by Avrel Seale
Sixty minutes.
That’s how long it took me to travel 30 blocks earlier this week at rush hour. That’s not normal — there was an accident — but it wasn’t shocking, either. Getting on the highway downtown at drive time is a daily roulette, because, as we all know, if a single thing goes wrong in the 15 miles between office and home — a rear fender kissed by a texting driver, a stalled engine, a flat tire — the whole sorry thing locks up for miles.
The fact that a solitary malfunction or accident can ruin thousands of people’s evenings is another unpleasant side effect of the crazy, fuel-hungry system we’ve allowed to evolve, and you would think it would provide more motivation to change the system. In a certain sense, collectively, we deserve this daily punishment for not being smart enough or willing enough to invest in a better system.
Whenever I’m forced to sit there and meditate on my circumstances, I’m always impressed by how relative this phenomenon of daily driving is and how this lifestyle has crept incrementally into such wide acceptance.
When I was a kid, about once a month we drove to my grandparents’ house, which was seven towns and 45 minutes away. Bored in the backseat, passing onion field after cotton field and entertaining myself by seeing how long I could hold my breath, the trip to Nanna and Pop’s seemed like a very substantial journey. That was one round-trip a month. Now I do that once a day — under ideal conditions. And many friends in sprawling Houston and Dallas/Fort Worth envy my 45-minute commute.
When I got my first job out of college in a town of about 100,000, my commute was 10 minutes each way. That seemed just about right to me. Now, 10 minutes barely gets me out of my subdivision and to the highway. It’s just a warm-up, a throat-clearing for my engine.
Gradually, many of us have come to accept as normal taking a road trip every day. It’s as if we’re all long-haul truckers, but the only commodity we’re delivering is ourselves.
One hour and 30 blocks into my commute this week, we finally passed the accident scene, got our lane back, and all floored our accelerators like drag boats speeding into the asphalt sea that lay ahead.
As soul-crushing as that 90-minute commute was, I was reminded only hours earlier that any unsustainable system America can conceive, China can take to the limits of imagination. You want a traffic jam? Try this one that now has lasted 13 DAYS and might not clear for weeks.
We all know instinctively how crazy and unsustainable this is.
In general, we live too far from our places of work. Real estate prices in city centers force families out to the suburbs, but many like yours truly still must go downtown to earn their daily bread. New “town centers” in outlying areas decentralize employment, but too often this only translates into someone driving clear across town to a job instead of merely to the center, therefore creating a satellite ring of bottlenecks. “Son of Downtown.”
Progressive city planners are using building density, walkable neighborhoods, mixed-use developments, and so on to try to mitigate the madness of our modern sprawlscapes. And those techniques are all necessary, but they are inadequate. As anyone who has visited New York, London, or Paris will tell you, the one thing that all livable large cities must have is an extensive network of passenger trains. Buses are well and good, as they displace cars, but they’re subject to traffic jams as well, and they just can’t move the same volume.
As with the electric car, we had the right answer early on, but then convinced ourselves that trains were antiquated and impractical. If we had stuck with the electric car, and if we had stuck with the street car (the original “light rail”), right now we’d be decades ahead in terms of transportation and decades behind in terms of climate change.
The answer is inescapable. It takes trains to make a big city livable. What’s more, it takes a lot of them from the get-go. Train systems don’t seem to be the sort of thing with which you can start small and grow organically. A tricky chicken-and-egg problem — it’s a big, expensive public project that needs lots of riders right away to pay for itself; but it can’t have lots of riders until it has lots of lines and lots of trains. Rail takes a massive investment so that it can basically spring full-grown from the head of Zeus with a critical mass of coverage, both of the city and of the clock.
Because it’s an inevitable part of every large city’s future, up-and-coming cities worldwide should swallow hard, make the investment, and skip the apocalyptic freeway visions that now pass for normal in too many metro areas.
If municipalities are smart, they’ll pull all-nighters planning and build now, because Uncle Sam is standing by with a checkbook. The federal government, through 2009’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — a.k.a. “stimulus money” — is spending $750 million for the construction of new public rail and other “fixed guideway systems.” Last month, the USDoT awarded Fort Worth $25 million for a new inner-city streetcar line. Charlotte, Cincinnati, and St. Louis have also won funds for rail. Detroit, New Orleans, and Tucson have won federal grants for streetcar connections between intercity rail stations and office areas.
And what about those intercity lines? The $750 million is a chunk, to be sure. But it’s dwarfed by the $8 billion in ARRA funds for an ambitious set of regional high-speed rail corridors nationwide.
(Click here for larger map.)
As far as I’m concerned, the more rail, the merrier. But one wonders whether those figures ought to be transposed, most importantly because, at least in wide-open country like Texas, the vast majority of driving is within cities as opposed to between cities. If the goal is getting cars off the road, then cities are where we can get the biggest bang for our buck.
Moreover, the sequencing of rail development is important. For example, the map shows one high-speed line from Tulsa through Oklahoma City, Dallas, Austin, and terminating in San Antonio. This would be great, and is probably inevitable. But if that were built now, someone would get off the train in San Antonio and then have to hail a cab, jump a bus, or rent a car to get anywhere else in town. Austin’s nascent rail system is a welcome start but needs to be dramatically increased to win enough converts to make a real dent.
When historians of the future look back on our society, will anything appear more absurd than the fact that we spent 10 hours every week, usually alone, in these big metal boxes, creeping along at walking speed, burning as fuel a valuable commodity that will run out, in a process that — by the way — is changing the world’s climate?
Choo-choo.
