Les Bonnes Choses

I was reading this article on Wired the other day, which was timely because it touches on a number of things that bug me about North America.

I tried to find some clips of the 1950's future of transportation spots that I think coincide nicely with where it really started to get out of hand. Disney seems to have been pretty diligent at keeping them off youtube. Some marketers got the funny idea in their heads that people would just love to take a nice long ride in their convertible to their nice suburban home in a quiet neighbourhood of well-manicured lawns. Urban planners must have seen these films because they went kind of nuts designing sprawling cities with miles of concrete to link all these neighbourhoods. (North America was born on the notion of land ownership - much to the chagrin of the aboriginal people who lived here before us - which I think is why we use land so inefficiently). So from about midway through 20th century, North America has been designed around the car. Most people are effectively obligated to own a car because there's no other practical way to get to work, do groceries for your family, etc. (it takes me 40 minutes by bus to get from home to the school; it takes me 25 minutes door-to-door by bike).

And so our economy revolves around the automobile in so many ways: oil is a big one, and we'll even go to war for it; 1 in 7 jobs are tied to the automobile industry; every kilometer of asphalt has to be maintained with taxpayer dollars as do the sewers and water delivery pipes that follow all those roads to newly developed suburbs. Not only do sewers crumble, but water pipes are not actually water tight, and I learned from a former neighbour who worked with a regional utilities managing company that something like 25% of the water pumped in from the lakes actually leaks out into the ground as it flows through those pipes: longer pipes mean more leakage.

So I'm somewhat ambivalent about the situation that car manufacturers find themselves in lately. On one hand, unless cities were radically redesigned, we're still screwed without them. On the other hand, for the reasons I outlined above, I think 'good riddance'. That's why I want my own planet. I think this one is a do-over.