It Didn't Have To Be So Hard To Travel

 

     The famous allegorical painting American Progress by John Gast symbolizes and says so much about American history. The book in the hand of Columbia is said to be a "school book" representing enlightenment, but I think it would fit better with the American story if it were an accounts ledger tracking the financialization of the landscape. Public Domain image from Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons.

 In my previous post, I wrote about how difficult it is in North Dakota winter to get a simple battery for a smoke alarm; it is even more challenging to travel long distances.  The further the distance, the more difficult the journey. Even in the best conditions, traveling from Williston, North Dakota, to anywhere is arduous.  The longer the trip, the greater the odds you will strike snow or ice-covered roads or wind and snow with low visibility and dangerous wind chills.  As I get older, I like driving less and less, especially in winter.  The fact that I have spent a year of my life commuting, the possibility of accidents, and the stress of driving always has me seeking different options.  Unfortunately, the way we design communities in the United States offers few opportunities for long-distance travel other than by car.

 The U.S., like other settler colonial nations, has a geography that, from the start, has been less about creating sustainable, livable communities than maximizing extractable profit at every step.  The car fits into this narrative because vehicles rely on a vast and expensive infrastructure from roads, to fuel supply systems, to millions of individual transport boxes people are compelled to buy, maintain and replace, keeping a vast transport maintenance and transport system afloat.  The car is a more effective tool for extracting the landscape than more collective transport systems that are shared. 

 It all started at the beginning.  The first step was the swindling of indigenous people, which allowed land acquisition by unfair means.  The second step was that indigenous land use systems were swept aside, creating a tabula rasa to financialize the landscape.  The next was the gangs of speculators who extracted wealth by dividing and organizing land, not in ways that would be most sustainable and create timeless communities, but would make the most profit.  Most important to my discussion is the wily-nilly creation of towns, often by speculators whose platting of new communities was more about profit than putting together a sensible city.  From the start, America has been more about designing communities to maximize extraction of the land and profits for those who control it than intelligent design.  It is a process that continues to the present day in highly extractable suburbanism that is good for all the open palms building and selling, but doesn't create great places to live.
 

In addition to maximizing the extraction of the landscape, car dependence is very effective at keeping marginalized people marginalized.  Just like an expensive, restrictively zoned home marginalizes by its exclusionary nature, the cost of a car and all the things that come with it marginalizes those who struggle to afford it or can't.  Of course, a car is necessary for rural places, but we can be more independent of it than we are.  

Through intelligent community design and making non-car transport easier, getting around could be much better than it is.  I have spent much of my life working with people marginalized by inadequate or lack of car transportation, and I dislike the vast inequities of what we have created. As I have written before, a car is a middle class object, just like the restrictive single family home, both of which have classist dimensions by that exclude as much as they include.  The creation of the system was only partially conscious, and it is hard to single out blame in most cases.  Just like our dependence on other infrastructural systems that are killing us, it was a process of accretion that got us into this mess.  Still, financialization as the sine qua non of everything in America is ultimately to blame.

Many communities in rural America, poorly placed, overly optimistic, or outright frauds, failed or have been slowly failing since their inception, leaving a landscape filled with barely standing, widely spaced towns on widely spaced lots.  The historian Elwyn Robinson wrote about " the too much mistake" of overbuilding the rural landscape, but I question the basis which allowed for the mistake in the first place.  How could things have been done differently?  Instead of a mostly dying rural landscape, kept alive more by extraction than sustainable communities, what could we have built?

I often think of how easy it was a hundred-plus years ago to jump on a train and get to or from even the most isolated parts of rural America.  I heard these stories firsthand from a generation that grew up in the waning days of an America with a rail and streetcar system that were the envy of the world.  It was also evident in the ease that late nineteenth century people traveled from far corners of the earth to some of the most isolated parts of North America with just a bit more difficulty than we do today.  How much have we gained from all our expensive roads and all the costs associated with our personalized wheeled boxes from what existed a hundred years ago? Is our freedom to drive, just another way for a system to extract from us by selling us the illusion of freedom with shiny cars driving in landscapes we will never see? If we really understood the true costs of our car dependent system that quietly taxes and marginalizes us all in imperceptible ways we might see things differently. 


 Anyone who travels outside the car dependent transport deserts of Canada and the United States is quickly amazed at how easy it is to get around on a web of trains, buses, small passenger motorbikes, humble bicycles and even walking via infrastructure made for carless mobility.  It is also evident in many places how spaces are engineered to make getting from place to place without a car easier.  Upon arriving home, one wonders why we can't have something similar here.  I have lamented the diminution of a system of trains and urban street cars in the U.S. that was once the envy of the world, but that is ancient history.