By Curmudgeon
Paul Krugman's column in Monday's New York Times deals with how the US will eventually solve the problem of ever-escalating gas prices. From the column:
Any serious reduction in American driving will... mean changing how and where many of us live.Won't be easy. Many problems, like the transit chicken-and-egg problem:
To see what I’m talking about, consider where I am at the moment: in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood consisting mainly of four- or five-story apartment buildings, with easy access to public transit and plenty of local shopping.
It’s the kind of neighborhood in which people don’t have to drive a lot, but it’s also a kind of neighborhood that barely exists in America, even in big metropolitan areas. Greater Atlanta has roughly the same population as Greater Berlin — but Berlin is a city of trains, buses and bikes, while Atlanta is a city of cars, cars and cars.
And in the face of rising oil prices, which have left many Americans stranded in suburbia — utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas — it’s starting to look as if Berlin had the better idea.
Infrastructure is another problem. Public transit, in particular, faces a chicken-and-egg problem: it’s hard to justify transit systems unless there’s sufficient population density, yet it’s hard to persuade people to live in denser neighborhoods unless they come with the advantage of transit access.He points out that the probable solution, pretty much modeled on European lines, does not involve Americans giving up their cars, or driving tiny three-wheeled mini-cars. Most Europeans own cars that are fairly mid-sized [though many fewer families own more than one]. It's just that cars in Europe get much better mileage than comparable American cars, and that Europeans drive them much less. Which they can do because Europeans have invested much more heavily than we have [so far] in urban and sub-urban mass transit. Whole article is worth a read, as Ogden contemplates its transit future.
