Cars

You come out in the morning to see a bright and shiny finely designed, streamlined machine. You click your remote and the machine responds with a flash of the lights that signals the vehicle is now accessible for your entry. You get into a finely sculpted seat that is adjusted to provide you maximized personal comfort. As you start the vehicle and move out on the road, the interior is warming or cooling to the temperature you choose. If you decide against the private quietude, you can choose to listen to a Bach cantata, the controlled chaos of Monk or "Bird", the latest in pop, the news of your choice, literally whatever you desire. Meanwhile, you are speeding along to your destination. You have no doubts of that because your machine will tell you where you are at all times, will tell you how to get where you need to go, and, if you need any further help, will, with a puch of a button, connect you with a live person. Whether you are going 5 miles or 500, you know that you will likely get there in perfect comfort and safety.

Is there any techno experience that is anywhere near as cool as your car? Many of us don’t have all the finer accoutrements mentioned above, but the same basic potential is there. We love our cars because they get us where we want to go whenever we want to get there, rain or shine.

I grew up in the 50’s, the dawn of the great age of cars. Cars all look the same to me now, but back then, we were enthralled with each new model. I can still tell you the make and model of most any car produced between 1952 and 1960. They went from frumpy rounded waddling hulks to these space age dream machines with fins, chrome, and lights popping out anew from one year to the next. No pretenses here; the changes were completely visual, and we loved it and bought them even though they were mostly the same mechanically,…and they still waddled.

Before we had cars, it didn’t make much sense to live miles away from where we needed to go everyday, unless we were near a trolley, subway, or bus line. The land use pattern of the suburb, which is what we have here on Vashon, is entirely a creation based on the automobile. Cities that experienced their primary growth in the age of the auto, like Los Angeles or Seattle, are particularly hard to serve with mass transit because the housing is so spread out. Whereas it is reasonable to get along without a car in Boston, New York, or even San Francisco, only the truly persevering will rely completely on mass transit in Seattle, much less Vashon. As green as a lot of us would like to be, love and necessity tie us to our cars.

What are the alternatives? Our 

suburban layout makes it uneconomical to run bus routes everywhere people would need them; Metro has dabbled with that and gave it up. So, we can find more efficient ways to go where we go now, and we can locate ourselves closer to the places we go. I think that we will need to do both.

We can increase efficiency rapidly by giving up "being inside" our vehicle. Bicycles, regular or power assisted, are an obvious starter. All sorts of scooters and small motorbikes get vastly more mpg. than any car and will carry most small loads that we now use our cars for. More elegant and more comfortable is getting more people in fewer vehicles. We can all start carpooling immediately. Talk to your neighbors about sharing rides to town. If you are going, why not call to see if anyone else needs to go, or if you can pick something up for them? This only works if everybody reciprocates; most will.

A ride share taxi could be an income producer for a lot of people. I looked at a website from Wisconsin describing ride share taxis in a number of rural towns. They will line up called in requests for rides so that they can carry other riders along the same route; kind of like a very small flexible route bus. We could also institutionalize hitch hiking. All of these alternatives mean we will need to be a lot more familiar with our fellow Vashonites. There is nothing really new here; it is the way people always lived before we had cars.

We could decide to change the housing pattern on Vashon; move houses together in villages or near potential bus routes. This is a long-term solution, and is really the one that gets to the core of the problem. The car based suburb plan was great when gas was cheap, resources plentiful, and we weren’t worried about our carbon footprint. I think it was a mistake, and we will eventually have to abandon it. People will still live in the "boonies" but they will have to accept the higher costs of longer travel.

I don’t expect that a lot of people will share my vision. It’s a big change from the present. I know how much we like our mobility, and I expect that I will touch some nerves. As objectionable as it may feel, I think that a discussion needs to happen; anything we can do now to cut down on our travel miles is a good investment. 
Comments,
terry@vashonloop.com