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When the Segway was in stealth mode (c. 2001) and code-named Ginger, it was said to be "a new transportation device so revolutionary that it will force urban planners to redesign cities in its wake".
Well, that didn't quite pan out, did it? Cities were then and still largely are designed around cars. In fact, the idea of a beltway 10 miles out and single family homes on cul-de-sacs, and structured parking,and the enclosed suburban mall were among the many many ways in which "urban design" was redesigned to fit the car.
What made cars so powerful that we were willing to reshape our cities around them? To bulldoze pedestrian neighborhoods to create wider, faster, streets and call it "urban renewal"?
Atlantic maintainsthe car was a tool for balancing living, social (and I'd add, work) obligations. It was also a status symbol and a tool for self expression.
And it has basically been replaced by the smartphone in all those functions.
The smartphone is now the social-life-enabler that the cars were in a pre-telecom era. And state highway departments have been notorious for predicting ever-higher Vehicle Miles Traveled despite year after year of flat or falling VMT--which coincide to the introduction of the touch-screen smartphone.
And like spending on Radio was undimmed by the Great Depression, spending/adoption of smartphones continued unabated by the Great Recession.
The Atlantic (and others) show we've passed Peak Car (in the USA) and its still very much dawning on us what that entails.
But the Atlantic would say that it is the smartphone that is the technology that cities and people's housing choices are going to be redesigned around. Elsewhere we do see that somewhere in the mix of the iPhone's introduction and the Great Recession, young people stopped buying cars in the "expected" numbers and started riding bikes, trains, and buses in unprecedented numbers (and without social stigma).
In response, some transportation planners are starting to change their plans and budget allocations to reflect the fact that the cars are unlikely to ever be as dominant a mode as they were. Case in point: the State of Washington now officially forecasts that, as a state, they've past Peak Car.
PEAK CAR C. 2009
There's no surprises in the Atlantic article, its just laid out in a particularly compelling way. We see its implications everywhere:
1) The centrality of telecoms in many people's budgets (the big-ticket phone as status symbol, and the full-bandwidth plan)
2) The substitution of shared modes: Zipcar, Bus; and human modes (bike & walk); and record ridership on (most) rail systems (eg NYC Subway and Amtrak)
3) The fall in auto sales and single-family-home sales (which tend to be car dependent)
So then the interesting question is: is there a war on cars (and should there be)? I'm going to say, Yes and Yes. Cars are an inappropriate technology that our cities should no longer be designed around, just like horses were and streetcars were (for a time), and if you're on the wrong side of this trend, you're going to feel made-war-upon. So call it a war if you like.
Car-dependent will notice that ""the war situation has developed not necessarily to the Car's advantage" (to paraphrase Hirohito).
For car-owners, the change will be experienced as a loss: a loss of political unanimity in favor of cars, and a loss of facilities devoted to car's exclusive use. They will experience a loss in the same way that electric streetcars and bus lines did, pushed aside or torn up (partly at the hands of car-makers) during the car's 1920 - 1960 ascendancy.
The difference "this time" is that the car/car-less divide is a generational one, while the car/streetcar divide was more of a class divide (highly paid white collar and well-paid factory labor suburbanizers mostly won at the expense of immigrants and African Americans in the cities). And the medial and ad dollars (including car ads) made sure that the story of the car's ascendancy was portrayed as "a good thing".
So I'd say the war on streetcars and "peak streetcar" mostly went unremarked because it was being waged on the "ins" at the expense of the "outs", while the folks who stand to lose in the war on cars (prosperous, high-voting, suburbanites) are better-positioned politically to oppose some policies (at the state level) but not others (as urbanites redraw the lines within the cities to favor urban modes).
If you want to know what it looks like when a mode peaks, look at Peak Railroad in 1916 (at least in terms of rail system mileage). Trucks and public highways won at the expense of trains and private railroads starting after WWI. Over the 50 years that followed peak rail, we invented the suburbs, the interstate, and the shopping mall.
PEAK RAILROAD C. 1916
Peak Car is where Peak Rail was in, roughly, 1920.
Well, that didn't quite pan out, did it? Cities were then and still largely are designed around cars. In fact, the idea of a beltway 10 miles out and single family homes on cul-de-sacs, and structured parking,and the enclosed suburban mall were among the many many ways in which "urban design" was redesigned to fit the car.
What made cars so powerful that we were willing to reshape our cities around them? To bulldoze pedestrian neighborhoods to create wider, faster, streets and call it "urban renewal"?
Atlantic maintainsthe car was a tool for balancing living, social (and I'd add, work) obligations. It was also a status symbol and a tool for self expression.
And it has basically been replaced by the smartphone in all those functions.
The smartphone is now the social-life-enabler that the cars were in a pre-telecom era. And state highway departments have been notorious for predicting ever-higher Vehicle Miles Traveled despite year after year of flat or falling VMT--which coincide to the introduction of the touch-screen smartphone.
And like spending on Radio was undimmed by the Great Depression, spending/adoption of smartphones continued unabated by the Great Recession.
The Atlantic (and others) show we've passed Peak Car (in the USA) and its still very much dawning on us what that entails.
But the Atlantic would say that it is the smartphone that is the technology that cities and people's housing choices are going to be redesigned around. Elsewhere we do see that somewhere in the mix of the iPhone's introduction and the Great Recession, young people stopped buying cars in the "expected" numbers and started riding bikes, trains, and buses in unprecedented numbers (and without social stigma).
In response, some transportation planners are starting to change their plans and budget allocations to reflect the fact that the cars are unlikely to ever be as dominant a mode as they were. Case in point: the State of Washington now officially forecasts that, as a state, they've past Peak Car.
PEAK CAR C. 2009
There's no surprises in the Atlantic article, its just laid out in a particularly compelling way. We see its implications everywhere:
1) The centrality of telecoms in many people's budgets (the big-ticket phone as status symbol, and the full-bandwidth plan)
2) The substitution of shared modes: Zipcar, Bus; and human modes (bike & walk); and record ridership on (most) rail systems (eg NYC Subway and Amtrak)
3) The fall in auto sales and single-family-home sales (which tend to be car dependent)
So then the interesting question is: is there a war on cars (and should there be)? I'm going to say, Yes and Yes. Cars are an inappropriate technology that our cities should no longer be designed around, just like horses were and streetcars were (for a time), and if you're on the wrong side of this trend, you're going to feel made-war-upon. So call it a war if you like.
Car-dependent will notice that ""the war situation has developed not necessarily to the Car's advantage" (to paraphrase Hirohito).
For car-owners, the change will be experienced as a loss: a loss of political unanimity in favor of cars, and a loss of facilities devoted to car's exclusive use. They will experience a loss in the same way that electric streetcars and bus lines did, pushed aside or torn up (partly at the hands of car-makers) during the car's 1920 - 1960 ascendancy.
The difference "this time" is that the car/car-less divide is a generational one, while the car/streetcar divide was more of a class divide (highly paid white collar and well-paid factory labor suburbanizers mostly won at the expense of immigrants and African Americans in the cities). And the medial and ad dollars (including car ads) made sure that the story of the car's ascendancy was portrayed as "a good thing".
So I'd say the war on streetcars and "peak streetcar" mostly went unremarked because it was being waged on the "ins" at the expense of the "outs", while the folks who stand to lose in the war on cars (prosperous, high-voting, suburbanites) are better-positioned politically to oppose some policies (at the state level) but not others (as urbanites redraw the lines within the cities to favor urban modes).
If you want to know what it looks like when a mode peaks, look at Peak Railroad in 1916 (at least in terms of rail system mileage). Trucks and public highways won at the expense of trains and private railroads starting after WWI. Over the 50 years that followed peak rail, we invented the suburbs, the interstate, and the shopping mall.
PEAK RAILROAD C. 1916
Peak Car is where Peak Rail was in, roughly, 1920.
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