Back to the 30’s? Recent speculation about the oil supply situation has left me wondering : could American society adapt to the lifestyle of the 1930’s? ( before we had interstate highways, multi-car families, and long commutes to work) ? I think the “modern” American lifestyle began just after WWII-when the interstate highway system was built-suddenly, we had new suburbs which were miles from the old city centers. Cheap gasoline made it feasible to live in these places, never mind the teenage angst and boredom that went with life in the ‘burbs.
Anyway, the migration to the suburbs had vast effects (many of them bad)-large parts of city centers became slums and were abandoned, housewives went nuts (social isolation in the suburbs), and large areas of the country were paved over.
So, could we go back to the 1930’s lifestyle? (Living near a streetcar line, high density housing, no cars, an occasional trip to the country)? Or would people rebel against such an energy-saving lifestyle? I remember my grandfather-he commuted to work on the streetcars-it would take him 1 ½ hours each way! And grocery shopping-you would do it every day-so you didn’t have a lot of stuff to carry at one time.
There are plenty of people who drive their car to commute for an hour and a half or longer each way now.
Take another look at history.
The whole reason streetcars came about in the first place (not the 1930s, but the 1870s-1880s) was that people were trying to get out of high-density central areas and into single-family housing. The whole reason that streetcars failed was because as soon as a family got a car, they never wanted to take a streetcar again.
There was plenty of teen angst and socially isolated living when people were living in two-room, 3rd floor walk-ups. (Consider the play Dead End, written in 1934, not to mention the social work of Jane Adams in the late 19th Century.)
Also, in 1930, the U.S. population was 123 million. Today it’s greater than 300 million. The population density of Manhattan was almost 114,000 people per square mile in 1910. Today it’s about 67,000. In Chicago, population density is around 13,000 per square mile today compared to about 17,000 as late as 1950.
Try to cram today’s population into the urban centers of the first half of the 20th century and you’re talking third-world style population densities, with the problems that brings.
What are they going to do? Marching in the streets won’t put any more oil in the ground.
If expensive oil is here to stay we’re going to see some big demographic shifts in the U.S. over the next thirty years … as big as the explosion of the suburbs was in the post-war era.
People have gotten used to thinking of mass transit and higher densities as though they’re part of some sort of liberal nanny plan to make us all more virtuous. They’re like eating a high fiber diet: Alll good citizens should have healthy colons, wear natural fibers, and ride the bus! The thing is, most Americans won’t do something just because they’re scolded about it. And since we’re used to being scolded about driving our cars too much, we tend to think that we’re going to stick to our ways come hell or high water.
But economics isn’t scolding. The oil’s gonna run out. That’s a hard brutal fact. And when it does the suburbs will empty out and the trolley lines will start running. Not because it’s the virtuous thing to do. But because most people will want to live a decent life without spending a quarter of their paycheck on gasoline.
I think you have a very skewed perspective of what “the suburbs” actually means. Plenty of suburbs have grown in size and services that they are now self sufficent. I don’t have to go into “the city” to get stuff, I can just stay in the suburbs.
And I’m definitely unsure of where you’re getting this life of teenage angst and boredom from. Again, any decently-sized suburb has things to do for people, teenagers included.
Why are you assuming that, under those circumstances, we will still have the resources and organization to build new mass-transit systems, or otherwise facilitate a smooth transition to the new conditions?
Many envision a much more distressed and disrupted post-peak-oil environment. “Apocalyptic” is not too strong a word. See this review.
No gasoline doesn’t mean no cars. Consider that people keep driving cars in Europe and Japan where petrol is TWICE as expensive as in the US even now. At some point first hybrids are going to be cheaper to own and operate than a conventional car, then some form of all-electric car. It will probably be more expensive then in the days of cheap oil, but I don’t see cars vanishing. They’re simply too handy, and you can bet your gonads billions will be sunk into making electric cars better performing and more affordable.
The question is will we be able to afford the same car/freeway culture that’s been the American standard for the past 50 years, and the answer may well be no. Not living in a suburban housing development with your job twenty miles away in one direction and the big-box superstore you shop at twenty miles in the other direction.
For the past decade or so, you have seen the rebirth of American cities. Most recently, the housing markets in urban areas have been spared a lot of the fallout of the crash that the rest of the country has experienced.
I recently read an article (I believe it was in the NYTimes, but I can’t seem to find the link) that cited a survey that a full 1/3 of homebuyers in the suburbs would rather buy in cities, but couldn’t affort do do so. The market will catch up to that kind of pressure and start to produce more housing in cities for people who want to do so.
I’ve always said that I think higher gas prices will be a net gain for America. We have an addiction to oil and the sooner we start the painful process of changing the way we live, the better.
We’re not going to return to the 1930’s lifestyle even if transportation does get much more expensive. We have incredible communications networks that we didn’t have then. Many people won’t need to move closer to their jobs because they won’t need to travel to their jobs in order to work. Let’s face it, many jobs could be done just as well in a home office as they can be in the main office.
I work in an office building, but most of the time I want to communicate with someone, even someone only 20 feet away, I use email, IM, or the telephone. It’s simply faster and easier. Several of my coworkers are already telecommuting, and that trend is only going to grow.
Not to hijack the thread, but ‘many’ believe a lot of ridiculous stuff. Peak-Oil (‘Apocalyptic’ version) is like the 9/11 CTs about how the government did it. The vast majority of experts don’t buy the apocalyptic chicken little version that we are all doomed, civilization will collapse, dogs and cats will live together, etc etc.
Pretty much what Pochacco said, though I disagree with the ‘oil’s gonna run out’ part. Oil will gradually become more and more expensive, and socially it may become more and more unacceptable…but oil will never run out completely. It will simply become either too economically or socially costly to continue to use as a personal transport fuel (well, say in an ICE anyway) and will eventually be superseded by some other technology.
Personally I don’t think we’ll need to go back to high population density cities and abandon the suburbs, etc etc, as I think the market will produce various alternatives to our current personal transport system…but as Pochacco said if we DO go back to city centers it will be because of the same forces that let us spread out in the first place.
-XT
We need a Godwin corollary … what do we call it when, instead of comparing stuff to Nazi Germany, someone compares it to 9/11 conspiracy theorists?
Toadspittle’s corollary, I guess:
As any Internet discussion begun after 2001 grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving 9/11 conspiracies approaches one.
Satisfied?
Well, you could call it an analogy I guess…
-XT
I’m game if it means we get zoot suits!
We create a lot of market distortions and incentivize towards sprawl and car ownership. For example, most people don’t pay directly to drive on streets, car pollution is to a large extent externalized, and things like parking are often free. So, that means the true cost of car ownership is diffuse and for a lot of people it’s subsidized.
Add to that the tax break people get for mortgages. Since we don’t give a similar tax break for renting, that incentivizes people towards home ownership, which again can incentivize towards sprawl, depending on the circumstances.
And on top of that, we place a lot of restrictions on development, such as minimum lot sizes, multi-family restrictions, set back requirements, etc., that again push the market towards sprawl.
It’s a tautology to say we have sprawl because that’s the way people like it. Obviously, we elected the government that is creating these distortions. And given these distortions, the rational choice tends towards sprawl. But if the market were structured differently, it could lead to denser living, particularly if we decided to subsidize mass transit to the same extent we subsidize individual transit.
You know, XT, I don’t mean to pick on you, but I see you make this type of argument a lot, and I think these arguments can have the effect of turning people off capitalism. A market always has a structure, incentives, disincentives and rules, no matter how lax the government presence is, and you have to analyze an existing market as it is currently structured. Simply saying that “market forces” will do something without analyzing the current structure isn’t meaningful, and if, and when, the predictions don’t pan out, that’s fodder for people to point at capitalism and say it doesn’t work.
Even in an ideal market, there are huge problems with getting individuals to switch to some new alternative system of transport. But we don’t even live in an ideal market, we live in one that heavily distorts in favor of gasoline and ethanol usage and individual transport. Given that, it’s not clear that the “market” will produce a solution.
I am not a economist by any stretch of the imagination, and as an Architect I know we have come up with plenty of pollyanna ideas about what people will do if we only made things ‘better’ for them, etc.
But in my opinion the bottom line is that if it is cheaper then people will move towards that position. If the net result is that it costs me $20 to get to work and you find a way to get me there for $2 most people would seriously consider the migration to your alternate transportation. Bus ridership is up, I see many more motorcycles and bicycles on the way to work, etc.
My simple understanding of the market is that if there is a way to make money on a situation, some bright kid who wants to make a buck will find a solution. I have already told my daughter she should figure out a way to run a car on seawater and she would be rich 
Once again, suburbanization (or as you call it, sprawl) began before the invention of the automobile or the enactment of the 16th Amendment. Whatever distortions you want to attribute to government came as a response to market demand.
Government-induced distortions are not a result of market demand. Government-induced distortions are the result of political demand. That’s not necessarily the same thing.
But hey. If you want to pretend that government created distortions don’t have an effect on the way we live, knock yourself out. That flies in the face of all capitalist economic theory, though.
No, that’s not how markets work. If the infrastructure build-out for your seawater cars is too expensive, than people won’t switch over. And it could be too expensive relative to gasoline for any number of reasons, one of which is that we subsidize gasoline usage. There’s a lot of scenarios under which your seawater car can fail to get to market in any significant way, and all of it depends on various costs associated with building infrastructure. Obviously we have no idea how those costs would shake out, but, again, given that we distort the market in favor of gasoline (and ethanol), we’ve created an uphill battle to transition to new transportation systems.