Evaluating my personal VMT

Over the weekend, I decided to chart three years worth of daily Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) for our Toyota Corolla. We track mileage at each gas fill up, so those were my data points. To be honest, I was slightly disappointed by the results:

The Travels of the Household Corolla

We ended up with an average of 31.7 miles per day. Split into two people, that's a per capita usage of 15.8 MPD. The combined average was a little better when we both commuted by other means (27.6 MPD) than it is when my wife began needing the car for work (32.8 MPD). This is below the national average but not by as much as I expected. I had not anticipated all of the mileage due to trips out of town and moving across the country, hence the sharply spiking graph.

One of the major lessons that I picked up from Tom Vanderbilt's instant classic, Traffic is that every system needs feedback to run efficiently, and this is especially true of the transportation system. We all consider ourselves to be driving at a safe speed, until we pass an electronic traffic sign displaying our actual speed back to us. Drivers will invariably slow down when simply presented with this piece of information. "How's My Driving" stickers on the back of trucks help the trucking industry track risk management through evaluating individual driver performance. Since driving is by nature such a private experience, the lines of communication we usually use for self-evaluation are limited. It's like you're at a party but you have no idea that absolutely nobody is laughing at your jokes. We need feedback.

As I tallied up our VMT totals, it occured to me that modern automobiles could track this data with more precision automatically. What if a chart of daily VMT were printed out or emailed to us on a monthly basis? Would that have any impact on our decisions to use the transportation system? It's also helpful to know where we stand relative to other people, in order to give some context to the raw data. We often think of "keeping up with the Jones" as a negative force, but it can also be a strong catalyst for positive change as well.

This is essentially one of the main components of the smart grid concept. The more accurate and timely feedback energy consumers are presented with, the more likely they are to voluntarily change their behavior in response to this information. What if we had a Smart Transportation system where everyone was aware of their personal VMT in the context of their community?

Children should be able to navigate their world

Somewhere along the line it became conventional wisdom in our culture that suburbs are good for kids. Lawns are supposed to be suitable places for children to play, and the cul de sac supposedly protects them from any strangers who may be passing through. I have to admit that this has always been baffling to me. For one thing, the typical drivable low-density environment is unhealthy ... physiologically. At least that's the conclusion of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who issued a policy statement last month in favor of "building new communities that are less car dependent and making existing communities more dense" as a strategy to promote active transportation. (The AAP also makes note of the excessive death and particulate matter generated by these automobiles as well). But right now I'm concerned with a less tangible story.

After the age of five, most children want to explore the world beyond their own home and lawn. As humans, our sense of identity is often tied up with the places we inhabit, and as a child develops he wants to expand that sphere. Just as adventurers depicted in books and film push out into uncharted waters, to a young child mapping out the neighborhood park or a new street is opening the same kind of frontier. I believe this process inculcates a sense of curiousity and healthy independance that cannot be taught in school or even acquired from eduational television or video games. Can this be replicated in a world where mom or dad are required to provide shuttle service to any of these far off lands?

Children want to navigate their own social world as well. I grew up in a suburb with lots of families. We children essentially elected one kid’s lawn as the play area for sports because it was particularly flat and a little bigger than the others. So essentially we created a de facto neighborhood park, while our dads had to keep mowing our individual lawns that rarely were used (when I was a little older, I was paid to mow, which was cool). I sometimes wonder why the grown-ups didn’t just live closer together and share a real park with real ballfields within walking distance of everyone. That arrangement would seem to have made more sense if it would have been available at the time.

Children want to make their own economic decisions. I was fortunate to have grown up in a closer-in suburb. By the time I was ten, I was riding my bicycle to the Main Street of our town every Saturday with a friend. I could blow my allowance on candy or save up for a cassette tape. It was up to me. I could make my way into the shops along the street and take care of the whole customer interaction myself. It was a great way to wade into the world of adulthood ever so slightly (I was still buying Swedish Fish by the boxful after all). This was six years before I'd be granted my drivers licence, our culture's traditional passport to sudden freedom, but I wasn't going to waste any time waiting for it.

My goodness, reading this, I sound like a crotchety old man. "Back in my day ..."

But, really, I see no reason to believe that our current trajectory toward more isolated, dependent, and obese children is a necessary by-product of progress and affluence. It only takes the will to ask for different kinds of places to live in.

Remembering "Busytown"

Herein, your humble author engages in an amateur childhood psychology self-diagnosis ...

While drinking my morning cup of coffee today, I suddenly had a flashback of all sorts of different animals dressed in human clothing bustling around a cartoon town, some carrying ladders and others dressed in lab coats with stethoscopes dangling from their necks. They were all rushing back and forth throughout the dense, mixed-use streetscape in buses, cars, bikes, and walking in all directions. Every shopfront window in every building had some crazy scene on display, and the whole town seemed to be pulsating with life. Then (I have no idea how I did this) the name Richard Scarry just popped into my head. This was a Richard Scarry drawing.

I spent hours as a child pouring over Richard Scarry books, focusing in on every little detail and how it all seemed to hold together in one town. I wanted to be that construction worker on the scaffolding waving to the police officer walking by. In many ways this was an ideal vision of life in community and a well-functioning economy, and millions of children in my generation were captivated by these images. Sure the vibrant colors and fuzzy animals didn't hurt, but I can't help but think we saw something good about human society all thrown together in the jumbled diversity of "busytown."

For many years, I completely forgot about Scarry's utopian (but so normal) urban vision, but I suppose these crazy illustrations, that had tapped into my childhood pysche, may have left a lasting impression. Perhaps Scarry's world is not so unattainable after all. Except for the anthropomorphic mammals, of course.

Life in smaller spaces

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, any unused space in a home will be filled with stuff. This is a cardinal rule of modern life that has been confirmed to me many times, and it holds true whether you want the stuff or have any desire to clean it and maintain it. Many of us still feel the perverse need for this large amount of living space. One of the common complaints about living in a compact community is the lack of space to stretch out your arms. But is more always better?

The Mrs. and I downsized in the last year from a 2-story house to a 450 sq. ft. apartment, and, in my opinion, this did not require any sacrifice in quality of life. We just have to be more efficient with our space and more selective with things we purchase. Here are some strategies we've come up with:

• Elevating the bed up 6 in. on risers gives an extra 16 cubic feet of storage. We drape of bed skirt to the ground to avoid the appearance of clutter.

• Televisions can take up a large amount of space, because they require all furniture to be oriented toward them. We keep a monitor and speakers in a nearby cabinet and temporarily connect it to a laptop on a table to watch videos. The set-up time is only about 1 minute.

• Under the couch is a line of 8 shoebox-size plastic containers that store items, such as office supplies or cords, that are used on a regular basis. It essentially functions as a separate chest of drawers.

• The printer is embedded inconspicuously in a bookshelf.

• A stackable washer/dryer unit fits nicely in the bathroom.

• The interior space of a room is often underutilized. We've placed two back to back metal carts in the middle of our kitchen for extra counter space and storage.

And we've got nothing on Gary Chang, a Hong Kong Architect recently featured in the New York Times, who has managed to configure his 344 sq. ft. apartment into one open space that can be converted for 24 different uses.

"What appears to be an open-plan studio actually contains many rooms, because of sliding wall units, fold-down tables and chairs, and the habitual kinesis of a resident in a small space. As Mr. Chang put it, “I glide around.”"

The automobile and freedom

In America since the 1950's, the car has joined the bald eagle as one of our primary emblems of freedom. That open road through the desert has been imprinted into our imagination through scores of books, songs, and movies. Libertarians such as Frank Lloyd Wright hailed the advent of the automobile as a way to reorient the city around individual liberty. The automobile's ability to confer freedom has even worked its way into our cultural experience of the life-cycle. Turning 16 and receiving a license is the entry point into the adult world (certainly more so than gaining the ability to vote at 18), and the point at which the children take away the car keys from their elderly parents signifies the end of their independence. These are some powerful associations.

However, with several decades of hindsight, it's worth taking stock of the whole situation. Have automobiles really enhanced our freedom?

Loss of Freedom

Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher of modernity, has written about the dominance of "instrumental reason" in the modern world. This is the tendency to ground most of our decisions in a cost-benefit calculation which requires all aspects of life to be reduced to quantifiable units.

From the Malaise of Modernity:

"The society structured around instrumental reason can be seen as imposing a great loss of freedom, on both individuals and the group - because it is not just our social decisions which are shaped by these forces. An individual lifestyle is hard to sustain against the grain. For instance, the whole design of some modern cities makes it hard to function without a car, particularly where public transport has been eroded in favour of the private automobile."

The problem is that, while the automobile did initially expand an individual's range of mobility, the essential infrastructure of society also expanded accordingly, leaving the individual back where he started, only now completely dependent upon the enabling piece of technology. In other words, the various activities that we organize our lives around (eating, sleeping, working, shopping, worshiping, schooling, socializing) have become that much more removed from each other now that it can be expected that we will possess an automobile to traverse the distance.

The results would be simply neutral, except that cars are expensive in a number of ways. As Christopher Alexander points out, their biggest expense is the space they take up. They are also expensive in terms of carbon output and use of finite natural resources. These costs are mostly incurred socially, but the IRS has calculated that the average individual cost of driving amounts to 50.5 cents per mile. Every dollar that goes toward our private modes of transportation is a dollar that we are not at liberty to spend on something else. Every acre of asphalt is an acre that we are not free to use for something else.

But the larger issue that Taylor is getting at is really the exclusion of individuals from civic engagement. Virtually everywhere in America, it is difficult for those who either choose to or are forced to live without an automobile to become full participants in society. This is evident in the American life-cycle narrative. Why is being able to drive celebrated by teenagers? Why is the loss of that ability mourned by the elderly? It's evident that those on the margins of the life-cycle are quite severely restrained in the choices available to them. As is true for those who simply can't afford an automobile or are prevented from driving by a disability.

Furthermore, the freedom granted by automobiles is not cumulative. Each new person who achieves this freedom takes some of it away from somebody else. Remember that it is the open road that seizes our instinct for liberty. As more people are added into the equation, the open road quickly becomes a traffic jam and we feel confined and powerless. As we are approaching the hard limits of land and of energy, as well as enjoying the continuing enfranchisement of more and more people, it's clear that whatever freedom the automobile may have granted to those who are able to own one has a very dim prospect into the future.

The automobile and disintegration

The technology we use impacts how we see the world, just as our philosophical outlook guides the development of human technology. This basic insight, found in modern thinkers from Marx to McLuhan, has been expressed well by Neil Postman in his book Technopoly,

“Technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things, and every technology - from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer - is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore require scrutiny, criticism, and control.”

But Postman is no Luddite. This is not a call to reject all technology out of hand but rather to evaluate whether the various messages conveyed fit well with the overall moral direction one is moving toward. It is a matter of using the tools we create, rather than being used by them. I plan on writing a few posts will contain some personal reflections on how I see the automobile, in particular, impact the way I view the world and live my life.

Disintegration

The modern West has long been characterized by disintegration of the various spheres of life, perhaps finding its origins back in the late medieval period when William of Ockham replaced Aristotelian metaphysics with strict nominalism. By the time of Immanuel Kant, who could still be considered the quintessential architect of modernity, this line of thinking had reached its culmination. Kant famously stood at the intersection of the various strains of modern thought and essentially drove a wedge between them, dividing facts from values, science from art, faith from reason, public from private. Although, at the time, this division was taking place mostly just in theory, on paper, and in discussions it would soon play itself out in the wider culture in some tangible ways.

Development in technology, as well as political and economic institutions, facilitated the ideological fragmentation evident in modernity. The incredible advances in the ability to transport ourselves ensured that the division especially between a private home and a public vocation would become physically manifest, with the birth of the commute as a measure of this distance. Early forms of transportation only allowed individuals a two-dimensional, linear division. Streetcars and rail lines had fixed origins and destinations, and easy access was limited to the particular line. Only a binary opposition could be spatially accounted for with public transportation.

However, with the invention and wide-spread adoption of the automobile, this linear movement in space was expanded into a three-dimensional range. A completely privatized and flexible mode of transportation allowed our society to further fragment into countless different pieces, from personal to social to professional to commercial to educational to political to spiritual. Some philosophers have carried on the impulse of fragmentation to radical new levels, even claiming an "incommensurability," or an utter inability to transmit meaning, between these different spheres and communities. Spatially, some metropolitan areas have been dubbed "edge cities" with no centers from which the parts can be integrated as a whole. Finally, many of us feel as if these divisions sometimes even cut to the heart of who we are as persons.

As a Christian, I've been to church and heard a number of sermons about how my relationship with God ought to effect every area of my life. The pastor wisely points to the temptation I have to compartmentalize the religious portion of my life into a church experience at a particular time and place, while letting my work life and home life on the other six and a half days of the week be untouched by the faith I profess to hold. An uncomfortable light is shone on the duplicity that lies in my own heart and mind, and I become resolved to change the way I live.

Then we all walk out of church and get into our cars. Does not the drive home preach a completely opposite message? That was one discrete place, and now you will insulate yourself from the world until you arrive at another discrete place, your home. The place of the church, with all of its associated memories and imputed meanings, will not be a part of your experience until next week. The perception of the world in between is strictly instrumental. There is that divided life being spatially realized as my tires roll down the street.

Walking home from church tells a different story. Every place I travel through does not feel discrete, but rather physically connected in a seamless way. I can look around and perceive my surroundings. I walk over the Clark Fork river into downtown, passing the coffee shops and bars where I spend time with friends. I'll pass the courthouse where I turned in my vote last week and the various shops where I exercise my important role as a consumer. Finally, I'll arrive at home. Home is certainly a different place than church, but it just doesn't seem quite as far away.

On to Virginia

I've accepted enrollment in the University of Virginia school of architecture for an MA in urban and environmental planning. I chose this school not only because of its good reputation, but also because the department espouses a vision for cities and land use that fits well with my own emerging vision.

"The trademark of our program is an abiding concern for sustainable communities signified by our inclusive urban AND environmental planning title. Our faculty values environments where countrysides are productive and appropriately protected, where cities have vital centers and efficient means of movement, and where neighborhoods offer opportunities for all to live affordably and safely. We are as much concerned with the economy and issues of equity as we are with the environment."

Yes, and yes. I believe that the next two years will help me fine-tune some of the thoughts that have been bouncing around this blog and learn how to put them to work in practical ways.