Lifestyle changes due to high gas prices

Pasadena light rail del mar station
Originally uploaded by faceless b

(Gold line train exiting Del Mar Station, Pasadena. Photo: EPA Smart Growth, via Flickr and faceless b.)

1. The Wall Street Journal had a couple articles last week about the increased demand for transit-located housing, "Suburbs a Mile Too Far for Some," and how the high-cost of gasoline may have reached the tipping point required for behavior change, in "Have U.S. Drivers Reached Filling Point of No Return?."

From the latter article:

"I think we've reached a tipping point," said University of California, San Diego, economist James Hamilton. "There are a lot of hard numbers that show that we've actually reached a point where people are responding."

The volume of cars on U.S. roads began slipping in November below year-ago levels. The Federal Highway Administration's latest figures, for March, show U.S. drivers logged 11 billion fewer miles than a year earlier. That is a 4.3% drop and the biggest-ever year-over-year reduction in miles driven.

A fall in gasoline prices might reverse the trend. But the last time the U.S. saw such a lasting decline in traffic volume was when gas prices surged in 1979. In the years that followed, the U.S. saw a reduction in energy consumption that wasn't reversed until the early 1990s.

The term "tipping point," made fashionable after Malcolm Gladwell's 2000 book of the same name, became part of the academic vernacular after a 1971 paper in which Nobel laureate economist Thomas Schelling showed how white families leaving a neighborhood as black families moved in induced other whites to leave as well.

While the term has come to refer to any point when a gradual change quickens and becomes irreversible, Columbia Business School economist Geoffrey Heal said there has been a behavioral shift in energy consumption that is analogous to what Mr. Schelling described. "If enough people like you ride the bus, you'll be more willing to ride the bus," he said.

For the past four years, Ann Arbor, Mich., has encouraged people to "curb" their cars in May and take other forms of transportation. For the first three years of the program, an average of 800 people participated. This year, 1,482 did.

"You get enough people taking the bus or getting on their bicycle, more people get the sense that it's not such a crazy idea," said Nancy Shore, director of getDowntown, a group devoted to easing congestion in Ann Arbor.

2. The Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reports that "More people are bringing bicycles along on their mass transit commutes." The story has links to four videos on bicycling.

Bicycles are the way to deal with "the last mile" issue of commuting by transit, because in most instances, your final destination doesn't coincide with the transit station/stop where your public transit ride ends. It also adds a great deal of span to your ability to accomplish tasks and get things done within your greater neighborhood, provided that there are amenities present. (Bikes are faster than walking.)

3. Related to this is thinking about transit stations in a new dimension. Sure, some stations have mailboxes and ATM machines, but over time, more amenities could be added to station footprints, just as in the old days of the small service-oriented commercial districts that popped up around railroad stations.

This would dovetail with my idea that in the hours that the subway system is closed, there could be a "Nite Owl" bus service paralleling the routes, stopping at the stations, and making stops en route if requested by riders.

If you had a diner say at the Fort Totten Station, it could become a hotbed of hopefully positive late night activity as part of the station area.