Energy -- and the Slow Death of Cities

At the risk of being a bore, I have another thought on energy usage. In 1903, with his invention of a car for the masses, Henry Ford proved an old adage false. There really was something new under the sun.
Throughout human history, all forms of transport – people or goods – were essentially gravitational in the effect they had on human communities. They pulled people, factories and houses in toward a central market place or manufacturing center.
Ships came to a dock – and you had to deal with whatever was on those ships within walking distance or as far as horses could conveniently pull a cart. That tugged workers and merchants alike in, toward the docks.
Camel caravans basically had the same impact. Everything came in to a central market place that your buyers could walk to. Same was true of a horse wagon full of farm produce. Canals and railroads had the same impact.
American cities were originally built around ports, canal barge docks or railroad yards. The railroad especially pulled American cities in toward a central point. Those central points got crowded, stinky, full of horse manure – reeking with the occasional odor of a dead horse that hadn’t been removed. And then they got more crowded and messy.
Along came some Germans who invented an internal combustion engine. It would eventually pull people and goods anywhere they wanted to go – whether going there was wise or not. But we weren’t in trouble yet. The German cars cost too much. They weren’t meant for the masses. It took three people to push us over the edge toward true ecological disaster.
Odd trio. Henry Ford, Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton. Henry Ford created a vehicle everyone could afford – and then he raised wages so that even his factory workers could buy them! That was 1914, the seed of the disaster. Water and fertilizer came in 1920.
The Army was curious. Trucks had proved their worth in World War I. But was there any way you could put goods in a truck (military or otherwise) and move them across country? Could internal combustion do that?
They picked two young officers to give it a try, Ike and Patton. With a dozen or so enlisted men, they loaded up the primitive trucks of 1920 and set them off from the East Coast to go West – where only railroads and horses had gone before. They crossed fields, they forded creeks, they broke down, they pushed out of mud – roads? What roads? But they made it to the Pacific!
National Defense! We had to have roads. In 1922, the National Highway Act was signed into law, and we began to build the incredible network of two lane highways that knit every town and future suburb together. (Of course Ike and Patton would get to Germany in 1945 and see those terrific divided highways that tanks could whiz right down and, well, one of the first things President Eisenhower did was to build the interstate system – so tanks could whiz down them, too.)
Unfortunately for us, other things than tanks could whiz down them as well. How long do you think it took some business owner to figure out that he could get completely away from downtown traffic by building his store on some road farther out in the country? All it took is a few of those things that Ike and George Patton had proved could haul goods as capably as trains. Trucks.
How long did it take for his executives and workers to figure out that they, too, could escape from the grimy center cities and move to a suburb just minutes – by auto – from the job?
No longer was transportation gravitational. It was now centrifugal. It was pushing the city out, ever farther from its core. In fact you could abandon the core. Let it rot. Shut the stores down and build malls. Who needs mass transit – you have cars. Delivery trucks.
The centrifugal effect on our cities is destroying them like some ghastly wasting disease. If we had had to stay working downtown, we’d have had to fix downtown. No need, now.
Fifty years ago I could stand at an intersection inside the corporate limits of New York City, with a farm field stretching in every direction. At the same time, I could drive through an intersection on the fringe of Grand Rapids and see three fields and a golf course.
Today, houses, malls, churches, schools, industrial buildings stretch for miles and miles from both intersections. Farther and farther out. Little country hamlets that were far from any city are now swallowed up in suburbs.
All the people that live and work there are now totally, totally, totally dependent on the internal combustion engine, truck or car. And petroleum.
There might have been a wiser solution to the horse manure.