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Time, Distance, Value and Superstition: A Fresh Look at How We Get Around |
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by Eric Greening
Local government gadfly Eric Greening does not mince words. His unique car-free perspective travels with him as he sits on numerous transportation and land development committees. In this essay he philosophizes about time, distance and how we get around.
The late Ivan Illich, author of Deschooling Society, Vernacular Gender, and Toward a History of Needs, wrote a brief but pithy book at the height of the “Energy Crisis” of the 1970’s that has since been largely forgotten. As we face a convergence of challenges to our auto-dominated way of life, it is time to take a fresh look at his Energy and Equity, for in it, Illich goes far beyond the current fad of placing faith in low-fuel cars and denser neighborhoods to question basic cultural assumptions about time and energy. Today, as never before, we need the sort of complete paradigm shift for which he was laying the groundwork.
His chapter titles alone are a challenge to the self-serving rhetoric the transportation industry uses to create the impression it is reforming: “Speed-stunned Imagination;” “Net Transfer of Lifetime;” “The Ineffectiveness of Acceleration...” Illich is a master of the concise quote (He would never have consented to call them “sound bites!”): “Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create distances which they alone can bridge.” “Past a certain threshold of energy consumption, the transportation industry dictates the configuration of social space.” “Occasional spurts to Acapulco or a party congress dupe the ordinary passenger into believing he has made it into the shrunk world of the powerfully rushed. The occasional chance to spend a few hours strapped into a high-powered seat makes him an accomplice in the distortion of human space, and prompts him to consent to the design of his country’s geography around vehicles instead of around people.”
Particularly noteworthy in this book was the simple arithmetic by which he proved that the common myth that driving a single-occupant vehicle saves time is based on a filtered view of reality. One’s “set of wheels” looks efficient if one divides miles traveled by hours spent in motion, but Illich adds the hours the average single-occupant driver spends earning the money to buy the car, put gasoline in it, keep tires on it, maintain it, and pay the taxes to build and maintain the road system. With that taken into account, the single occupant driver gets 5 miles an hour.
Costs, wages, and miles traveled have changed since the mid-1970s when Illich did his calculations, but the relationship between the numbers is unlikely to have changed significantly. Moreover, he did not take into account the hours some drivers spend studying for a license, shopping for cars and reading about what brand to buy, attending traffic school, recovering in hospitals from traffic accidents, and most assuredly did not include as a time factor the costs paid for our military posture in the Middle East driven by an appetite for fuel that exceeds our local supply. Essentially, the single-occupant driver gets no more than walking speed, and possibly a slower walk all the time. Yet the car itself is the greatest deterrent to actual walking, as the quotes in the second paragraph so aptly illuminate.
It is true that those who carry passengers, or heavy goods, have a better reason for using these otherwise wasteful vehicles. But when counts are made locally of actual vehicle occupancy, the single-occupant vehicle remains in the majority. When Cuesta Grade was widened, one mitigation for the traffic impacts during years of construction was a million-dollar-a-year subsidy of various “traffic demand management” strategies, ranging from extra buses to vanpool subsidies, carpooling bulletin boards, and coupons subsidizing gasoline purchases by carpoolers. During the period these strategies were funded, the occupancy of the average vehicle on the Grade went from 1.24 to 1.28. Incidentally, the cost of that construction project, at well over $40 million, was applied to saving the average rush hour driver 3 minutes in making the crossing. How many minutes have taxpayers spent earning and forking over the tax money to fund that project to “save” those 3 minutes per trip? Is time spent in a slow car “lost” and time spent laboring to pay taxes “found?” Or are we such captives of the superstition that progress equals acceleration that no project that promises faster travel can be questioned? Illich’s term “speed-stunned imagination” is still as appropriate as ever! Now that bonds are being used to pay for projects of this type (thanks to voter approval of Proposition 1-B last November), interest costs will double the number of minutes taxpayers must labor for projects to “save” minutes on the road. Many of the taxpayers who will labor longest to pay off these bonds are presently children, who have not been asked how much of their time they wish to donate to the construction of 12-lane freeways in Los Angeles.
Highway project costs are also inflating explosively, driven by rising costs of steel, concrete, asphalt, and energy. Since 2000, they have roughly doubled every 4 years.
Let’s face it: we are not going to build our way out of traffic congestion, and when it comes to creating traffic CONGESTION, hybrids and SUV’s are equal.
Short of some disaster that forces us to rebuild our communities from scratch, we are to some extent hostages of a built environment planned around the automobile and hostile to other modes of travel. What steps can we take to incrementally reduce the tyranny of the car and make living without one more feasible? How far can such steps eventually take us?
The changes we need to make are both in the collective realm of public policy and the personal realm of how each of us chooses to get around.
When it comes to public policy, we need to stop forcing those who are part of the solution to subsidize those who are part of the problem. This means, for example, that in your town, when a “smart growth” urban infill project is proposed, particularly as “affordable housing,” we need to vociferously challenge the illusion of free parking. When “parking requirements” are imposed on a downtown condo project, the cost of “needed” parking adds up to at least $25,000 a space, built into the cost of each unit. If sold for the same price whether the occupant drives or not, it essentially forces a low income non-driver to spend over a year working to purchase nothing more than a driving neighbor’s parking space. As long as this sort of injustice exists, “density” will not mean “smart growth” but CONGESTION, as more and more drivers are crammed closer together. True cost pricing would SELL parking rights separately, only to those who need them, with perhaps a modest collective contribution to a bit of visitor parking.
On the state level our Governor, who tries to sound green when he talks about more fuel-efficient cars (not the kind HE drives!) has steadily tried to shift the costs of driving to non-drivers. This needs to be frontally challenged from now on! His first act as governor was to cut the vehicle license fee by almost 2/3. This shifted the cost of fixing local roads from this driver-provided user fee to such inappropriate sources as school kids losing their music and art teachers and other cuts that were made with the pretense of balancing the budget thrown out-of-balance by this reckless act.
In backing Proposition 1-B, the Governor backed funding road repair, not by raising the gas tax, but by putting today’s youth in debt (with interest) for the next 30 years. Now he is proposing next year’s budget to raid State Transit Assistance Funds for deficit reduction and school buses. This is no favor to the schools, since they lose on the other end through recalculation of Prop 98 obligations, but it is a terrible disfavor to the students, many of whom depend on public transit in their non-school lives, and, in many cases, also to get to school.
Locally, our Council of Governments needs to keep Transportation Development Act funding, intended primarily for public transit (after a little is taken off the top for bikeways), from being used on roads, which, legally, can only happen if no unmet transit needs reasonable to meet are left unmet. (Sorry about the triple or quadruple negative -- this is the jargon the law puts in decision-makers’ mouths. If you want to witness these decisions being made, visit the new County Government Center at 8:30 on April 4th to see how they define “reasonable to meet.” I must state that the current Council of Governments board shows signs of being more responsive than some past ones; they have funded the continuation of regional Sunday service, and a pilot program for regional Saturday evening service, as well as expansion of weekday evening service within San Luis Obispo. Anyway, show up, watch and learn, and if so inclined, speak out!
In our personal lives, drivers can go car free in increasing doses like smokers trying to ease out of their habit. I wish more people could experience not just the inconvenience and struggle, but also the joy I find in being car free. I have made great friends on the bus and meeting people on foot; that is something drivers can’t accomplish in their swift bubbles. I have great conversations with elders and youth, who are disproportionately represented in the non-driving population, and see and hear far more animals than drivers ever do. (On foot, I never hear an awful thump and see a squashed one in a rear view mirror!) I feel part of a community bound together not by the rantings of talk radio but by the smiles and shared stories of fellow travelers.
I frankly don’t know how we will overcome the challenges of living in a built environment centered around the car, as the Age of Oil sputters downhill, but I do know that a critical prerequisite to any positive changes is the building of community, and being car free makes community-building far easier than it is from the seat of a car. Join me when you can!
Eric Greening is a tutor, musician (New World Baroque Orchestra; San Luis Klezmorim), and local government gadfly who does not drive. He serves on the Citizens’ Transprtation Advisory Committee, the Regional Transit Advisory Committee, and the Water Resources Advisory Committee. He treasures the face to face community of walkers and bus riders of which he is a part. He can be reached at jbarsman@charter.net.
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