Markets rally, people wait in line

Yesterday was a good day for the markets, according to the New York Times. Oil dipped below $120 a barrel, which is starting to seem like the ‘panic price’. The Dow was up 331 points at the end of the day.

This wavering roller coaster of oil and economy makes me even more interested in getting a price floor in place. And since it appears $120 is the panic price, maybe $100 or even $110 should be the tax floor. For more about that idea, you can read back a few posts.

Stabilizing energy prices would be a real long-term benefit to the economy, even if they remain high.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but wonder about the ingrained culture of gasoline and automobiles that is so deeply ingrained in our national phsyche.

An anecdotal example: today I went to McDonald’s for breakfast on my way to work. Yeah, I know. But I was there nonetheless.

I’m at the McDonald’s at Kirby and Westpark, and I pulled in from the side only to find that the drive-through line was about 10 cars deep.

“Forget this,” I said to myself, and I went inside. I walked straight up to the counter, ordered, and had my Sausage and Egg biscuit in about two minutes. I walked back outside, hopped in my car, and drove off.

Not the drive through I was being amused by, but similar.

Now, the reason I was amused by this, is that I kept track of the car that I would have pulled in behind, and it hadn’t pulled forward more than one car length in the entire time I was in and out of the building. Meanwhile, the line behind it had grown, now there were about 15 cars in the line, 3 of which were waiting in the right hand lane of Kirby!

I pull out of the parking lot, and as I’m getting out onto Kirby the last view I catch of this scenario shows 2 more cars patiently waiting on Kirby Dr. for a chance to be part of the drive-thru line at McDonald’s. Aren’t any of these people on their way to work? I mean, you’re going to be late guys!

This whole ordeal is a pretty good anecdotal illustration of how we as Americans are chained to the machine. So, so many people, (especially the kind who grew up in Houston hearing that it was the greatest city in the greatest state in the universe and never bothered to step out into the world and check to see if that was true) have never experienced any urban life whatsoever.

A little personal story:

I lived in Italy for about half a year. It was interesting, to say the least. In many ways it made me more grateful than ever to be an American, and it helped me to understand why so many people from around the world would walk away from all they know to be part of our culture.

But in one way, Italy had us beat. The small towns of Italy are by far better places to live than just about anything America has to offer. They may not have better jobs to offer, but that’s a macroeconomic issue. The fact is, though, that their quality of life is just on a whole different level from that of an American suburb. I think the biggest reason for this, is that they aren’t nearly as chained to the machine as we are.

Italians love cars. They LOVE cars. And in the smaller towns there are parking lots, garages, plenty of marked lanes… it’s not an anti-car zone. In fact, they allow cars in places we never would, like parked on the front steps of a church. For the most part, in Italy, if you can get your car there, you can leave your car there.

But in the daily life of an Italian, a car is just one way to get around. It’s not the best choice for every situation, and they don’t treat it as such. It’s not a birthright, or a rite-of-passage as it is in the US. They see cars as being very fun, very expensive, slightly dangerous machines. They see cars as offering a certain level of convenience for specific types of uses – and they use them for those things. (Going to the grocery store, for example, is much better with a car.)

The people sitting in the drive-thru line that is backing up down the street while nobody is sitting inside the restaurant illustrate the problem we in America have. We can’t get out.

So many people have never even considered using their feet to get around. It hasn’t ever even crossed their mind. “Walking is for exercise,” is the predominant cultural idea. People get in their car to drive from one side of a parking lot to the other. And who can blame them, it’s what their parents did, and it’s what we built our world for.

Before any energy policy is going to improve people’s quality of life, before any ammount of land use or transporation policy is going to reduce congestion, people have to culturally shift to a new state of mind, where the car is a utility device. The car is a transportation pod, and there are good things and bad things about it. It is not always the best way to get around, and it is heinously expensive to own and operate, period. No ammount of new technology will ever change that, in fact, it will most likely just keep making cars a bigger drain on your personal finances.

It’s hard to say if this cultural norm is shifting, or if it ever will, here in the US. In China it’s shifting the other way, hard.

Seaside, Florida

I think the only real way to help break this social mindset is to invest in building some ‘model’ communities that demonstrate the form of a traditional town, one where walking is sometimes the most efficient transportation choice, where quality of life is the highest design focus, and where cars are accomodated without dominating the landscape. Places like Seaside, Florida, offer a tiny glimpse of what such a model community could be. Washington DC is the best large urban example. We can build more places to demonstrate this, and we need them to be geographically distrubuted so that even the most provincial of people could see one in their geographically limited life.

The difference in my own thinking that living in Italy made was night and day. As I said, I came back with a profoundly increased understanding of why America is great. But I also came back with a realization that I didn’t need my car as much as I thought I did, and that, in fact, I felt a lot better when I thought of it as what it is: just a tool.

Comments are always welcome!