian-friendly and off limits to personal transportation vehicles. The entire transportation infrastructure needs to be rethought in terms of realistic future capabilities, not our unrealistic wishes.
We may not want to do these things. Powerful forces will resist the change. But if we are to avoid the mess of a transition that was the demise of the railroads, we need to actively promote that transition. We have no choice. We might as well get on with it.
We ought to start with our automobile industry. An industry that has navigated itself into bankruptcy by keeping its eye firmly on the rear view mirror for the past half century. ‘Green cars’ are a nice concept, but so are healthy cigarettes. The answer doesn’t lie in that direction.
If our auto industry looks to the future for a change, it will see that we no longer need, nor can we afford, the souped-up six, eight, and twelve cylinder, gas-guzzling living rooms on wheels they’ve been foisting off on us for decades.
What the future screams for is mass transit and fuel-efficient putt-putts to move people from point A to point B in built-up urban environments. We need ‘volkswagens’, not Prius’. We need to do for transportation what Bic did for pens and McDonalds did for burgers: Make it cheap, disposable, and accessible to everyone.
Back in Detroit’s darkest days for quality, a great idea was lost in the shuffle: The Fiero. The idea was simple. Build a basic go-cart frame that could be accessorized with snap-on plastic panels. If the Big 3, oops, 1 and ½, were to perfect a basic, couple thousand dollar transportation machine, maybe the Chinese would be buying from us for a change instead of the other way around. The future of transportation is mass transit and putt-putts, not Hummers and ‘vettes. It has been a long time since Detroit has been on the cutting edge of anything. This may be America’s last chance to have an auto industry that is relevant in the 21st Century.
Transforming the American landscape to survive, much less thrive, in the coming days won’t be easy, nor cheap. Especially since we’ve squandered so much of the 20th Century’s wealth building an infrastructure that is economically, environmentally, and aesthetically unsustainable.
We need to start refurbishing the old, rather than tearing down and building new. As the Internet changes the way we work, shop, and socialize, we are going to find ourselves with a glut of commercial and industrial space. As the era of the automobile becomes more and more untenable, we will see an urban flight, (to, not from), that will blight our suburbs. In the future, we will travel less, not more.
Tax laws, environmental regulations, and tax codes need to promote central campuses around which we build our lives. From shuttle buses to weatherproof underground walkways, we need to re-plan our cities and towns to meet the coming economic and climatic realities.
The split-level ranch, bedroom communities that sprung up to house the ‘50’s nuclear families are already obsolete. The typical family in America is no longer typical. Jobs are not forever. Housing is no longer a twenty or thirty year proposition. If we are to thrive in the future, we must plan for the future rather than desperately cling to the past.
Washington has presided over, if not outright legislated, the demise of the American auto industry. This once mighty giant of industrial strength is a welfare state shadow of its former self, surrounded by a de-populated urban wasteland of its departed workers. The housing industry is not far behind. The energy industry waits in the wings. America is falling apart.
Washington needs to develop a vision for the future rather than allow itself to be bought off by lobbyists for the past. Our lawmaking process has been corrupted by a past “too big to fail”. Yet it failed for a reason. It failed, perhaps, because the times had passed it by.
What we need for the future will never be priority one for our politicians. It is the past that writes the big checks. Unless Washington gets some vision, the only thing it is going to be governing over is the demise of an unsustainable way of life. …the demise of the American Dream.
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