"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Wednesday, August 06, 2008

On job-hunting and suburban sprawl
Posted by Jill | 6:15 AM
The town in which I live isn't quite an example of the suburban sprawl we've seen in recent years, with housing developments springing up ever-farther away from necessary amenities. The housing stock is predominantly post WWII vintage, or at least it was until the bash-and-build McMansion boom of the last five years. But if the automobile were to disappear tomorrow, we would still be within a reasonably biking distance of a strip mall with a supermarket and a thriving downtown area.

What this area lacks, however, is any kind of public transportation infrastructure that doesn't involve going into Manhattan. It also lacks any kind of road structure that would encourage cycling. You ride a bicycle on the main thoroughfares in this area, you are taking your life into your hands. The SUV drivers who insisted they needed these behemoths for everyday use because once a week they have to put soccer gear into them are paying four bucks a gallon for gasoline, and they are angry. They are still trying to terrorize Civic drivers, let alone cyclists.

So if you are going to work in the area, you're going to drive. We are near any number of main highways, which makes even such far-flung areas as Parsippany viable within a one-hour commutation limit -- except who wants to drive thirty miles each way to work, even in a car that gets forty miles to the gallon on the highway, when gasoline is four bucks a gallon and rising as soon as the oil companies get McCain elected?

This forces a change to the viable employer radius, narrowing it significantly in all directions other than east, where there is public transportation to New York City. Of course with the exception of one bus that only runs during rush hour, you need to drive to get to said public transportation -- a drive that is about six miles because the park and ride is on the other side of a major highway. There is a train in the next town, but what parking exists is limited to town residents and there is only one bicycle rack. And it is 2-1/2 miles door-to-door, which for a person less than five feet tall is a 45+ minute walk.

It's worse elsewhere. I have family in the Chapel Hill area of North Carolina and in Naples, Florida, and public transportation in those areas is practically nonexistent. Two-lane roads become four-lane highways, and four-lane highways become six-lane highways. It's Drive or Stay Home. Some newer communities are adopting the "new urbanism" model, or a variant that means "postage-stamp lots" rather than a full complement of services within a reasonable and safe walking or cycling distance. Others, like Southern Village in Chapel Hill, offer a somewhat comprehensive array of retail stores and restaurants, as well as a movie theater and an upscale market. If you live in Ave Maria, a Catholicism-oriented community in Florida built by Domino's Pizza magnate Tom Monaghan, you never even have to leave the gates of your community (and you don't have to worry about those evil sluts trying to avoid the consequences of their sins by using contraceptives either, because the drug store in Ave Maria doesn't sell them). But if you don't live in one of these communities, and you've bought a house in the exurbs, you are shackled to the internal combustion engine for life.

Perhaps now that oil is temporarily under $120/barrel, and gasoline prices have eased to slightly south of the four-dollar mark (though not by as much as a $20 drop in the price of crude would indicate it should), people will adjust to $3.50 gasoline as the new benchmark of "cheap gasoline". But the effects of expensive driving are rippling through the suburban communities that used to represent the American Dream:

Cheap oil, which helped push the American Dream away from the city center, isn't so cheap anymore. As more and more families reconsider their dreams, land-use experts are beginning to ask whether $4-a-gallon gas is enough to change the way Americans have thought for half a century about where they live.

"We've passed that tipping point," U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said.

Since the end of World War II, government policy has funded and encouraged the suburban lifestyle, subsidizing highways while starving mass transit and keeping gas taxes much lower than in some other countries.

Americans couldn't wait to trade in the cramped city apartments of the Kramdens and Ricardos for the lush lawns of the Bradys. Local land-use policies kept housing densities low, pushing development to the periphery of metropolitan regions and forcing families who wanted their dream house to accept long commutes and a lack of any real transportation choices other than getting behind the wheel.

Even the way the government pays for roads and transit is dependent on gas taxes, which is effective only if Americans keep driving.

"There is a whole confluence of government policies -- tax, spending, regulatory and administrative -- that have subsidized sprawl," said Bruce Katz, director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. A gallon of gasoline costs more than $8 in Britain, Germany, France and Belgium, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Much of the price difference is due to higher taxes.

Federal spending is about 4 to 1 in favor of highways over transit. Today, more than 99 percent of the trips taken by U.S. residents are in cars or some other non-transit vehicle, largely as a result of decades of such unbalanced spending.

The policies -- building so many highways and building so many houses near those highways -- have had a direct bearing on how and where people live and work. More Americans, 52 percent, live in the suburbs than anywhere else. The suburban growth rate exceeded 90 percent in the past decade.

But there's been a radical shift in recent months. Americans drove 9.6 billion fewer highway miles in May than a year earlier. In the Washington area and elsewhere, mass transit ridership is setting records. Last year, transit trips nationwide topped 10.3 billion, a 50-year high.


Increased use of mass transit is an indisputable good, but with so much money still going into roads and highways, such mass transit systems as exist are stretched to the breaking point. A few years ago I saw a documentary at Full Frame Fest about train commutation in India, that showed men hanging onto the outside of the train and riding on the roof. Mass transit in the New York area isn't quite that bad yet, but it's not unusual for rush hour trains to be standing room only, which for a one-hour commute is hardly going to make people paying $300/month think they're getting value for their money.

I'm hoping that I can find a job that's either within fifteen miles of home, or that at least allows for telecommuting a few days a week. At some point, all of us, including corporations, are going to have to change the way we do things. But the kinds of policies that are necessary to deal with the gradual phasing out of the instant gratification that the automobile offers are going to require a New Deal-type federal effort, that incorporates changes to corporate policies, huge investments in mass transit (both public and private) and renewable energy, and housing policy. The exurbs that exist cannot be allowed to turn into weed-choked wastelands, but will need to be connected to more populated areas through a network of bus, train, van, or trolley services. It's going to take a huge amount of money, something we don't have at the moment, because it's all going to companies like Blackwater and Halliburton and U.S. oil companies reaping profits from Iraq. The U.S. has allocated $48 billion for reconstruction in Iraq while little actual reconstruction has taken place and Iraq is poised to see a $79 billion budget surplus this year. $48 billion would be a drop in the bucket for the kinds of changes we need here at home to sustain anything even remotely resembling the life we currently enjoy. But at least it would be a start.
1 comments
Bookmark and Share
1 Comments:
Blogger Bob said...
A Star-Ledger writer tried commuting ftom Hillsborough to Newark without a car, riding a bike to the train station in Raritan I think. The bike ride alone was six miles one way on a busy road. One day he had to go from Newark to New Brunswick on assignment, so in late afternoon he needed to travel from NB to Newark to Raritan to home. He couldn't do two weeks without using his car, & after two weeks he was so crazy & exhausted he gave up.
8/6/08, 2:57 PM  
Post a Comment
<< Home