2008.05.22
The Ideal No-Car Life?
I was just reading a short post on one of CNN’s business blogs on the rising price of oil (article here). Todd Benjamin, International Finance Editor, writes:
On May 7 I wrote a blog about the possibility of oil hitting $200 a barrel. Since then, oil has continued to move higher. And now the futures market is pricing oil at close to $140 as far away as December 2016. Even by this year’s end there are predictions that oil, trading at $129 dollars a barrel now, will reach $150 a barrel.
That’s the forecast of T. Boone Pickens. He’s a man you may not have of heard of before, but he’s well known in the oil world and well known among many on Wall Street. When he speaks, people listen. He speaks in language easily understood. His reasoning for oil hitting $150 a barrel by year end is simple. “Eighty five million barrels of oil a day is all the world can produce and the demand is for 87 million,” he said in an interview.
His prediction of course, follows Goldman Sachs which sees oil prices averaging $141 in the second half of the year. Goldman Sachs really turned heads when it predicted earlier this month that oil would reach $200 a barrel within 6 months to two years. Oil a year ago was trading at less than half its current price.
There have been so many articles recently on how gas prices are affecting families, marriages, businesses in the U.S. So I started thinking, what is the ideal no-car life like? Then I realized, I’m living it.
In Tokyo, the megalopolis that has been my home for the last 5 years, all apartment listings include the time it takes to WALK to the nearest bus or train station. This is a small, compact country without the luxury of wide open spaces that has encouraged, then necessitated, the need for transportation by automobile (much to the chagrin of the domestic divisions of Japanese automakers).
Walking is a way of life here, from those who live near the city center (think Manhattan in NYC), to those who live two hours away in the very farthest suburbian towns. Trains make such lives possible, and have shaped the culture of this nation. Stations are hubs, where restaurants, supermarkets, stores concentrate and through which you pass on your way home from work. This means that I buy fresh food several times a week because the supermarket is along the short walk between the station and my apartment.
Public transporation–punctual and efficient–combines with walking to make owning and using a car in this city a casual luxury, to be used only if you have the money to pay for parking space, and to be used only on weekends. My company, in fact, prohibits its Tokyo office employees from using any type of motor vehicle as well as bicycles for fear of accident liabilities. Only in Tokyo can such a thing happen.
It takes me 45-50 minutes door to door to get to work. I am walking or standing (sitting if lucky) on the train during that time reading the newspaper, reading a novel, writing email on my cell phone. I suppose if I tried hard, I could keep my walking time to under 30 minutes, but I estimate I walk at least an hour a day. Productive and healthy, I’d say.
And, Tokyoites don’t have to worry about drinking and driving since they don’t drive. (The $3000 per person riding in a car for DUI is another pretty convincing discouragement to refrain from drinking and driving. So for a car with four people, the drunk driver plus the three passengers will each receive a $3000 bill if caught. That’s $12,000!!!)
I’m sure the experts will say that residents of Tokyo find other ways to produce carbon dioxide, but at the very least this is a city that makes avoiding the use of a car very easy.
