An important part of life is getting from one place to another. And in the 20th century it became not just an important part of life but also an important part of the pollution problem facing the world.
In the late 1800s cars were something of a novelty, but as an auto industry sprang up and cars became more readily available cars gradually came to replace horses. By 1910 there were as many cars as horses on the roads in some places. Soon there were more cars on the road than horses. By the mid-20th century most families owned a family car, shared by the family members, and teenage boys such as Archie Andrews in the comic books couldn’t wait until they were old enough to have a car of their own even if it was just a beat up piece of junk.
Gas stations were everywhere. Gas was cheap, and we used a lot of it.
By the late 20th century many US families owned multiple cars, since sharing one car among several people just wasn’t practical. Gas was no longer quite so cheap, but we still used a lot of it.
If we want our planet to remain habitable, we need to find a way to use a lot less of it. And that means we need to create a very different culture than the one we have now. That’s what I’ll be talking about in tonight’s Regenerative Culture for an Altered Planet.
Tonight I’ll be presenting two ideas for greener ways to go places. One is for travelling within a city, one is for travelling between cities. One is a practical idea which could easily be implemented if we can get more good people elected to local, city and state offices, the other is a somewhat imaginative idea which isn’t likely to happen any time soon but which I think would be a great new mode of travel if enough people can be convinced it’s worth trying.
But before I get to either idea, I’d like to talk about something I see as an underlying principle of a regenerative culture: public goods.
Conservatives and capitalists are often more inclined to the idea of private goods — the idea that everyone should pay for the goods and services they personally receive and shouldn’t have to pay for the goods and services someone else receives. For some things that makes sense. But there are many things where we all benefit by others having access to certain goods or services whether we personally use those goods or services or not.
Public education is an example. We all benefit if the children in our community get a good education, I have no children, but I’m much better off if the children in my neighborhood and my nation and in other nations are well-educated. A community of people who can read well, do math well, have a good grasp of history and a good grasp of science, is a much better place to live than one where people can’t read well, can’t solve math problems well, have a poor grasp of history and a poor grasp of science. So even though I’m well past the age of attending public school and even though I don’t personally have any children attending public school, I’m delighted to see money going to schools and would actually like to see more money being spent on paying teachers well, improving school buildings, and providing students with the best resources.
Public health is another good example. We all benefit if the other people in our community are healthy. Quite apart from our being less likely to contract contagious diseases if the people around us don’t have contagious diseases, it’s just a lot more enjoyable and less depressing to live among people who are happy and healthy and aren’t coughing and vomiting and dying in the streets. So even though I’m personally pretty healthy (haven’t needed to see a doctor, other than optometrists and dentists, for the last 50 years) I very much support a Medicare For All system where we all pay into a health system which provides good care to all those who do need it.
Public transportation is another example.
Most people in the US are so used to our system of public roads that even most of the conservatives and libertarians I’ve met favor our system of paying for road construction and maintenance through taxes and letting everyone use the roads for free, rather than charging people based on how much they use the roads. We have a small number of toll roads and toll bridges and most people seem okay with that, but I don’t know anyone who loves having to pay the tolls and wishes more of the roads they drive on regularly were toll roads.
But when it comes to public transit systems, many people’s attitude changes. For that they do want a private goods system, where those who use it have to pay for it (via fares) and those who don’t use it don’t have to pay for it.
I spent my early childhood in Buffalo, NY. At the time there was a very good public transit system there (Niagara Frontier Transit). It was about a 5 minute walk from our house to a good bus stop, buses ran frequently (about a 10 to 15 minute wait between buses), buses starting running early and ran until quite late, buses could take you almost anywhere you wanted to go, and the fare appeared to be pretty reasonable. (At least, I don’t recall any of the adults I knew grumbling about it.) When we visited a big city like NYC or Washington DC on summer vacation, the public transit systems there seemed pretty good as well.
But in the decades since I noticed a significant change. People who owned their own cars and drove around often resented the public transit systems, which were being supported by their tax dollars, and wanted the systems to be more self-supporting. So fares continued to be raised in an attempt to pay for the gas and bus mainentance and driver salaries out of the fares collected, and if buses didn’t have enough passengers on a run to add up to a lot of fares the schedule for that route was reduced or the route was eliminated.
Which generally seemed to have the opposite of the desired effect. The higher the fare went and the less frequent the buses ran, the more people stopped riding the bus and began using their own cars to get places. And the more people stopped taking the buses, the more the bus companies raised the fares and cut back the service…
Obviously, to me at least, raising fares and cutting back service is the wrong strategy. If we want to have more people riding public transit, we need to make public transit more convenient, not less. If people know they can catch a bus or train whatever time of day they need a ride, without an excessively long wait, and they know the bus or train will get them to their destination in a reasonable amount of time, they’ll be more inclined to use public transit. If they know it may be a half hour or hour wait, and the bus will take a long time to get to the destination, and the bus may not be running at the hour when they need to catch one to return home, they’ll be less inclined to use public transit.
Here’s the thing, though. Even people who don’t use public transit benefit by the existence of public transit if lots of other people use it. One obvious benefit is the reduced pollution of 50 people sharing one bus rather than 50 people each driving their own car. But there’s also a benefit of time saved. When lots and lots of people drive their own cars to get to work, rather than sharing a public transit ride, there are often very long lines of traffic moving very slowly. It may take an hour or two each morning for a person to commute 10 or 20 miles into a large city, and another hour or two each evening to commute back home. If there were a good public transit system which could get people where they needed to go comfortably and pleasantly and in a reasonable amount of time, more people would use it, there’d be fewer cars being used, there’d be less internal combustion engine fumes going into the air, all traffic would move faster, and everyone would benefit.
So what I’d like to see, and what I think makes a lot of sense, is a public transit system which is funded entirely through taxes. The buses start early in the morning, run until very late at night, run frequently, and no fare is required in order to ride. (Sales pitch for this system in order to attract riders: You’ve already paid for the bus with your taxes. Why not take advantage of it and ride it as often as you like? )
One big advantage to this system is that the buses will be able to zip along their routes much faster if no fare is required, especially during rush hours. Why? Because if a fare is required, all passengers need to have their fare recorded as paid when they get on or get off the bus. That generally means a line going, one at a time, past the driver and showing a card or putting coins into a slot or tapping a fare card against a mechanical reader or whatever other system is being used. That takes time. It also generally means everyone has to enter by one door. But if there’s no fare to collect, then it’s a lot faster. The driver opens a door at the front and a door at the rear, and people can stream off and stream on.
Because the buses will be convenient to ride, with no problems about needing the right change or needing the right card, more people will ride them. And if more people ride them, that justifies putting additional buses on a route — making for shorter waits between buses and an even more convenient system. Instead of a system where bus schedules and bus routes keep getting cut back because not enough people are riding them, a system like this could lead to more buses and more routes being added.
See how easy? The obvious benefits of a good public transit system are less cars on the road, less pollution, less wear and tear on the road itself, less time lost by people sitting in a long line of cars waiting for the cars ahead of them to move, less space needed for parking lots and parking garages, and less road rage. But there’s another benefit which ties in with a regenerative culture: riding together on a bus is a more communal experience than riding alone in a car. The more we get out and mingle with people we otherwise might never have met, the more chances we have to meet and develop an understanding and appreciation of the many different types of people there are in our world.
One possible problem, though: if the buses are free and comfortable, homeless people might get on and ride for hours at a time to get out of the heat or the cold or the rain. But the solution to that isn’t to ban homeless people from riding or to arrest them for riding too long; it’s to provide comfortable housing and shelters where homeless people would rather be than riding around endlessly on a bus. That’s something we can talk about more in a future Regenerative Culture diary, perhaps.
A good public transit system can make getting around within a city more pleasant and enjoyable. Now I’d like to talk about an idea for making the commute between cities more pleasant and enjoyable.
There are a number of places in the US where two cities are located 30 or 40 miles apart and there’s a good bit of travelling done between the two cities. Let’s take Baltimore and Washington as an example of what I’m talking about.
Now, there are a lot of ways to get from Baltimore to DC, or DC to Baltimore, or some point in between. You can drive a car; you can take a bus; you can take a train… Depending on how much traffic there is and other factors, it might take half an hour, it might take an hour, it might take two hours or longer.
Not many people bicycle regularly as a method of commuting between Baltimore and DC. Not many people even consider it as a practical alternative. There are roads you could bicycle on with good wide shoulders and not too much broken glass, but the trip would take a while and there’d be a lot of traffic zooming by and other things to make it somewhat unappealing.
But what if you could take a pleasant, easy, mildly downhill ride all the way from one city to the other (or whichever point in between you wanted to go to)? And what if you could then take a pleasant, easy, mildly downhill ride all the way back?
Wait! If it’s downhill going one way, it can’t be downhill going back the other way, can it? Yes — it can!
Here’s my idea. The two cities invest in a roadway between their cities. But this is a special roadway, for bicycles rather than cars. It’s 40 miles long and will be expensive to build, but once it’s built it should need a lot less maintenance than a road cars or trucks drive on.
I said roadway, but it’s actually two roadways: one going from Baltimore to DC, one going from DC to Baltimore. The two roads are side by side but they’re not connected, for a reason which will be obvious in a moment.
At each end, the roadway starts at a raised platform. There are elevators at ground level which people can use to get up to the platform (or stairs for those who would like some exercise). Then there are additional stations about every 4 miles or so between the cities — wherever it’s likely people will want to get off. (Sort of like an interstate highway with frequent exit ramps.) Each of these stations also has a raised platform which one reaches by elevator (or stairs). But each platform is a little less elevated than the one at the previous station — because the road is constructed to go mildly downhill for the first half mile or so as one leaves the station, getting the ride off to a pleasant easy start, then runs level much of the way to the next station, with a very gentle incline the last 100 yards or so as one reaches the next station to make it easy for those who want to stop at that station to do so (but also easy for those continuing past that station to pedal through the uphill leading to the station and on to the downhill stretch once they’re past the station.
The roadways are wide enough for several lanes of bicyclists — a slow lane for those who only want to coast at 5 to 10 mph and relax and enjoy the scenery (and who aren’t going a very long distance); a moderate lane, 10 to 15 mph, for relaxed pedaling; a fast lane, 15 to 20 mph, for those who’d like to zoom along (but not too fast); and a speedster lane, for those who’d like a little exercise (and who want to get where they’re going a bit faster). There’d also be one lane for an emergency vehicle to use, in case someone has a heart attack or stroke or falls off their bike and needs medical attention.
Overhead there’d be a translucent cover, to let light through for good visibility but to screen from excess sun on hot days, and to keep rain from getting riders wet or snow from getting the road slippery. That cover would also contain lights (solar-powered lights, perhaps?) to light up the road for night-time bicyclists. (And at intervals there’d be security cameras so station workers can keep an eye on the road in case anyone has an accident and needs help, or to identify anyone who’s bicycling dangerously or who’s harassing other bicyclists, so they can be given a traffic ticket and told to behave when they reach the next station.)
Ah, you say, but in order to bicycle you’d need to have a bicycle. Not everyone owns one or wants to own one. No problem! Since the roadway is comfortable downhill and level pedaling all the way, there’s no need for lots of gears or anything fancy; a simple, solidly constructed one-speed would be fine. So the city hires a firm to build a simple inexpensive one-speed and stocks hundreds of these at each station, free for people to use.
Ah, but what if there’s some convention or event at one of the stations, and a lot of people bike to that station, leaving their bikes there, so that the next day that station has way more bikes than it needs and some other stations don’t have enough? Again, not a problem. At the end of the day each station does a count of how many bikes it has on hand and how many it needs to have. Vans then drive a group of people to each of the stations with excess bikes, and these people each ride a bike to a designated station in need of more bikes; they are then picked up by the vans and driven back to the starting station. (This could be a fun job for teenagers looking for a way to earn a little money. You get paid for riding a bicycle downhill!)
For the first few years after the roadways open, the bikes would be limited to use on the roadways. People would pick one up at their starting station and leave it at their exit station. They’d then need to get from the exit station to their destination, but the stations would be located near likely destinations such as major malls so their destination might be within easy walking distance; there’d be public transit stops at the stations; a friend could pick them up; a company van could pick them up; or they could catch an Uber or a cab. But after a few years, if the bike roadways become popular, I’d like to see the program expanded to allow people to take bikes from the station to get where they’re going, with numerous bike racks set up throughout the area where people could park the bikes when they’re done.
As with the public transit system I described in the top half of this diary, the use of the bikes and the roadway would be entirely free, paid for out of taxes rather than fares. The aim is to provide an alternative to cars, and to make that alternative fun (and healthy!) so that people enjoy using it. The more people who choose to bicycle for their transportation when possible, and who find they actually enjoy it, the more we’ll be able to get away from our current over-reliance on cars. That means we all benefit — not just the people taking a pleasant bike ride instead of a boring drive stuck in rush hour traffic, but all of us who enjoy breathing cleaner air.
I think most people in our current culture couldn’t imagine themselves regularly biking 10 or 20 miles each day to get to work, or biking 30 miles on a weekend to visit the DC zoo or museums. But downhill-both-ways bicycle roads could change that...
… Or so I’d like to think! This isn’t an idea which is likely to become reality any time soon, but I hope you enjoyed reading it and I hope it stimulates interesting thoughts. Sometimes things that seem crazy the first time we hear them start to sound less crazy the more we hear them and think about them, or can lead to new ideas which aren’t so crazy at all.