This article first appeared in the Sacramento Bee.

--

By Daniel Lerch

With a peak oil conference in Sacramento this week and the 100th anniversary of the first mass-market automobile coming up, it's a perfect time to re-visit our relationship with that most ubiquitous icon of the American (and California) Dream: The Car.

Ford's 1908 Model T didn't just mark the start of widespread private automobile ownership. It heralded the complete restructuring of America around petroleum-powered cars and trucks. By mid-century we had discovered massive oil fields in Texas and the Middle East, and World War II had effectively modernized our industrial base. The stage was set for the true mass consumption of the car, a shift that would fundamentally change our economy, our landscape and even our culture.

These days it's pretty well accepted that we can't all drive everywhere. California was home to some of the earliest suburban sprawl, so its metropolitan areas experienced early on what happens when everyone tries to drive everywhere: unending congestion (despite more and bigger highways), more sprawl and overall greater dependence on oil.

For years we've tried to limit sprawl and promote transit, bicycling and walking – first in the name of conservation and quality of life, more recently to fight global warming. Today peak oil (the looming high point of global oil production) and the end of cheap oil make it more urgent than ever to reduce our dependence on cars.

There's a problem, though. We're stuck with the landscape we've built over the past 60 years, much of which is literally uninhabitable without a car. Trying to make our communities less car-dependent simply by adding more buses, streetcars and light rail is like trying to make a bowl of chicken soup vegan simply by picking the chicken out. It's just not that simple: like the chicken broth in my chicken soup, car dependence is an inherent property of nearly every city, town and suburb in this country and especially so in car-loving California.

That said, it's not impossible to quickly scale up transportation alternatives in our communities. High and medium-density urban areas can boost their transit and bicycle systems in just a few years with targeted funding and policy. Lower-density areas will have a harder time, but can still act quickly with targeted programs supporting modern car-sharing, hybrid "smart jitneys" and, where possible, mixed-use and higher density development.

Moving away from the car doesn't mean reducing our quality of life, either. Cities and suburbs throughout Western Europe have proven for decades that people will choose walking, bicycling and public transit over personal cars if the price is right and the trip is pleasant. For transit, that means headways well under 15 minutes, and a rider experience that is safe, reliable, fast and clean. For bicycling that means extensive networks of dedicated, wide, uninterrupted paths with minimal stops and secure, covered parking at destinations.

How might this look in the long run? Ernest Callenbach's 1975 novel "Ecotopia" is one of the earliest and best-known visions of a modern California no longer dependent on cars: People get around by bicycle and maglev train; cities are compact; and rural areas have reverted to villages and farmhouses; suburbs are nowhere to be found. Richard Register's nonfiction "Ecocity Berkeley" (1987) presented a more nuanced – though no less radical – vision for the future: The city is rebuilt as a beautiful, productive urban garden; the hinterland returns as a place for wildlife and agriculture instead of shopping malls.

Significantly, neither vision is excessively low-tech or high-tech. Both see ample use for existing technology, whether in constructing buildings, growing food or producing energy. Also significant is that both chart a role for personal vehicles – particularly electric vehicles (albeit not one in every garage).

This underlines an essential point for the real transportation future of California. The car will not disappear: It's simply too useful. But how we use cars, how we plan our economies and communities around cars, and even how we build cars, all have to change.

What California needs, then, is not a future without cars, but a future that uses cars intelligently – a future in which California has declared its independence from the car. Millions upon millions of Europeans are living rich, modern lives without requiring a private car to meet their most basic needs. They're in communities that function perfectly well with gasoline three times the price as at our pumps, and with the resilience to continue thriving if prices doubled tomorrow. How many places in America can say the same?

The good news is that we can not only envision a car-independent future, we can actually visit it and learn from it. We can learn how the Danes turned downtown Copenhagen from a virtual parking lot into one of the busiest and most economically successful pedestrian zones in the world. We can learn how the Germans accommodate growth, not by expanding suburban sprawl but by improving existing cities. California in particular can look to its cultural touchstone – the Mediterranean wine country – and rediscover the bustling, walkable village with its heart at the piazza.

Some American cities are already moving in that direction. New London, Conn., recently decided to overhaul its historic Parade Plaza. The plaza was mangled in the 1970s by the kind of design philosophies that treated urban spaces as either conduits to pass through quickly or themed destinations with no real relation to their context. But the plaza worked quite well in earlier times, and for a simple reason: It was designed with the same millennia-old, human-scale principles that make great urban spaces all over the world.

In fact, a lot of how we did things in the pre-oil era makes good sense for a post-carbon 21st century. Without cars to skew our sense of distance and place, we developed cities, provisioning systems and even cultural and social norms suitable to a lower-energy world. That doesn't mean we need to revert to some 19th century or anti-technology lifestyle. We simply need to rediscover those ways of running a society and an economy that don't completely depend on petroleum-powered engines.

California is already on the route toward breaking its ingrained car dependence with legislation like Senate Bill 375, which links energy use with transportation and land development. The challenges we face in global warming and declining oil supplies, however, require that we do more than just tinker around with zoning codes and transportation funding. We need to fundamentally rethink the way we do urban planning and the way we fund public infrastructure, and fast.

Portland, Ore., remains the best American example of this fundamental rethinking, with its vibrant downtown, pioneering light-rail system and strict constraints on suburban sprawl. Portland achieved its successes not by executive fiat, but through decades of work by countless elected officials, planners and community members to forge regional agreement on land use and transportation issues. Car independence has been a central part of the Portland vision, and today the city boasts some of the nation's highest rates of walking and bicycling, despite miserable weather half the year.

There's no reason sunny California cities and towns can't do the same. The Village Homes development in Davis, begun in 1975, was one of the first in the country to prove that pedestrian-oriented communities are not only nicer to live in but more lucrative to build. Today, towns across the state are investing in modern transit and lower-carbon "smart growth," and both modern streetcars and high-speed trains are quickly becoming realities in California's largest cities.

Retrofitting our communities to be car-independent – car-smart – isn't rocket science. And we're fortunate that the American legal system leaves the bulk of land use and transportation decisions to the state and local levels. Every community across this country has the choice to continue increasing its car and oil dependence, or to reorient itself for the new post-oil era. If the successes of Western Europe and American cities such as Portland are any indication, car independence is clearly the smart path for California to choose.

Photo credit: Rick Hall