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Fritz, none of this is about what an individual prefers. It's about what we do with our limited public funds. We have spent trillions and trillions over the past 60 years to subsidize and encourage one living arrangment over another. It's also the most wasteful arrangement ever conceived in human history. Metaphorically, it's like having government subsidies so everyone can eat organic ice cream rather than a balanced diet. It's both fiscally wasteful and counterproductive.

While that might have once sustained our national economy between approximately 1950 and 1995, it clearly isn't anymore. One of the main untold stories behind the credit and housing bubble that popped last fall was that the tech and housing/credit bubbles inflated because the auto/highway building/car-dependent sprawl building economy had ceased generating positive returns. The bubbles were a collective attempt to pretend that nothing had changed. They were an attempt to fill the void. In the process, they attempted to sustian the unsustainable and made the situation worse. On top of that, it is contributing to a horrible environmental disaster.

We're past the point where an auto-centric living arrangment has gone onto the other side of the curve for the Law of Diminishing Returns. We can't just keep doing what we've been doing and pretend that all the bad consequences just aren't happening.

Much of this is generational. The younger set is not so attached to their cars for personal ego as the boomers and older. We equate cars with traffic jams, not freedom. My car is a handy tool that I use to go places where there isn't transit. It comes in handy if I go to a game at car-dependent FedEx Field. I don't use it if I go to RFK or Verizon Center though. It's not the right tool to get the job done in that case.

Cars don't have the same social meaning for our generation because everyone had access to them growing up. They were everywhere. For the older set, they were less ubiquitous when they were growing up and therefore indicative of a certain economic standing. Not so with us. No big deal.

Mr. Imhoffe is a dinosaur who can't see the meteor coming from above. The game is over. It's not 1962 anymore. We as a nation don't use the policies from 1962 for 2009, except in urban planning and transportation. Why should we keep using something that maybe sort of once worked (it didn't, just take a look at the health of our cities between 1960 and 2000 until we started getting a new generation of young people who want to live in a place where you see your neighbors) but clearly has jumped the shark and is now a huge millstone around our collective neck?

by Cavan on Aug 11, 2009 2:27 pm • link • report