The cost of convenience around the neighborhood
When I was in third grade or so, I saw the man who lived across the street coming home from wherever he had been. He surprised me by pulling into our driveway. He came in to talk with my parents. No surprise there; to this day he’s among their best friends. But then he got in his car and drove across the street to his driveway.
That seemed very odd. Why didn’t he pull into his own driveway and walk across the (dead end) street to our house? That was in the middle of the 1950s. Today, maybe it doesn’t seem odd at all.
I didn’t realize it, but our small-town neighborhood was a new type of neighborhood springing up all over the country at that time. Hardly anything but other people’s houses were within walking distance. Such neighborhoods were designed on the assumption that everyone had a car and would drive everywhere. Very convenient.
The costly convenience of driving everywhere
I think gas cost something like $0.289 a gallon back then, and was pretty stable. Now, of course, it is much more expensive, and prices seldom stay the same for more than a week or two at a time.
The US now needs to import a third of its oil, and with the rest of the world aspiring to our standard of living, it isn’t cheap any more. No one wants to live anywhere near a refinery, so there aren’t enough of them to meet the demand at certain key times of the year. At least we can build cars that don’t foul the air as much as they did in the ’50s.
But high gas prices are not the only cost of the convenience of driving everywhere. Consider:
- Many neighborhoods have no sidewalks, even on busy streets. That discourages walking even for recreation.
- Making walking in the neighborhood inconvenient or even dangerous encourages people to drive even short distances. In other words, instead of moving their bodies they sit. They let the car expend all the energy.
- After a while, getting out of the car and walking can seem like an unreasonable imposition. So fast-food stores and others provided the drive-thru .
- Therefore, besides making us dependent on foreign oil, our cars are making us fat.
The modern lawn
I remember the day I was pushing my noisy gas lawn mower and it dawned on me that modern technology had provided me with a machine so that I could do what used to be the job of the family goat.
Zoning regulations would not let me buy a goat even if I especially wanted to. I don’t think anyone has ever managed to teach the goat a difference between grass or weeds (eat these) and shrubbery, flowers, or vegetables (don’t eat these).
In older urban neighborhoods, houses are very close together. There are lots of tall old trees. Lawns are small and grass doesn’t grow especially well. It’s fairly quick and easy to mow them with a non-motorized reel mower.
Over the last sixty years or so, houses are built farther apart on larger tracts of land. We have come to love our big lawns. Those old-fashioned mowers just won’t cut it any more (no apology for the pun).
