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Sunday, June 29, 2008
“Too far” isn’t as far as it used to be
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As AJC reporter Ariel Hart documents, MARTA train ridership is up 15 percent from a year ago. Toll traffic on Ga. 400 is down 5 percent from a year ago. Ridership on express bus systems is up 67 percent from a year ago. Nationwide, we drove 11 billion miles fewer in March than a year earlier.
And as The New York Times notes, $4 gasoline may be sending teen-age cruising the way of the hula hoop or phone-booth packing.
But the real transformation will come as a result to changes in our sense of geography, more specifically our sense of how far is “too far”. How far is too far to commute to work everyday? How far is too far to drive to go shopping or to the movie? That’s changing very quickly. It’s pretty astonishing, in fact.
That’s how energy-saving starts to become embedded in our economy. As our definition of “too far” changes, the way we arrange ourselves on the landscape will change with it. Commercial and residential development will cluster at rail and transit stations, not at highway exits. Metropolitan areas will become more compact and dense — real estate in outer suburbs is already falling in value much more quickly than in areas closer to the core. As we balk at driving long distances for goods and services, businesses will respond with smaller, more numerous stores.
A lot of those changes have been advocated by city planners and architects for years, to little or no effect. Oil at $140 a barrel has proved for more convincing.
