I just came back from a trip in Southern California. Beautiful climate, wonderful natural environment, but covered with houses, condos, strip malls and highways: one massive suburban development for hundreds of miles.
And I was thinking – and this applies to all suburbs, of which southern California is an extreme example – what the future of transportation is there. These places are built on the concept of a car. But there does not seem much room for further massive road development from any number of perspectives: budgetary, environmental, public opinion, and even sheer physical space. And if the price of fuel doubles, triples or quadruples in the near future [not impossible], what happens then to the car as the central transportation source?
On the other hand, there is no apparent alternative to the automobile. Suburbs are not built in a way that is conducive to public transportation even where trips are to and from a central core. Even in suburbs that surround central city cores, more and more trips are between suburbs, rather than just to and from a central core. And in some places, there is no real central core – with southern California being a particular example. In these places public transport is difficult.
Are these places screwed if and when the shit hits the transportation fan in the future?
In my opinion no, but we may eventually be faced with a need for a massive rethinking of transportation approaches. For example, you could rebuild or rededicate existing highway corridors as public transit corridors and restrict personal auto use to getting to and from the corridors. That would be less than ideal from the perspective of many (people like their cars!), but still would be realistically possible. The shit hitting the fan would also affect how future housing and business development occurs, meaning that development would be much less aligned along current patters of sprawl and would centred around transportation hubs.
In any case – to respond to g’s original question – I don’t think that the future is massive building of new highways (toll or otherwise) to facilitate further sprawl. I suspect that the days of this approach are numbered.
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