AUTHOR James Howard Kunstler was in town Wednesday to give a talk promoting his new book, The Long Emergency. For those of you who have never read him, Kunstler believes we are now at the peak of the oil supply curve and that the subsequent and imminent drop in oil production will force us to change how we live. Soon, he predicts, automobile-dependent, suburban big-box culture will be economically unfeasible for most, forcing a return to cities and towns built upon traditional, pre-modernist planning principles. When you look, he says, at the history of human civilization as a whole, the era of freeways and strip malls, giant parking lots and tract housing subdivisions will be seen as a 60-year anomaly.
In his 2002 book, The City and Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Kunstler writes: "In the public debates about suburbia, the idea is almost always put forward that suburbia exists because Americans like it and want it. That may have been so. But if so, it may have been a poor choice. What's more, that people like a way of living, or are accustomed to certain behaviour, does not mean that circumstances will necessarily allow them to continue that way of living. Junkies like their heroin, too, but after a while their veins collapse, their immune systems switch off, and their organs begin to shut down."
Under Kunstler's scenario, not only is the U.S. Interstate highway system doomed to failure, but, eventually, also the worldwide network of commercial aviation.
He envisions a future dominated by local economy, local agriculture, local manufacturing. Among the projects Kunstler suggests is the resurrection of North America's passenger rail system — currently, in Ohio, for example, you can't take a train from Cleveland to Columbus — and the electrification of freight and passenger rail. Russia, for example, in 2002 completed the electrification of its Trans-Siberia line — more than 9,300 kilometres.
This would seem at odds with the position of Jino Distasio, director of the University of Winnipeg's Institute of Urban Studies. Distasio introduced Kunstler at Wednesday's meeting.
Distasio favours a bus rapid
transit proposal for Winnipeg. "At $270 million," wrote Distasio in an
October 2005 article for View from the West, "the plan presents an
excellent and highly cost-effective approach, especially considering
that this figure would barely fund one mile of subway or perhaps a few
miles of LRT track." Bus rapid transit, according to Distasio, is "not
only cost-effective but also afforded great flexibility to adjust
routes and expand service to new residential developments." He believes
a diesel-based, low capacity public transit system will provide
flexibility in serving "new residential developments."
I came to Kunstler's talk not just as an interested citizen, or as a newspaper columnist, but as a representative of Transit Riders' Union of Winnipeg (www.truwinnipeg.org), an organization devoted to advocating pragmatic solutions to the problems Kunstler has been warning us about. After his talk, I informed him of the 1959 Norman D. Wilson subway plan for Winnipeg. Had we followed Wilson's plan, the subway would have been completed by 1980. If we don't get to work digging now, when oil is still reasonably priced, a subway decades in the future will be an economic impossibility.
Those who say Winnipeg first needs more people fail to recognize the obvious fact that, without a properly functioning urban environment, which only true (grade-separated rail) rapid transit can induce, Winnipeg will continue to stagnate.
In a city where much of the population already spends more on transportation than they do on housing, we may, as gas prices climb beyond the means of working-class incomes, see a massive out-migration of our population to other cities whose transportation infrastructures are better equipped to handle The Long Emergency: Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, even Calgary and Edmonton.
Those who dismiss the exorbitant costs of subway construction need to ask themselves: What are the costs of failing to build?