c. 2008 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) I just made my first travel plans dictated by rising fuel costs.
I had set aside $1,000 to fly three of us from New York to Indianapolis over Memorial Day weekend for the annual Indy 500. Thanks to dwindling competition and surging costs for jet fuel, the airfare tab was going to be nearly twice that.
I looked at flying out of Philadelphia, but a costly train fare made that no bargain. I looked into driving the 700 miles each way, but when I did the financial math at $4-a-gallon gasoline, and the human-cost math of navigating Interstate highways for 12 hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic, I realized yesterday’s “romance of the road” has been buried in the crush of a 300-million-person nation.
I finally found a reasonable itinerary _ fly to Kentucky and drive two hours _ but even then, I am spending my vacation budget mainly on travel, leaving little for Indianapolis or souvenirs at the Speedway. What transportation takes, something else has to give.
I found this milestone disconcerting.
Ready and cheap mobility has been a fixture of American life, an entitlement alongside clean air and potable water. Sure, Europeans had better rail systems, but we could go anywhere we wanted. We could take 1,000-mile sidetrips just because the open road beckoned. An entire nation has felt within reach, from artists’ colonies in New Mexico to lakefront cottages in Minnesota.
Yet now leisure air travel collides with soaring fares. Casual driving, even the epochal “road trip” that defined coming-of-age in America, faces gasoline moving inexorably to $10 a gallon and sagging middle-class incomes.
Having sold our two cars in moving to New York and reoriented our lives to walking and subways, I realize that the new freedom is freedom from the automobile, not freedom conferred by the automobile.
Even though America is a vast nation filled with interesting places to visit and to live, I anticipate a future in which automobiles play little part. So, apparently, do many others, as young graduates flock to destination cities like New York and Boston that are defined by promising employment and reliable mass transit.
Cities that resisted light-rail for short-sighted anti-change reasons now look foolish. Real estate values in outlying suburbs are plunging, as a new generation of young families prefers proximity to mass transit, not safety behind gates or living near good schools.
In recent business forays outside Manhattan, I have seen worlds that could easily become ghost towns _ a conference center west of Seattle, for example, whose existence depends on customers driving three to six hours for quiet natural vistas. Or seemingly all-American cities like Tucson, Louisville or Indianapolis, which banished airports to the countryside and built their educational, commercial and residential lives along Interstate highways. Places where virtually everything _ from buying milk to reaching a workplace _ requires an automobile trip on roads designed 40 years ago with cheap gasoline in mind.
In fact, other than a few large cities with adequate mass transit, I cannot imagine a lively future for any city that depends on drive-by shopping, drive-to-work employment, and schools, churches and theaters surrounded by asphalt. Already, walk-everywhere communities are emerging, where some auto use is still required but the after-work norm for shopping and entertainment is pedestrian.
If the so-called “closing of the frontier” traumatized America in the 19th century, just imagine what freedom from the automobile will do to the 21st century.
(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)
KRE/LF END EHRICH
650 words
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