Getting Around- Transport and Mobility
This is the introduction to week five of the Powerdown Toolkit 10-week community learning course created by the Cultivate Center in Dublin. It has an accompanying TV show with a 30-minute episode accompanying each week of the course, soon to be aired on Dublin Community TV.
According to Ivan Illich { Illich, I. Tools for Conviviality 1973}, a society that travels faster than a bicycle is actually going slower than a bicycle- by the time you have counted all the road construction, repairs, disposal of used cars, mining of metals and of course the consumption of oil for fuel, as a population we may not be traveling very fast at all.
The domination of the private motor car has been an essential feature of the rise of industrial society. As described in the Peak Oil cult documentary The End of Suburbia, the oil industry developed in the early part of the 20th Century by systematically dismantling convivial mass transport systems such as trams in order to sell more oil. Early assembly line production was introduced first to mass-produce private cars. The development of new urban areas in many American cities followed patterns suitable to the private car: long stretched out suburbs with relatively low population density making them unsuitable for public transport.
The motor car became a potent symbol of the American Dream, the driving license an essential rite of passage for teenagers growing up from the 1950s onwards, and marketing agencies still evoke our primeval urge for adventure and crossing new frontiers to sell the latest model car: how ironic that for much of the time, especially in the more crowded European cities, our powerful 2- and 3-liter Sport Utility Vehicles are as far from the rugged terrains of the TV commercials as it is possible to get, crawling along at 10-15 miles and our in city traffic.
The older cities of Europe tend to be of a more walkable scale, with many plazas and public areas amenable to the pedestrian and cyclist, but often are still clogged and polluted with traffic.
Response
Reducing energy supplies will mean we will be less mobile in the future. Cheap foreign holidays will be a thing of the past, and air transport may become the preserve of only the very rich in just a few years. This is one of the areas in which changes brought about by Peak Oil will be very jarring for some: many grandparents have grandchildren on the other side of the world and will find it increasingly difficult to stay in touch. This is what George Monbiot has referred to “Love Miles”. {Monbiot, G. Heat- How to Stop the Planet Burning 2006}
Climate change also demands that we reduce our air miles: greenhouse gas emissions from air travel increased 70% from 1990-2002 making it one of the fastest growing sectors.
In terms of personal transport, the main issue is of relative location: we need to live closer to our work places, and design more integrated living/working environments. We need to move away from dependence of the private car, and begin walking and cycling, and using public transport. Even horses may come to play an increasingly important transport role in some locations in the future.
David Holmgren has outlined some of the ways the suburbs could be retrofitted by adapting the existing resources and infrastructure to make them more suited for home food production and mixed living and working spaces.
One of the forms of transport that has not been given so much attention is water transport: in many areas, canals were of tremendous importance in the pre-industrial areas and could be again
{Wilson, A. Steaming into the Future, the Case for re-opening the Canals Sustainability Magazine vol. 3 }
Pat Murphy {Murphy, P. Plan C 2008} suggests that the energy savings from much conventional mass transit may be highly overrated and that using the existing infrastructure of private vehicle fleets in a “smart jitney” system may be much quicker to implement and more efficient:
This involves a system of licensed private taxis and sophisticated software systems to link jitneys and passengers. In reality, as energy constraints bite harder in the next few years and decades, many low-energy transport solutions will be improvised and ad hoc, as happened in Cuba during their “special period” when huge buses pulled by truck engines were fabricated in machine workshops. These were called “Camels”. Murphy says of today’s Cuban transport that it is “fascinating, eclectic and difficult.”
We may need to prepare for similar arrangements here in the future.
In the early days of communal living c. 1972 at The Farm in Tennessee we pre-figured the Cuban special period and reached many of the same conclusions. A bicycle shop is necessary kit for any village, and in addition to cobbling together spare bits to make new bikes, can also make handcarts, pony and goat carts, and wheeled vehicles for a variety of specialized applications. These are still good days to be in-gathering the detritus of consumer society, and used bike parts, ball bearings, and machined bits with no apparent use now may prove invaluable later.