B. Carfree

With gas prices at historic lows, Americans are returning to their living-room-sized vehicle ways again. Unfortunately, these behemoths take up so much space, both storage space and lane width, that they can squeeze other road users out and make car-free living less attractive by creating a perception of danger. Additionally, their high front end makes them much more lethal in any collision with a human being by making it more likely that their victims will be pushed under the wheels rather than being able to get on top of the situation.

I guess I'm not surprised. I'm disappointed, but not surprised. What's that P.T. Barnum quote?

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/science/cars-gas-global-warming.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-regionŽion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Rollfast

You live in wall to wall suburbialand, B. I was there in the early 80s and it's not much different all the way into Portland from around 30 miles or so out from the last time I drove the interstate around that way in 2000 something?


How many Honda Fits and CR-Vs are behemoths? Does this story correlate well to the Metro zone?

tandempower

When recession and high gas prices are fresh in their/our minds, we question the driving-dependency paradigm more and think about potential reforms, but as economic growth continues and money keeps flowing, people start to fall under the spell that their driving habit is sustainable because they have the money to sustain it for themselves personally. They forget that many other people are falling under the same spell and settling into a comfort zone of go-ahead-and-drive and that's going to lead to more congestion, road-network expansion pressures, and eventually fuel-price increases.

When there is recession and people are conserving money by avoiding driving trips, their minds start to think more about other possibilities besides driving. For most people in the US, this thought process is daunting because transit routes and schedules are challenging, to say the least, and how many people consider riding a bike further than a few miles, if that?

But when the money starts coming in, it starts to seem like driving is just the way things were always meant to be because the money is there to do it. Most people don't want to build more highways, widen roads, etc. but they just assume we've gone too far in the automotive direction to 'turn back' so they figure it's an inevitability. Those of us who keep telling them that not only haven't we gone too far to 'turn back,' we absolutely have to reform transportation to 'move forward,' are regarded as naive, crazy, or at best marginal.

A traffic engineer I spoke with recently told me that widespread transportation change is driven by power-source changes, meaning humans will choose whatever form of transportation gives them the most power/speed. This makes sense in an environment where congestion and sprawl aren't byproducts of power/speed. When I asked him what happens when congestion/sprawl are increasing travel times for powerful/fast vehicles, he said people build more roads and/or move to less congested areas. Since we met at a meeting to discuss highway expansion where the majority consensus was to avoid it, the question is how these two views are compatible, i.e. 1) seek out more speed on less congested roads and 2) prevent roads/highways from expanding into less congested areas.

It is sad that US culture has become so submissive to social normative imagery (in the media) of what people are supposed to look/dress like and how they're supposed to behave. If it weren't for these normative media images, US utilitarianism would easily motivate people to choose transportation biking over driving in areas where congestion inhibits the ability to drive. Unfortunately, however, the irony seems to be that as rural areas grow more (sub)urban, people/culture grows more conformist and thus the fear of deviating from driving as a normative standard of transportation prevents people from making a rational choice from a utilitarian perspective.

In rural areas, there are more people who would ride a bike if that was the rational way to get around, but because distances are long, it saves time to just drive. Then the irony is that city folks go to rural areas for a scenic cycling experience. What's really needed is for city people to just accept that biking and transit are the rational way to solve their congestion problems and begin adapting themselves and their business/consumer practices to those modes. It should just be simple logic that as an area infills to a certain level of density, bicycling and transit should replace driving as the popular mode of transportation. This doesn't happen because of social-cultural normativity.

People would argue that the distances are too great within the cities to make biking/transit convenient, but this is due to sprawl. Let's define sprawl as the expansion of a city beyond the size that would make it conveniently traversable by bike and/or transit. Obviously, the reason sprawl happens is because of social-cultural normativity of driving. So instead of an area reaching a density level where biking/transit would be more efficient than driving and people just switching modes, they maintain the driving paradigm and thus the area expands into unbikeable sprawl. So now instead of it just being a problem of social-cultural normativity and conformity, it has also become a problem of geography.

So whereas once upon a time, a free market of ideas would have eventually led people to adopt other modes of transportation besides driving, road/highway builders and sprawl-developers built the cities outward into prisons that would deter people from overweighing the choice to switch modes to avoid/reduce congestion. So now we're in the position of having to figure out ways to make sprawling areas traversable by bike and transit and preventing smaller areas from seeing larger, sprawling areas as models for bringing in more economic opportunity.

B. Carfree

Funny, I went for a 75 mile spin with my spouse on a tandem this morning and only rode fewer than 100 houses, and the majority of those were on a two mile stretch of a single street (I live in the center of town). Much of our area is devoid of suburban housing, though none of it is truly urban.

About the car types: Outside of PDX, the preferred vehicle is a light-duty (van, pick-up, SUV) and a great many of them are true behemoths. True to form, they almost always carry fewer people than my tandem, but consume immense amounts of public space.

KD5NRH

What gets me is the never-ending cycle of stupidity; people who want the biggest vehicle they can get, for the once a month or less that they actually need its capability. They complain about gas prices, but then when prices go down, they trade up to an even less efficient vehicle, then complain more when prices go back up. It seems to me that most of these people would be better served by a small trailer that even a Honda Accord should be able to pull so they can take the jet ski to the lake or the Harley to Sturgis. Then, they can leave the trailer at home the rest of the time and enjoy 35+MPG.

Personally, I want a car I can get to DFW in (70-150 miles each way, depending on what part) quickly and cheaply, with (usually) no more than one passenger and maybe 5 cubic feet of cargo. Once in a while, I'd like the ability to take and/or bring back considerably more. (Generally my bike, though bulk shopping at Sam's would be another nice benefit.) If Elio would also make a little 6x9' trailer (ideally, just big enough to carry a 4x8 sheet of plywood flat) matched up for their cars, I'd be saving my nickels for one already. Mount a double bike carrier in that, and you're all set for long range light touring (most of us can't afford to take a month or more off, so driving most of the interim distance can get a lot of the enjoyment of a multi-week tour into a long weekend) or whatever, and with an aero shell on the trailer, you should still be able to get 50-60 of the Elio's 79MPG efficiency.

Robert C

So far Elio is just vaourware. I was excited about it a couple of years ago; but there seems to be nothing there. As far as a basic vehicle and a trailer for those "big haul" projects, I did that for years.

This week I needed a pick-up. I went to u-haul and rented one for a couple of hours. It may seem expensive; but compared to keeping my own truck sitting around, it was a bargain.

KD5NRH

Yeah; if they'll get something to market, I want one, but the "next fall" every year has worn way thin. I still like the concept, though, and wish others would pick it up and run with it.

That's why I'd like something that can adapt; I rarely need to haul enough to really need a pickup, and wouldn't mind renting or borrowing for those times, but something more than a small car's normal capability would be nice when I just need to haul a couple sheets of plywood or a single item of furniture.

mconlonx

Tow hitch and a small trailer on a compact or sub compact car? This is what I'm planning to add to my Volvo C30...

In the meantime, good summer weather is here, so I'm commuting on my motorcycle, which gets about 45mpg.

One thing I did notice during the last gas hike was more people using motorcycles and scooters, especially the younger crowd. Millennialist are hopping on two wheeled motorized transport in far greater numbers than the previous generation.

mconlonx

Bike commuting is up over the past decade and will continue to grow. A transition to more sustainable culture will not happen overnight, or even perhaps in your lifetime. Paradigm shifts of the nature you talk about will take generations -- it took 100 years to get here, it could certainly take as long to wind down from here.

"Normative media images" is BS. Media reflects, it does not project.

Super high density cities, were everyone to move back to cycling distance from work, would bring with it a whole new set of issues, involving incredible levels of development to house and maintain a super-high density population. Storing that many bicycles, bicycle traffic, bicycle parking... Not to mention all the utility and transit upgrades. It's not impossible, but it won't happen quickly. Maybe it's happening now...

okane

I stopped reading the New York Times when I realized that half of what I read was outright propaganda or fantasy, and the other half was too highly questionable to be labeled anything else but drivel. The publication is a poster child for why fewer people than ever read or believe what the see in a newspaper.

tandempower

I disagree. There is a certain rationality to avoiding driving that many people just ignore because their minds are geared toward image-management instead of independent reason in decision making. The only way many people would think, "I don't care what it will look like; I'm going to just bike or take a bus instead of driving," is if someone they saw and admired on TV exhibited that attitude first. People are simply inhibited by boundaries of what they expect will be received in a socially-favorable way. I don't think this was the case some decades ago. Probably before radio, people made decisions more independently of social-cultural role-modeling through media. They might have taken into consideration what their family members or peers might think, but the norms weren't as clearly defined in terms of widespread imagery. It's a hard topic to nail down, though, because there's no way to keep historical records of what people were thinking in the past.

It is a mistake to think of cities changing so radically as LCF becomes more dominant. What's more likely is that we'd simply see traffic congestion decreasing and more local work, shopping, and recreational opportunities being created. Eventually, if traffic decreases enough, we could see outside lanes separated from motor-vehicle lanes by treed medians, but up to now 'road-narrowing' brings a public reaction akin to being choked to death.

Maybe more "super high density cities" like NYC will develop, but I think those will be the exception. I think most places will be the same as what we would call suburban sprawl today, except the sprawl will end up more bikeable/walkable, hopefully greener with more tree canopy, and more local work, shopping, and recreation.

There will be denser downtown areas, but they will not grow too dense because people will want to 'move to the burbs,' only the burbs will be biking distance away and the option to take transit will be more practical as well. How can such practically multimodal-scaled cities evolve from current levels of automotive sprawl? Answer: by local shopping centers evolving into mixed-use residential-commercial areas, which grow into downtown areas for their local surroundings, which are connected with other 'downtown' mixed-use areas of the larger municipality via transit and bike highways.

350htrr

Really? Have you watched, read, listened to much media lately? People are sheep and do as told, do as they see others do, and are programed by rhetoric/propaganda every day... As I see it anyways...

loky1179

I feel the same way. I was excited about Elio when I first heard about; now I'm pretty sure it is either a pipe dream, or a scam ala Eestor or Aptera.

It especially seems like a scam, because this HAS been done before, manufactured in my very own community! They had a reunion a couple years ago here; I saw a bunch of these drive by my house, still on the road 35 years later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_Vehicles_Free-way

These were produced without CAD/CAM, so it is hard to believe that something similar (and better) couldn't be produced today. But $2 / Gallon gas will not help.

Rollfast

You didn't see all their junk and kids in seats behind the likely tinted windows that a passenger in a car or truck tends to notice.

cooker

man, I get annoyed when journalists mindlessly repeat phrases like "electric and other zero-emission cars". No vehicle is zero emission. They're more accurately "displaced emission" vehicles because the emissions are being generated at the power plant and the battery factory and so on.

tandempower

When peak quantities of motor-vehicles per lane-mile increase to the point of noticeable congestion, they begin emitting a powerful herbicide known as 'bulldozers,' which leaves a barren stretch of land alongside the road where further emissions called 'hot oil tank trucks' cause asphalt deposits in the form of additional lanes to form.

Transportation cycling also results in these types of emissions and asphalt deposits, but the lane width is narrower and thus the herbicidal effect on trees and plants along the roads less severe.

mconlonx

It will still take a sea-change. What is portrayed by media will not change overnight and will be based on economic realities. Until and unless sustainability becomes profitable, it won't show up in MSM. Media will not change, "just because it's the right thing to do," they will react to popular and economic trends.

I see more and more local scenes flourishing, so it may be that the change you want is happening already, in early stages. It still won't happen quickly, likely until you are too old to care or dead.

The 'burbs will not be biking distance away. All real estate within biking distance of downtowns is already built out -- and this is what I'm talking about when talking about super-cities: those areas with merely high density, within cycling distance of downtowns will need to become super-high density to accommodate a non-motor vehicle commuting population.

Jobs are getting more decentralized, there is more tele-commuting going on than ever, but most companies, most jobs, still require physical attendance.

I think you vastly underestimate the scale of what you suggest as some kind of LCF, sustainable way of life.

cooker

lol

tandempower

This is why I said that conformity to media imagery undermines people's more innate ability to reason better choices. The media portrays lifestyles, both fictional and actual, full of new clothes and furniture, where people never sweat or get dirty, all because sponsors want to promote shopping for new items. As result, a sort of schizophrenia develops where people imagine their lifestyle choices exist separately from the negative consequences they experience in their lives, such as expansion of noisy, dirty motorways and poverty, war, etc. The media doesn't tell them the spending promoted to them is also the cause of the bad news that's shown in another segment. The aestheticism of the media is to present life as being separated into different time slots where the things happening in one time slot seem utterly separate from those happening in others.

I sort of cringe when you call it "the change you want" because the only reason I want it is because I have reasoned that it is good. If I didn't think in terms of adopting preferences according to the goodness of their consequences, I have no idea what I would want. Maybe and SUV and an expensive house in bedroom community far outside the city, who knows? All I really know is that making choices based on hedonism of what I want stopped satisfying me years ago. There's no peace in enjoying something if your conscience knows it's going to come back to bit you and/or your children('s children).

Already built out with what kinds of land-uses?

An arbitrary general statement. Too much of this sort of logic shapes the economy. People do things a certain way because they've been told, "that's the way things are done" without thinking hard enough about how to do it in a different way. It's a form of authoritarian mindset, albeit without a direct dictator; call it "decentralized authoritarian culture."

We'd have to be discussing a specific area or city to really know for sure; but if we decided to shift just one lane's worth of traffic to LCF in an area, the outer lane could be split and treed medians allowed to grow up on islands that would separate the bike lane from the other lanes. Small residential spaces (such as tiny houses) could be added to more commercial areas and commercial trailers added to residential areas to defer the need to drive to shopping areas. Plenty could be done to reduce traffic pretty quickly in this way, and then more permanent adaptations would evolve as the pattern persisted. The biggest obstacle would be all the (socialist) clamoring to bring back GDP-growth by eliminating the car-free reforms. They know darn well that they can generate more GDP growth by keeping people driving so they (ab)use democracy as a platform for pushing the automotivist agenda in the face of any reforms that take root.

mconlonx

Then you are bound to be disappointed. MSM will start portraying LCF in a more positive light when LCF becomes popular. So which comes first -- people going LCF or media portraying it in a better light? And what will change that media will get out of bed with current commercial endeavors and start with the LCF programming...?

Other people are fine with the status quo; still others think we should move in a direction 180deg from where you're at. It is "the change you want," because it's your reasoning behind it, as you present it here.

Mixed residential and commercial use. There are not many vacant lots around anymore, in areas bikeable to downtown.


And the solution is... what? Some other authority telling people what to do? "Common sense," and prevalent market economics are what brought us to where we are now. How is it authoritarian if people buy into it willingly, availing themselves of what they would claim is free will?

Do you have studies to back up your assertions? Economic impact statements for the kind of development you are suggesting? You want people to live in small boxes, shop in small boxes, and live small lives constrained to a local area. Not that it's inherently a bad idea, not that people could not avail themselves of travel and whatnot, just that I can't see you've yet outlined a reasonable transition from where we're at now, and where you see we should go, which is not financially and economically catastrophic.

I-Like-To-Bike

Genesis 1:31, eh?

tandempower

All I'm talking about is how people are currently being programmed. You want to jump ahead to defend against LCF programming without addressing the problem of mind-programming to begin with.

Relativizing reason helps nothing. All anyone can do is reason with the information they have and give fair consideration to ideas presented to them. If you reason that my reasoning is wrong and some other reasoning is better, please let me know so I can reason about it.

Yes, but what is going on inside the buildings? Some properties may be able to convert from commercial/industrial to residential or vice-versa. It's not that complicated.

It's authoritarian to say that "most jobs simply require physical attendance" without looking deeper into why they may or may not. Many of these jobs may just require attendance for the sake of creating social interaction among coworkers. If that's the only purpose of physical attendance at a job, what job wouldn't "require physical attendance?"

This is the same thing Mobile155 was saying in the economic thread that got moved to P&R. Like him, all you are doing with this is screaming against change as something threatening to a status quo you consider safe. If all you do is fight against change to protect status quo, what's the point of discussing solutions to existing problems?

Mobile 155

Old PT gets a bad rap that may not be deserved. "There's a sucker born every minute" is a phrase most likely spoken by David Hannum, in criticism of both P. T. Barnum, an American showman of the mid 1800s, and his customers. The phrase is often credited to Barnum himself.

But that isn't the thing you are pointing out.

I agree there should be no surprise that people keep going back to what they want when the conditions favor that return. It seems to be that we can't come up with a solution that deals with the problem of customer preference. How many of us remember when Mom and Dad had big station wagons and they would take a wagon load of kids on Sunday drives just t get out of the city? Not a good use of the vehicle but people liked the idea they could do such a thing. The bonus was you could tow a travel trailer or a utility trailer and do almost everything you could do with a Pickup truck.

Our leaders decided such vehicles were not good for us so they tried to get people to stop using them by making Fleet average fuel mileage a primary concern for auto-manufacturers. Because the government has such a hard time making rules that don't holes big enough to drive a truck through they left the door open for a work around. First the import market sky-rocketed and domestic sales sagged. That was till they came out with the minivan. In one felt swoop the holes were opened and people bought the things by the boat load. While mini vans captured the market small cars got bigger. If any remember the first Accords you might remember they would almost fit in a new Accord's trunk! (hyperbole intended)

Mini Vans were fine till we got a few higher paying jobs and the market found another big hole. This whole was the SUV. If you look at the high water mark of SUVs you will see they represented almost 50 percent of the market share at one time. 4 door pickups were a natural extension of SUVs.

What is my point? People want to feel like they are getting more for their money and look good while doing it. It doesn't matter if they more than likely would never go off road it only mattered that they looked like they could. Besides the mini van was now tied to soccer moms and small Sedans were for wimps. (at least that is how they talked around the water cooler.)

The problem is what people absolutely need doesn't fill the empty spot in the soul of what people want. If they could ever come up with a vehicle that was good for people and good on fuel whatever kind that might be and one that people wanted that filled that empty spot maybe there would be this big vehicle revolution every time gas drops. At least I would think.

mconlonx

People aren't programmed by media. Influenced, maybe, but not programmed.

No, I'm willing to consider reason and solutions, but you don't seem to be able to express how we get from here to there in any coherent, meaningful way. I'd accept an LCF world, just that what you describe doesn't make sense. I can't grasp a way of attaining this the way you are explaining it.

wolfchild

Backward trends ??...Isn't that the main goal of a few ( especially one particular) LCF poster ??...To go back in time and re-live the lifestyles of people from dark ages when everybody was just a brainless zombie living in an utopia ruled by religious hierarchy ??...I noticed certain individual is trying to weave in his religious dogmas into some of the threads as if to make everybody feel guilty for being born in this technological age and condemning people for enjoying the benefits of our modern technological advances.