Pavement, it's what's for dinner

The three biggest issues of the next 50 years, as I see it, are clean drinking water, renewable resources and transportation. Although the rate of population growth has been on the decline since the late sixties (perhaps due to the women’s right to choose movement) the population is still increasing exponentially and is estimated to reach 10 billion worldwide by 2050, up from 6.6 million today.

The production for passenger vehicles is rapidly growing as well. Already half of the vehicles in the U.S. are SUVs and light trucks and, at this rate, it will be true worldwide by 2030. Increasing an estimated 9 million per year from 41 million in 2003, auto production is giving population growth a run for its money with the most demand coming from China.

While over half of the 539 million vehicles worldwide are registered in the U.S. (where there are 1.2 more cars than licensed drivers), China and other developing nations are anxious to catch up. Let’s do the math.

China has 1.3 billion people compared to 300 million in the U.S. and are projected to grow by 500 million people in the next 50 years. Their car ownership could easily triple that of the U.S. but unlike the U.S., China’s people and cropland share the same one third of the country’s land mass. Roads and freeways are typically built on farmland putting countries like China at risk of paving over their food supply. And pavement is permanent. As environmentalist Rupert Cutler once noted, “Asphalt is the land’s last crop.”

So why are our brightest minds working on transportation to space and stealth bombers that cost two billion dollars each? Why not spend that money building ways to move goods and people in a way that’s more attractive, efficient, enjoyable and better for the environment? I, for one, am tired of determining my social schedule by time spent in the car, sitting in traffic, looking at ugly pavement and wondering why most humans think they are capable of driving.

With the second highest population in America, The Greater Los Angeles Area has 18 million people over 500 square miles (compared to 18.8 million in the 330 square miles of The New York Metropolitan area). A patchwork of cities as dense as San Francisco and Paris, the majority of the population, jobs and businesses are clustered along the major corridors making the entire area (excluding the San Fernando Valley) dense enough for light rail.

Freeway expansion projects go on for years only to yield one or two more lanes and a UC Berkeley study showed 90 percent of new highway capacity fills up within five years of being built! Another new study showed that the only thing that keeps people off the roads is congestion. It seems like there’s never enough road, never enough parking, and never enough pavement. If our pavement were its own state, it would be the 24th largest at 61,000 square miles, beating out Georgia.

In the past 20 years the population of California’s metro areas increased 20 percent but the amount of driving increased 59 percent. We’re driving more because of the way we build our communities with affordable housing in one direction and jobs in another. In the years between 1950 and 1990, the population of urban areas grew by 92% but the land area used grew by 245%. Increased suburbanization has meant bigger houses, farther apart, taking up more farmland, requiring more roads and greater energy consumption. Suburbanites drive bigger cars and rack up many more miles.

Clearly, we have to think of something else. The solution, at least in Los Angeles, seems to be easy. The city was built around the streetcar. In the twenties, we had the largest electric trolley system in the country with 6,000 trains running on 144 routes in four counties. (If you want to know what happened to them, rent Who Framed Roger Rabbit?)

Los Angeles has actually been piecing together a public transportation system over the last twenty years and our mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, is committed to joining existing rail and subway lines and building new ones. Even though only 6.6% of Angelenos take public transportation to work, it’s higher than the national average of 4.7%. Nationwide, 9 out of 10 people drive to work, 77% by themselves. For many, it’s still the easiest way to travel but it isn’t cheapest. Not for the driver, not for the city.

One study put the annual cost of owning and operating a vehicle at $7,000 - $10,000 per year. That doesn't take into account the subsidized costs: highway patrol, traffic management, police work on auto accidents and theft, street maintenance, parking enforcement, and "free" parking paid by higher rents, property taxes and lower wages. We’re starting to pay for the invisible costs as well: air pollution, loss of open space and habitat, global warming, war in the Middle East. Conservative estimates put the cost of those subsidies at 22 cents a mile. If we had to pay for them, we’d pay a gas tax of $6.60 per gallon!

Over the last decade, the fastest-growing cities are suburbs while industrial cities, once the biggest in the country, are shrinking. Detroit, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis, Philadelphia and Buffalo have steadily declining populations. New York and California are the only two major cities still growing, which is why a lot of cities are looking to Los Angeles for leadership on the mass transit issue.

But we’re still a long way off from a future where the majority of people use public transportation. As it is now, the buses use the same roads, take twice as long and are noisy as hell. We built a subway, but the most traveled east/west corridor has never been tunneled. If we’re really want to encourage drivers to use public transit, why are we digging under ground? Why not build light electric rail on the existing roads and highways, surrounded by trees and beautiful platforms for catching the train? Hey and while we’re at it, let’s build bike lanes along the same routes!

I got a request to send email to the governor about maintaining the budget for planning the high-speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles (an overwhelmingly obvious choice). Of course I sent it but then I wondered, why have we been PLANNING it for ten years? What's it going to take to get us into the future? Seriously, in every futuristic movie you've ever seen, were people taking mass transit or driving cars? Think about it.