After Oil - The rest of the story

By Kevin Klinkenberg The Kansas City Post For several years now I’ve been making a living somehow by extolling the virtues of walkable urbanism. I give countless presentations on how much of a pleasure it is to live in a neighborhood where one can walk to many of life’s daily needs, and your entire lifestyle is not chained to an automobile. For me, that neighborhood is now Volker, where I’m just a couple blocks off of 39th Street. The simple joys of walking to the ice cream store, to a bar, to buy a card or coffee are hard to express unless you’ve not been able to do that for most of your life. You can call this approach whatever you like – New Urbanism, Smart Growth, Quality Places, Traditional Neighborhood Design. But the basic premise is simple – a great many of us simply prefer to live our lives in neighborhoods where walking is a normal, daily activity – not something done simply for exercise. What is apparent these days is that we haven’t been nearly aggressive enough in making more places walkable. This is especially so in the Midwest and Kansas City, where living without a car is frankly unimaginable to most. I wrote previously about how the changing dynamics in energy are beginning to impact us, and will continue to do so. Don’t believe me? Fine, listen to T Boone Pickens, any executive of an oil company or any geologist who studies what is going on. So I left us last time with – what do we do? Do we just throw in the towel and hide in our homes and on our computers? Hardly – that’s not the standard of living which we expect. But we will have to re-order our lives in some fairly simple ways. Fortunately, many of the ways are things that we actually enjoy as human beings, and provide a side benefit of being healthy for us. For example, getting back to walking. Remember walking? Count on doing more of it. Bicycling, too. And that dreaded “t” word will rear its head – transit. Yes, transit. We will all increasingly be taking public transportation on a regular basis if we are to lead productive, fulfilling lives. It really is going to be that simple. Our lives as the 21st century progresses will in many ways resemble the lives our forefathers did in the 19th century. We will have to re-order our daily existence to live in walkable, transit-friendly neighborhoods. This will of course not be an easy thing to do – we’ve spent all of the last 60 years building an infrastructure that supports sprawling, car-oriented development patterns. Many folks simply cannot survive today without the use of a personal vehicle for every trip outside of the house. This will have to change, and change fairly quickly. The greatest opportunity to accommodate the new 21st century lifestyle is paradoxically the places we abandoned in the 20th century. Our pre-WWII neighborhoods, especially in Kansas City, Missouri, were designed and built on a system of streetcars and walkability. They are tailor-made for the way will we need to live in the future. But will our city leadership strive to take advantage of this opportunity? Some consider rail transit, for example, an expense that is hard to justify, even though a continuous, diverse urban fabric is simply not possible without it. Others worry about accommodating far-flung commuters in perhaps the least-dense metro area into the country. Instead, why don’t we work on making the old city itself a haven of walkability, quality density and transit-friendliness? What if we worked hard to make the City great, and welcomed the formerly car-dependent into its arms? Why would we assume that 50 years from now people will still be living in low-density towns such as Grain Valley wanting to commute into downtown Kansas City? In the course of history there are often “game-changing” events that reshape how we live. The advent of elevators made it possible for cities to grow in denser concentrations than previously imagined. Air conditioning has made living in southern climates tolerable year-round, even opening up the possibility of inhabiting the desert. Modern sewage treatment made urban living clean and safe. And the rise of the personal automobile created a dispersed city form unlike anything seen previously in human history. But that era of cheap and easy motoring is over. Let’s all mourn its death – it had its fun moments, but it also has left us decades worth of problems to correct. The future can be better, if we seize it.