Once upon a time most “greens” favoured the notion that “small is beautiful” and generally looked forward to a time when, once again, we lived a bucolic, low-impact, village life, growing our own food and trading at the local market.

However, the combination of the thrill of “Peak Oil”, high petrol costs, and the apparent need to reduce our carbon footprint, has converted many of them into advocates of high density living, stacked up in concrete slabs from which we shuttle back and forth in trains or trams. Their favourite model would seem to be Halle Neustadt, the famous “world’s most sustainable city”. Unfortunately, Halle Neustadt was in East Germany, and once the East Germans were freed from their poverty and tyranny they fled Halle Neustadt in droves to live in “unsustainable” western style suburbs.

However, the Halle Neustadt dream has been revived and features on a host of blogs and websites which ask “What does the end of cheap oil mean to the future of our cities?”

As usual, those who combine a yearning for catastrophe with a hatred of the motor car and the bourgeois lifestyle are convinced the suburbs will be abandoned and left to decay into extensive ghost towns, home only to vermin and weeds.

They are convinced that all those suburbanites, will up-stakes, and surge into downtown neighbourhoods to live in high-rise slabs. Here is James Kunstler (the archetype US catastrophist) in full flight:

“The far-flung McHouse tracts are becoming both useless and worthless in the face of gasoline prices that will never be cheap again. The strip malls and office ‘parks’ are following the residential real estate off a cliff. The retail tenants of all those places are hemorrhaging customers who have maxed out every last credit card.”

All this because US gas prices may soon reach $5/gallon. Mr Kunstler, and his fellow Kunstler Katastrophists do not seem to realise that New Zealanders, like many others round the world, have been living with $5/gallon petrol for years, and have even survived $10/gallon petrol for some time now.

Are we really going to take our cars to the dump and abandon our family homes? The simple sums suggest otherwise. Look up the city housing replacement rate, and figure out how many decades it will take to transform present day Auckland into a remake of 19th Century London. Then think about the costs of all the new buildings, all the new infrastructure, and the lost asset value of all those abandoned “homes and gardens”.

Long before we could complete such drastic reconfiguration of our built environment new technologies and some minor behavioural shifts will make such disruption totally unnecessary.

We can develop new technologies and produce new products at high speed if we have to. WWII hastened the development of jet engines, radar, V2s, and computing. By the end of the war it was taking only five days to build a Liberty Ship in the US dockyards.

Drivers are responding to higher petrol prices by reducing their driven mileage. American drove about 120 billion fewer miles in 2008 than in 2007. But increased public transport ridership accounted for only 2-3% of that reduction.

Significantly, the most dramatic reductions are in the rural areas, probably because country folk can more freely plan their travel times, and share their rides. Also, they spend no time at traffic lights, in gridlock, or looking for parking spaces. When petrol prices are high such waste is infuriating.

Hence, while none of us can be sure about future human behaviour, early data suggest that high petrol prices are a further force for decentralisation.

Kunstler is sure we shall all rush to the city centre. However, no human behaviour is uniform. Some people will go downtown and some – probably more – will go to rural centres. Many will go to more remote locations for “the sea change, the tree change and the ski change.”

For most of human history people have had access to private point-to-point transport using horses, camels, mules, donkeys, lamas or whatever. Christ rode into Jerusalem on the contemporary equivalent of a VW. Then, in the 19th Century rail allowed the development of far-flung cities in which large numbers of people could get into the central city for work. (The Manhattan model). Unfortunately, the horses, which dominated short distance urban trips, caused dreadful pollution of the air, water, and soil. Imagine an equine gridlock in a New York summer.

The car was a miracle. It got rid of the pollution, and released huge amounts of food to feed people. In 1910, 40% of the grain grown in the US went to feed horses. This “extra” grain fed the population explosion which followed. Now we are turning it back into “fuel” again.

So the car was the real “Iron Horse” – not the train.

The new technologies available to trains increase their speed and reduce their pollution but cannot overcome the fact that trains cannnot provide the flexibility of rubber-on-road transport such as buses, cars, and taxis – or indeed, of the family horse.

Many research centres are working on new technologies. One system may enable us to drive to the motorway, where an underground cable will guide the car – you will be able to take your hands off the wheel and read, and even use your cellphone. The same cable may use an induction system to power an electric drive system. (You will charge your electric car up in your garage overnight or at the parking meter by day).

You will re-enter the surface street network to complete your trip. If there is no parking at the kerb you may be able to instruct the car to park itself somewhere else. When you leave your business you will phone the car to come and pick you up.

Whatever systems finally prevail, cars will certainly leap to new levels of efficiency and effectiveness over the next few years, and people will buy them.

People will change some of their other behaviour at the margins.

For example:

·      People who are tired of congestion may move to the regional centres earlier than they might have, while their children might move to a downtown apartment. 

·      There will be more telecommuting.

·      There will be more hi-tech car-pooling using GPS, iPhones and the Internet. 

·      A few will switch to trains and buses.

Cities like Auckland face a clear choice.

One approach is for the central “super city” planners to join with the train-loving catastrophists and force us to use radial rail systems to support high concentrations of employment in the city centre – the Manhattan model.

The alternative is to allow employment and commercial centres to spread around the periphery so that people can access all manner of activities without entering the congested centre – the Houston model.

We already know which works for most cities.

Experience has shown us that forcing low income populations into high density “slabs” and reducing their mobility turns working class people and immigrants into warring underclass tribes.

Joel Kotkin argues than successful “Opportunity Cities” turn those same people into a productive and integrated middle class.[1]

Our political leaders and urban planners should take note. If high petrol prices become an excuse to create a raft of Halle Neustadts in the name of “sustainability”, the price can prove to be extraordinarily high.

Sadly, Auckland seems determined to get it wrong again, if only because too many seem prepared to let “wise élites” to make our decisions for us.

1264 words

Owen McShane

For July 25 NBR