Since 2006, Americans have bought over 105 million cars. However, since Covid, sales have dropped to one-third of what they were in 2006. The average number of vehicles per year is over six million. I assume that they are all still on the road and working. My numbers will be low because a significant number of used vehicles are still running and will run for many years to come. We have over four million miles of roads; at times, we experience gridlock and wish we had more. The point I am making is that there are over 25 cars per mile on every road in the country. At first that sounds like a low number, but my guess is that twenty years ago we only had 12 cars per mile. As the years progress and the reliability of cars is improved, more and more of them will strike out and be on the roads.
As a personal observation, as I walk around the neighborhood, I see an increase in the number of cars people park in front of their homes. In one example, I have seen one house with two cars in the garage and four more on the driveway. As families grow, so does their need for transport grow. It is not unusual for families with several high-school-age kids to provide a car for each. Several cars in a family lighten the burden of transporting them to sporting and club events by providing each child with his own transportation appliance. They do the same with cell phones using the argument that the parent wants the child to report his extracurricular activities. What this does is create a new “rush hour.” There was always the morning and the evening rush, now we have the mid-afternoon rush created by teachers and students leaving school. The traffic never seems to end or lighten.
I recently read a book titled City Limits, Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways.‘
The author argued that while we approve of cities widening their roads and adding capacity to allow traffic to flow more smoothly through the town, this only works for a short time. As more people become aware of the faster ride home, they flock to the new road, which becomes jammed as severely as the old one did. On top of that, the area of property taken to make the wide road displaces people and fosters more homelessness. Ultimately, the argument heads toward the need for more public transportation.
One of my recollections of boyhood concerns public transport. In the early fifties, Chicago had a large, well-run public transport system. We were only two blocks from a trolley stop, and walking to the stop was never a problem. As a young boy, I could hop on the trolley, drop my nickel into the box, and ask for a transfer. The transfer was good for several hours; with it, I could traverse the city from north to south and east to west.
The trolleys took their power from overhead electrical wires, thus avoiding any pollution. The trolleys called Red Rockets were painted red and yellow. Most had entry at the front next to the motorman, and longer trolleys had an additional portal two-thirds the way back, often supervised by a second conductor. As time progressed and we evolved the trolleys were replaced by the Green Hornets. They were the same functionally, but were faster, had more comfortable seats, and more hand holds for people that had to stand. I recall reading about a couple of horrible trolley collisions with vehicles and fires which caused many deaths. The cry for safer transport evolved into another type of vehicle that did not use tracks. The idea was that these bus like vehicles could avoid collisions easier because they were not restricted to the tracks. They were, however powered by electricity routed through the same overhead wires. Another leap in evolution came when the electric driven buses were replaced by diesel powered ones. The ugly, overhead wires were stripped from the routes and replaced by the black smoke of the diesels. All along, the price of a ride kept growing and the number of busses running were diminished to the point where it was faster to walk to where you were going. It was certainly faster to drive. After WWII the availability of personal cars boomed and the need for public transport kept shrinking. It has never disappeared but the practicality of running a system in 2024 like the one we had in 1945 is severely limited.
The future of public transportation will evolve into self-driving electric modules that come to your home and drive you to your destination. The highways will be rebuilt to become transport paths with electrical pickups that the modules will use for power. Traffic will be computer-monitored and controlled.
Although drone technology sounds great, they will not be practical for commuting. Imagine as many drones in the air headed for the same place as there are cars today.
I will never live long enough to see that evolution in service. Instead, I will live constantly complaining about awful traffic and over-crowded roads.
Filed under: Biography, Book Review, family | Tagged: Electric Busses, Future Public Transport, Public Transportation, Rush Hours | 2 Comments »
