Re-Urbanization - Imagine No Personal Vehicle. Imagine Great Public Transportation

Brill Bullets were beautiful Interurban Trolleys
that were built by the J.G. Brill Company.
Lafayette Street in Schenectady (Circe 1931).
(Photo: Efner Research Center).

.

I imagine my hometown of Schenectady and Scotia, New York like it may have looked 85 years ago - with a population concentrated around the city - around where people worked, shopped and socially interacted.  A trolley running down the State Street with bus routes to and from the trolly stops.  People lived in an urbanized environment - simply "close".  We visited the country on our Sunday car rides or when we went on vacation.  Then came the 40s, 50s and 60s; cheap gas, a prospering economy, and a DOD project that became our Interstate Highway System (for moving troops quickly).  We went from a 15 minute commute to work to a 60 minute commute to work from the country / suburbs.  I question the differences in quality of life, as a people, between the times of the early part of the 20th century and what we evolved into today.  Would this have happened if energy had not been cheap, the Interstate Highway System had not been built and the times been less prosperous?  Maybe we would have been riding Brill's Baby Bullets to work and around town.

Now reset the clock to the current day.  Expensive energy, an aging interstate system in need of repair and a changing mindset where time is more valuable spent with family and friends than commuting on I95 (add to that the potential of shrinking service / professional wages).

I like San Francisco as my model city.  An arterial commuter train system (BART) that interconnects several major cities in the Bay Area.  A bus/subway system (MUNI) that connects from BART around and within the major cities and then free "around town" bus/trolleys that provide in town transportation between commerce and shopping locations. Oh, and just in case you need a car for a couple hours - walk up to the corner and get in a Zip Car - No more need for a personal vehicle - rent it by the hour (Zip, now owned by Avis).


People will say "that they don't live near a city"... then for the sake of sleeping in the county, they will pay more for energy, pay more for vehicles, pay more for insurance and drive on roads that will remain in disrepair as the population will not pass the tax bonds to pay for the repair and replacement of roads they don't drive. An interesting article > Why This CEO Doesn’t Own A Car: The Rise Of Dis-Ownership.

 Now imagine inner city (big city) high speed walkways (like in airports),  Imagine convenient mass transportation, like in Portland, Oregon and high speed railways between large regional cities.

Which cities are ahead of the curve?  List of U.S. cities with high transit ridership from Wikipedia.





Will our cities and communities of the future look more like a Jetson's cartoon?

"Local" will become much more important in out future.

Quality of life will be redefined - In our lifetime.

Bob

 Connect to me on LinkedIn

www.linkedin.com/in/robertleonard5699

Follow me on Twitter
@T4Leonard

Re-Urbanization - Let's Start with Reining in the Banks

Until the 1970s, banking was governed primarily by state laws, and banks could do business only in their home states. From the mid-70s through 1999, a series of laws deregulated banking eliminating state lines until banking became completely deregulated; those laws and acts included:

• Marquette Decision (1978)
• The Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 (DIDMCA)
• Alternative Mortgage Transactions Parity Act of 1982 (AMTPA)
• The Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994 (IBBEA)
• The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), also referred to as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 

In my opinion, deregulating the banks was one of the biggest mistakes that our government made (allowed) over the last 30 years, but I can only say that in hindsight.  I believed in deregulation of all commerce; only wisdom has taught me differently.

So why did deregulation occur?  Technology, competitive opportunity and expansion, a spreading of the capital to where it was needed, and finally, an economy of scale - a more efficient system.  All of these reasons make sense - most occurred and some did not ("...banks peak in efficiency when they reach the size of a small regional institution". says Stacy Mitchell of The Institute of Self Reliance - watch her TED presentation).

So why was deregulation bad? Very simply, money no longer had to stay close to home.  Banks could invest your money in projects and products anywhere.  Since the idea of business is "to profit", money went to where the most profits could be obtained (the money business is much different than services or manufacturing where location in significant).  Sometimes the money went to bad mortgage instruments - the rules allowed this.  Sure there were problems like the ones the media made big, but things like big bonuses were earned by creative smart people working within the rules - oh yeah... Having banks working within state boundaries would have greatly limited the size of those bonuses as well - simply, the market would not have been as large.

So what is the solution here?  Keep money local - local mortgages, local business, local commerce, local people.  In my opinion, moving banks back to being state regulated would solve the problem.  This is a monumental task that some people would scream out to be impossible to accomplish. It's not.  It was done with ATT (modern history)  and Standard Oil (early in the 20th century); in both cases, the sum of the parts were greater then the whole as competition and creativity boomed.  So, how?  It will be a process much like, but much easier (IMHO) than the aforementioned examples.  Regretfully, only the people would share this interests - the banks, their lobbyists, and most importantly, the money would have no interest in this.  I would be perceived by the money (and thus the media) as a flaming liberal (whatever that means).

Bob

hmmmm...  no commercial opportunity here - just more foundation to the Local idea.

.

Re-Urbanization - Imagine No Personal Vehicle.

Brill Bullets were beautiful Interurban Trolleys
that were built by the J.G. Brill Company.
Lafayette Street in Schenectady (Circe 1931).
(Photo: Efner Research Center).

.

I imagine my hometown of Schenectady and Scotia, New York like it may have looked 80 years ago - with a population concentrated around the city - around where people worked, shopped and socially interacted.  A trolley running down the main street(s) with bus routes to and from the trolly stops.  People lived in an urbanized environment - simply "close".  We visited the country on our Sunday car rides or when we went on vacation.  Then came the 40s, 50s and 60s; cheap gas, a prospering economy, and a DOD project that became our Interstate Highway System (for moving troops quickly).  We went from a 15 minute commute to work to a 60 minute commute to work from the country.  I question the differences in quality of life, as a people, between the times of the early part of the 20th century and what we evolved into.  Would this have happened if energy had not been cheap, the Interstate Highway System had not been built and the times been less prosperous?  Maybe we would have been riding Brill's Baby Bullets to work and around town.

Now reset the clock to the current day.  Expensive energy, an aging interstate system in need of repair and a changing mindset where time is more valuable spent with family and friends than commuting on I95 (add to that the potential of shrinking service / professional wages).

I like San Francisco as my model city.  An arterial commuter train system (BART) that interconnects several major cities in the Bay Area.  A bus/subway system (MUNI) that connects from BART around and within the major cities and then free "around town" bus/trolleys that provide in town transportation between commerce and shopping locations. Oh, and just in case you need a car for a couple hours - walk up to the corner and get in a Zip Car - No more need for a personal vehicle - rent it by the hour. UPDATE: 1/2/2013 - NBCNews.com: Avis buying Zipcar in $500 million all-cash deal.


People will say "that they don't live near a city"... then for the sake of sleeping in the county, they will pay more for energy, pay more for vehicles, pay more for insurance and drive on roads that will remain in disrepair as the population will not pass the tax bonds to pay for the repair and replacement of roads they don't drive.  UPDATE: 1/3/2013 - Why This CEO Doesn’t Own A Car: The Rise Of Dis-Ownership.

Now imagine inner city/town high speed walkways (like in airports), convenient mass transportation, like in Portland, Oregon and high speed railways between large regional cities.

Which cities are ahead of the curve?  10 Best Cities for Public Transportation per U.S.News & World Report February 2011 article..


Will our cities and communities of the future look more like a Jetson's cartoon?

"Local" will become much more important in out future. Buy.Eat.Live.Local.

Quality of life will be redefined - In our lifetime.

Re-Urbanization - The Re-Urbanization of America - Reinventing Local

As much as I would like to take credit for this/these prediction(s), I can't as there are already so many government and business studies that talk about this trend, the whys and the outcomes.  What I will point out, in a series of blog entries, are the business opportunities that I believe will be created during, and as an outcome of, this evolution.

The biggest causes of the coming re-urbanization are somewhat obvious:

• Energy Costs
• Water Availability
• Services Availability
• Quality of Life

The whys and the outcomes are a bit less obvious.  Then there are the "Wheres"; where should you be in 2020 or 2030 and beyond.

I will relate this evolution to business and economic changes - changes that represent opportunities for some and a demise for others.

The Buy Local campaigns we see and hear about are just the beginning - some think they are just lip service put on by the local chambers - I believe they are beginnings of a change to self sustaining and complete socioeconomic microcosms - wow, that sounds way to technical; let's just call it our Hometown.

And yes, my thoughts and predictions are an opportunity I am betting on. - Buy. Eat. Live. Local. TM

I wish I were in my 20s again.