Car Divorce Goes Trendy

Car-free living has officially reached trend status.

Last week, the New York Times ran an interesting and evocative story about the increase in people choosing to live without a car. Perhaps it’s a trend that’s been building. Nearly a decade ago, shortly after Divorce Your Car! first came out, I got a call from a Time magazine writer wanting to know about this same trend. Were more people, in fact, going car-free?

At the time, Critical Mass rides had become a phenomenon, and a surge of transportation reform groups had drawn attention to the need to cut car use. Still, it was hard to tell how many people might be choosing a car-free lifestyle, and ultimately, the magazine did not run an article.

For last week's piece, NYT reporter Micheline Maynard dug up several numbers that serve as proxies for the car-free trend. Her article notes that young people now wait longer to buy a first car. She also quotes Jesse Toprak of TrueCar, a company tracking car-buying trends; the data Toprak has seen suggests suburbanites are down-sizing from three cars to one or two per household. Maynard also cites Toyota’s finding that in at least 60 U.S. locations, more people have moved into city centers and gotten rid of their cars.

There might well have been a budding car-free trend ten years ago, but it hadn’t yet found its way into numbers like these. What’s changed between then and now? The NYT article mentions the recession as well as greater environmental awareness. Here’s what occurs to me:

• We already spend thousands per year on cars, but as gas prices have gone up and economic prosperity down, more people have indeed realized that cutting back on driving and car ownership can save big chunks of money.
• Growing awareness of climate change has sparked a new wave of environmental advocacy, and awareness of the problems caused by all our driving – enough to inspire more people to cut back.
• A shift in U.S. transportation funding that started with ISTEA in the 1990s has had more time to give us better facilities for walkers, cyclists, and transit users.
• Congestion continues to be a problem, as tracked by the Texas Transportation Institute, and who needs it? Especially now that we have a few more alternatives to driving. With the better facilities mentioned above, it’s now more convenient in more places to go car-free.
• Movements like Smart Growth and various livable communities initiatives have also had more time to promote and help establish denser and more walkable, bikeable and transit-friendly cities and towns.
• The cutting edge – what Maynard calls “a fledgling car-free movement emerging in big cities like New York, Boston and San Francisco that echoes a much broader campaign in Europe and Asia” -- has actually been around for awhile, and has had time to strengthen and gain more influence. New York City’s own Transportation Alternatives was founded in 1973. Next year, the World Carfree Network will host the ninth Towards Carfree Cities Conference since these conferences began in 1997.

How would you answer the question? What’s changed between 2000 and today that has fed the trend toward more car-free living? I welcome your comments.

... And More Oil on the Brain

Here's another quote from Oil on the Brain (and keep in mind this excellent book from Lisa Margonelli came out a few years ago):

If we bought gasoline the way people buy widgets in Economics 101, we'd stop consuming gasoline when prices spike, reducing demand ... But that's not what's happening .... Drivers either can't cut back or they don't know how to...

Now that gas prices have hovered just over $4 a gallon for several weeks, we're seeing that just begin to change. Higher prices have, in fact, shocked some of us out of the mindset that taking any trip means driving a car. Car miles traveled have dropped. Transit and Amtrak ridership are up. I'm seeing a lot more bicycles most places I go.

Higher gas prices do create some economic hardship, but there's a big silver lining to those costs going up. They inspire us to seek the dozens of other ways there are to travel.

Oil on the Brain

I just started reading Lisa Margonelli's book, Oil on the Brain. Margonelli's quest for deeper meaning in the oil economy begins at a San Francisco gas station in the summer of 2003. At the time, unleaded regular was $1.61.9 a gallon.

Barely five years later, gas prices have more than doubled. The average per-gallon cost has reached $3.73 in the U.S., and recently topped $4 in San Francisco. The good news is -- to the surprise of some -- American travel behavior is starting to change.

Two shifts demonstrating this have made news recently. First: More Americans now ride mass transit. From last year to this, ridership on regional rail lines is up 8% in southern California, 11% in Philadelphia, and 28% in the Miami area, USA Today reports. In Seattle, interest in vanpools has climbed by 17% over 2007.

Second: The New York Times reports that Americans bought more small, fuel-efficient cars in April 2008 than ever before. One in five cars sold that month were compact or sub-compact models, up from one in eight ten years ago. And for the first time, four-cylinder engines proved more popular than larger six-cylinder models.

When Leonard Doyle of The Independent interviewed me for a story about this, I told him I thought the trend toward smaller cars was great (even though four out of five vehicles sold in the U.S. are still medium to large). But, I added, what would really excite me is a shift to more walking and cycling. It would not surprise me if this were happening already, although I haven't seen statistics showing such a trend as yet.

Back to Lisa Margonelli's book: the gas station where she begins her story is not far from where I was born and is, I guesstimate, about two miles -- a brisk half-hour walk -- from the apartment where I spent the first few months of my life. Gas prices notwithstanding, that's a distance that most Americans, these days, would probably still drive. But more of us, now, would go in smaller cars, or take the bus.

It's a start.

Higher oil prices: good news or bad?

As I write this, oil prices sit at just over $105 a barrel, in record territory even when adjusted for inflation. Gasoline futures are up, with prices at the pump expected to rise above the current national average, $3.18 a gallon. Later this year, they're also forecast to beat last May's record of $3.23 a gallon.

It's a definite hardship for cash-strapped workers who feel forced to commute by car, and has ripple effects on the economy as prices rise generally, reflecting higher transport costs. But does it have a more positive flip side?

With higher oil prices, U.S. gas consumption has trended lower for the past year, the Wall Street Journal reports, and for the past six weeks, it has steadily dropped. Ignore the economic doom and gloom for a moment and consider some of the positive side effects when gas consumption goes down:

• Air pollution drops, which means fewer asthma attacks, less hardening of the arteries, reduced lung damage in growing children, and lower cancer rates, just to name a few.

• Globe-warming CO2 emissions go down, which means -- probably -- a slower rate of increase in sea level, species range shifts and extinctions, natural disasters, insurance costs, and global average temperature itself.

• Tanker traffic diminishes, bringing a lower risk of oil spills. So does non-point source pollution into waterways.

• In the U.S., oil imports lessen, bringing greater energy independence (every little bit ought to help) and a better balance of payments for the ailing economy.

If lower gas consumption also means people are walking and/or bicycling more instead of driving, it's even better news. A little more exercise helps people whittle waistlines, mitigate chronic illness, and live longer, too.

Look past short-term analyses, and you can find further economic benefits. Higher oil prices can spur the development and competitiveness of renewables, helping us break the addiction to fossil fuels -- something we desperately need to do, both for environmental and foreign policy reasons.

If we can help the folks who find themselves in hardship situations due to rising gas costs -- providing better transit, ridesharing opportunities, walking and bicycling facilities, and telecommuting are just a few ways of doing this -- then rising oil and gas prices might be good news all around.

Climate Change Out My Window -- And Yours?

Nearly ten years ago now, I signed a contract to write Divorce Your Car! Even then, as I researched that book, delving deeply into topics like worsening U.S. fuel efficiency, China’s burgeoning car boom, and of course, global warming, there were times I felt as if I were watching the climate change right outside my own window.

Partly that was because the major El Nino of ‘97-98 hit right in the midst of my research and writing. In that winter, this part of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- normally a place of snow eight months of the year -- became a place of thaw, bare ground in December, and early spring. Friends visiting from the west coast had often compared our spot near Lake Superior to the Arctic, given the stark expanse of white bergs and silver-blue ice that usually characterized winter on the big lake. But that year, winter was balmy. Snow sports enthusiasts grumbled, and people kept talking about “when winter gets back to normal.”

Now it turns out that, in the winter of ‘97-98, I probably really was watching the climate change. So were all of us. Climatologists rightly say that one season doesn’t make a trend, and that particular winter’s warmth -- while well out of the norm -- doesn’t prove a thing about climate change when taken in isolation. But in recent reading, I’ve learned there is a climatologist, Julia Cole at University of Arizona, who considers 1998 a “magic gate” -- defined in Tim Flannery’s book The Weather Makers as a kind of leap made by the climate, marking “the onset of remarkable phenomena.” That year also marked the beginning of a trend toward much lower lake levels in the Great Lakes, including Lake Superior.

These changes have happened more quickly than anyone had expected. Earlier this year, researchers at University of Minnesota, Duluth -- whose Large Lakes Observatory sits about 250 miles west of my house -- looked back over data from the last 25 years or so and found that not only have regional temperatures been warming faster than the global average, but surface waters in Lake Superior have warmed at twice that rate. Surprisingly fast, the researchers said. An article I wrote about this is online here.

So I guess Lake Superior is still like the Arctic: both places are now warming quickly. Since 1998, the Lake Superior basin has had more balmy low-snow winters. This past January our local Chamber of Commerce came close to applying for economic disaster area designation, because the businesses built around snow sports were suffering. That same month, a cross-country ski tournament held near here had to truck in snow to make racing trails. I no longer hear much talk about “when winter gets back to normal.” Now, everyone is wondering about the lake levels, which are near record lows and low enough to be costing real money for shippers, marinas, and municipal water systems. Are lake levels low due to drought conditions that will end soon, or is the drought part of a long-term shift to a dryer climate here -- a shift that could drop Superior’s level even further? Not everyone around here believes in “Al Gore’s global warming,” but there seems to be a sort of quiet waiting going on, a watching to see what’s going to happen next.

Lake Superior is the cleanest and most wild of all the Great Lakes. Its shoreline is less than a mile from our front door. We walk the wooded trails to that sandy, rocky shore several times a week. We see how the lake affects our weather and the way we feel. We don’t yet know exactly what the rapid temperature rise means for our lives, and the lives of all the many occupants of this forested waterfront -- from black bears to tiny mice, ancient cedars to delicate ferns.

What I do know is that the rapid change means there are more reasons than ever for all of us to change our relationship with driving. The carbon dioxide coming out of our tailpipes, and from all of our fossil-fuel burning, appears to be changing the climate faster than we’ve expected even with our sophisticated models, perhaps faster than we will be able to handle it. How much worse it gets depends in part on our actions, and one action we can control more than many of us believe is how much we drive. There are so many ways to cut back on driving that I wrote 120 pages about them! See more about this.

Here’s one way of reducing your driving, based on an idea from Ellen Santasiero of Bend, Oregon. Get out a map, draw a circle around your house with a radius of one-half mile, then commit to walking or cycling any time you take a trip within that circle. Every week, expand the circle by another half-mile until you feel you’ve reached your limit. If you do this, you’ll not only cut greenhouse gas emissions, you’ll also live longer -- lots of research supports this link between more walking or cycling and longer life.

I’m guessing there’s a natural area near you that may already be showing evidence of our changing climate. Maybe this is happening in some of your favorite places. Do you know of climate-related shifts already occurring in places near you? Let me know with a post to this blog.