Slippery

The political greaseball known as CA's HSR (California's High Speed Rail) was hit with another down-turn of events yesterday when Fresno County Superviors voted to relinquish their support of the insider's gravy train.  The Business Journal, July 29, 2014, reported that the County Supervisors, in a 3-2 vote favored to terminate their support due to the misaligned agenda of the HSRA (high speed rail authority) that has strayed from what was promised to voters in 2008.

News Flash on the HSR

Oh, this is so easy to predict but, is nauseating.  There is a 12cent to 76cent tax coming to the gas pumps in California on January 1, 2015.  The politicans connected to building CA's HSR (high speed rail) will suddenly discover the missing $40billion in their distorted underfunded budget and gain approval to justify the political insiders to increase personal pocketbooks for their gravy train.

Social Impacts

Social Impacts of Automobile Centric Urban Growth

There are several areas of societal impacts relating to the automobile as the foundation of a society. The fundamental core in every urban population is transportation: how a person gets from one place to another.

The automobile was sold to the general public as a method of attaining independence.  By partaking in the feeling of independence, suburbia was created and progressed into uncontrollable sprawl.  One of the unforeseen aspects to this claim of freedom and independence was costs to its future.

Social isolationism 

In its proposition of independence, the automobile centric society evolved into a culture of social isolationism.  Standard procedure for people today is to get up from bed, walk outside to their car and drive to work with no social interactions.  Many people park in a parking lot, walk to an office and work an entire day without benefit of the interaction of close personal relationships and then drive home, lacking any relevant social interaction.   

The un-sustainability of the automobile reaches deep into an automobile based society.  The cultural implications of social isolationism and the myriad of health problems created by traffic congestion are yet to be fully investigated.

Prior to the automobile centric urban land-use design, Western Society had been building its urban growth upon the railroad and streetcars: a transit oriented land-use design.  That type of urban growth has characteristics of sustainability. 

The style of an automobile is created by designers.  Primary influences relevant to these designs are current trends in fashion.  Car sales are promoted by advertising agencies’ campaigns exclusively measured by fashion trends to encourage customer purchases.  While this is reasonable in business, its effects reach further than mere car sales in the automobile centric society. 

Every car manufactured can be visually ascertained to its decade of origination.  Further reaching implications of fashion can be seen in the patterns and styles of the tract housing built to accommodate automobile centric urban growth.  The houses built in the 1920s are different than those of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, etc., throughout newly built dwellings today; every decade can be visually distinguished in its style.

On the negative repercussions from fashion-only production in the automobile centric society is the consequence of worn out parts.  Trends in design no longer fashionable fade into a negative social enigma.  Outdated tract homes and strip malls no longer in vogue stimulate economic activity to newer growth centers of sprawl development.  The significance can be seen in every urban area that is several decades old. 

As clothing fashion styles change from season to season, the automobile and tract house styles make major shifts every decade.  Inasmuch as fashions quickly go out of date, each tract style becomes out of fad after a decade and a new tract house area becomes popular.  The nature of automobile centric society follows new trending patterns based on that era’s marketing popularity in cultural and sprawl development.

Building

Tract houses are designed by sprawl developers as fashion statements to maintain the status-quo of cyclic trends.  As the new areas are built-out over a decade, older areas are unable to compete with the newly created trend.  These older areas hold a lower real estate value and fall victim to loss of pride in ownership; often becoming lower maintained rental properties.  As they are beset by several decades, the mass produced quality of these deteriorated housing units are exposed to lower income and subsidized first time home buyers.  Economically these properties are higher loan risks with higher foreclosure rates. 

In the building industry, high quality home building in the sprawl sector of tract housing is treated as profanity.  Quick sales with high performance of speed in building quantity and low cost are the only goals of tract housing developers.  The prominent phrase dictated to the labor sector: “never look back” while preforming one’s particular industry trade routine.  This phrase means that a worker can not take the necessary time required to do high quality craftsmanship with the check and balances of one’s own work.  It is demanded of the worker to not look for mistakes and when flaws are found, the low contract bids don’t allow a sub-contractor time to look back but, only leave errors for someone else to take care of.  The rational in this methodology is that there isn’t enough money in the lowball bid process of high production to accommodate high quality.  The focus on tract housing is to generate profit through high quantity.  The designer warmth of security found in Styrofoam beams and faux stone are a psychological façade.  The absence of high quality craftsmanship and long lasting buildings in sprawl development is replaced by contracted fashion designers for the purpose of quick sales to create short term profit.   

As this short term profit making of poor quality building becomes problematic to future generations as the buildings deteriorate; is this a result of the automobile centric land-use design?  This is perhaps material for a philosophical discussion but, even if one might lean towards the answer of it having to do with the nature of greed in mankind taking advantage of one another and having little to do with a land-use issue, it is still a consequence of non-sustainability.

As a source of transportation, the automobile is only 100 years old.  There are no established measurements to quantify the effects of a society based upon this unsustainable foundation.  

Urban blight

In the Car Culture, urban blight is a corollary to automobile centric growth.  Urban blight is a process of cyclic design changes within the car culture.  Once these forgotten areas gather low value rental status, many properties are foreclosed and abandoned.  When abandoned properties are boarded up and chain linked fences become the norm, blight dominates the area.

One of the most accurate terms in identifying urban blight is visual hostility (the term from studies produced by Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Ph.D., Chair, UCLA Dept, of Urban Planning).  Properties with graffiti filled walls, busted windows, rolled razor wire wrapped chain link fences, and warzone landscaping deliver the presents of abused neighborhoods.  These abandoned and economically decayed, visually hostile neighborhoods are socially negative environments.  Psychological ramifications of people (children) forced to live in this economic decay are psychologically effected but, undocumented as to the source and consequent outcome of such psychological ingestion. 

There is some analysis from social science observing this environment and has established the “broken windows theory”.  (In March 1982 an article by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling titled "Broken Windows" appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. This theory considers a building with a few broken windows leading to an increase in more broken windows and crime.)   The primary discussion, however, of “broken windows” relates to crime and efforts for crime prevention.  This paper merely raises the point that the foundation of such environments is the nature of unsustainability with automobile centric urban growth.    

Another product of the unsustainable automobile centric land use is the social dysfunction of its human hostile design.  Detailing the importance sidewalks play in an urban environment, authors Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht in their book: Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space, approach the topic of social interactions in land-use design. 

The topic of social actions resulting from environmental conditions was introduced into the urban planning community in the 1960s by author Jane Jacobs.  There is currently some conversation within the urban planning community which discusses the importance of social interaction. (More about government intrusion and their failed attempts at social engineering; in other posts.)  

Author, Malcolm Gladwell, in his book: The Tipping Point makes the point: “Even the smallest and subtlest and most unexpected of factors can affect the way we act.”  Of social interaction with isolationism in the automobile centric society, this statement makes one ponder how the car culture can find sustainability. 

Economic Impacts

Economic Impacts of Automobile Centric Urban Growth

One of the major forces validating the visual aspects to the unsustainability of the automobile is economic.  There are extenuating repercussions seen over the past decades as the US has outsourced its manufacturing: an increase in a lack of jobs.  People without incomes reduce the overall GNP (gross national product).  Large numbers of unemployed people lowers the size of the middle class in the US.  While this paper isn’t written to editorialize or make political comments, there is a point to be made about how local economies are made successful and prosperous.

Micro economics research shows that one dollar will turn over within a local economy 60 times.  To explain: a farmer purchases his equipment from a local hardware store.  The hardware store purchases the products he sells from a local manufacture.  The farmer sells his products to the grocer.  The local manufacturer and his employees purchase goods that the farmer produces from the grocer.  On and on it goes but, the dollar remains locally traded.  The dollar represents work traded.

In an automobile centric society, the automobile immediately removes that dollar from its ability to be circulated within a local community.

As an illustration to the economic loss in an average automobile centric community; in the middle of California, Fresno County is a farming region with a total population of less than one million.  It consumes roughly 500,000 gallons of gasoline per day, Fresno County, like most Western Culture suffers from its automobile centric land-use urban growth design.  Economically, Fresno was once a financially prosperous region but, now is filled with economic poverty.  Every day with the pump price of gasoline at $4 per gallon, Fresno County loses $2,000,000 out of its local economy that would otherwise be kept locally traded.

Where does that money go?  The US consumes 8.77million barrels (42 gallons per barrel) of gasoline per day.  At 368.51 million gallons per day, the US is roughly 1/3 of world consumption.

A rise of $10 per barrel, from $90 to $100 per barrel, world consumption added $1billion per day income increase to the producers.

The automobile centric society is addicted to oil.  It is economically unsustainable as well as environmentally unstable.

In 2007 there was an economic downturn.  The economy had been flourishing, bank credit was easy to attain and the housing market had seen a tremendous burst in real estate equity increase.  One seriously forgotten economic component is that crude oil was sold at $90 per barrel.  During the same time that the housing bubble was increasing, crude oil skyrocketed to $140 per barrel.  The pump price for gasoline increased 40% within weeks.  People who had just remortgaged or purchased new homes didn’t budget a gigantic fuel increase as well as the immediate inflationary costs attributed to reflect added shipping costs pushed onto the market.

It is all part of the consequences from the nature of an automobile centric society.

The history of America’s Old West is full of colorful pictures taming the wild.  The more accurate analysis shows that the US was built on the rail roads as its primary source of transportation.  The history of each metropolitan area shows that the United States was established with a transit oriented urban growth land-use design.  This type of urban development design is far more sustainable than what the West has separated itself into with the automobile centric land-use design.

There are culprit entities that killed small communities by severing the rail component from the transit design.  This effectively terminated economic survival but, it did allow access and the land-use development of outlying areas.

In 1935, a political move lobbied for federal legislation which was passed as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal.  It rendered it illegal for a power company to also own and operate a transit system (local trolley street car service).  At that point in time nearly every metropolitan area had a public street car system that was privately owned and operated (generally owned by the regional power company).  GM (which manufactured buses), Standard Oil of California (fuel for the buses), Firestone Tire, and Philips Petroleum (fuel) structured a joint venture organization and provided equity to National Cities Lines which purchased over 100 transit systems throughout the US and shut down most of the street cars, selling steel rails as scrap.  The manufacturing of buses brought profit to GM, the operations and maintenance of the busing systems brought profit to Standard Oil, Firestone and Philips Petroleum as bussing became products of government subsidies.  National Cities Lines, was eventually convicted of conspiracy.  Again the automobile centric land-use design in regards to public transportation is economically unsustainable with the failed government operated bus industry that continues.

Previously (pre 1935­) every transit company was privately owned, had to purchase its rights-of-ways property, build the system, purchase rails and rail cars, build and maintain the line of its operations and maintenance, carry its own liabilities and make a profit.  Conversely, the automobile industry manufactures a vehicle; does not have to provide rights-of-ways, was not required to provide any guarantees, carried no user liabilities, provides no fuel and has no added maintenance expense.  Its right-of-ways become the burden of its consumer.

Cost of where to operate a vehicle became the burden at the cost of the general public.  The automobile centric design benefits the car manufacturer at the cost and burden of all others.  Other examples of this type of benefiting at the cost and burden of everyone else are extremely rare in business.  The foundation of this industry could conceptually be considered morally irresponsible and, again the automobile centric society is economically unsustainable.

Other aspects from the automobile centric society’s economic decimation are seen in an area’s gross economic output.  In 2009, traffic congestion cost American’s 79million hours and 3.9billion gallons of fuel for a combined $113billion loss. (http://drivesteady.com/how-much-money-and-time-is-wasted-in-traffic)

A community's economic strength is found in areas of concentrated commerce. Automobile centric design communities separate communities and isolate people.

Wholly owned local businesses keep profits within a community. Localized sales of imported gasoline and large box stores owned by out of the area entities cause an economic extraction of otherwise locally distributed dollars. The combination has shown negative effects to be economically unsustainable.

When the origin of Western society was built, the urban design was transit oriented. Commerce cores were town centers which encouraged higher density and vertical urban growth. Today, the automobile centric urban growth has caused those original transit oriented designs to loose functionality.

Since the 1930’s, urban growth in the US has altered its original transit oriented developmental planning design from train and street car orientation to what it is today: a conglomeration of unsustainable urban sprawl based on automobile oriented development.

Revitalization efforts for downtown areas that include a mobility component (streetcars) designed to carry large numbers of people easily around the entire downtown area quickly have served to reinstitute the function of their original transit oriented designs. These revitalization efforts allow these downtowns to once again maintain positions as regional financial hubs of commerce. These reinstituted designs revitalize the original transit oriented growth patterns.

Electric streetcars are no longer a new technology but, are much more sustainable as a mode of transportation than the automobile for city environments. There are, however, extremely efficient new technologies available for mass transit which are completely sustainable. A cognizant and morally responsible government would seek out ways to implement this sustainable technology.