Concrete Nation: All Paved Over With No Place to Go

[Thom Little]

I have seen the future . . . and it is hard-topped and held up in traffic. Tomorrowland is neither free nor mobile. Twenty-five years from now, as the number of cars equals or exceeds the population of everyone over 15, Americans face congestion from sea to shining sea -- or from shore to flooded shore. True, even in car-glutted 2030, mobility remains "Our Most Important Product," as the DuPont chemical folks described Progress in the heyday of the land-swallowing suburbs. But the 90-mile-an-hour romance of the road is not to be. The need for a ton of wheel and steel -- plus a 10-lane highway to get a bottle of milk -- has rendered Americans immobile.

As the nation's population grows -- or, rather, stalls -- through a new century, engulfed by vehicles and stuck in traffic, the automotive life has become a misery for the adults of the future. And forget about buying a third car for 16-year-old Junior, whose only means of independent travel is on the Internet. Worse still, the emissions from Junior's grandparents' cars, which contributed 25 percent of America's greenhouse gases to the atmosphere in the past century, have accelerated global warming, drowning the coastal and waterfront sites where half the nation's population once lived. As the waves begin to ripple through the petunia patches and cornfields, Junior and his parents are contemplating putting their 2030 house on stilts.

Happily, word has it that a counter-car culture of octogenarian hippies from the 1960s -- from pedestrian activists to scientists, harassed mothers and climatologists -- has come up with some alternatives to motorized entrapment. Under the new maxim of "feet first," they have rallied against the school sprawl that keeps children incarcerated in the car on long trips to and from mega-schools. They have promoted more sidewalks, so that the nascent movement of the Walking School Bus can allow young children to walk to school as they cling to a looped rope.

Meanwhile, planners reviving the "small is beautiful" thesis of the '60s have not only saved the Little Red Schoolhouse from extinction, but have established an alliance with the Committee on Counter-Culture Stoplights. Alarmed by the high-speed rates of "drive free or die" 20th-century motorists, they have striped pedestrian crossings onto countless roads and installed "Walk" . . . Don't Walk" lights on every corner, thus helping to reduce the highway death toll that had reached 42,000 a year in the previous century. Cheered by the advances, the Human Mobility Commission's new Placeway Over Raceway committee has managed to add bike paths and hand out bikes and Segway scooters. Other advocates of the Homing Sweet Homing society have also done their bit, renting out zip cars for sharing among neighbors who have lost their Chevys at the levee or in other coastal catastrophes.




http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/30/AR2005123001574.html

[htuttle]

1. "They took all the trees, and put 'em in a tree museum"

"And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them
No, no, no
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone
They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot"



Ya know -- all that concrete creates a whole separate micro-climate for the cities on top of it. Much hotter, and much drier.

[bemildred]

2. Yep, the "open road" just isn't what it used to be.

There is something about creeping along in traffic at 10MPH for two hours a day, at the cost of hundreds of dollars, with gas and insurance and maintenance and the cost of the vehicle, that really adjusts your attitude.

[Solo_in_MD]

3. Check out this shirt alng those lines.

Not sure is this is allowed, if not the mods will let me know (gently I hope).

http://www.aerostich.com/product.php?productid=16854&cat=290&page=1