Unless my upcoming job search proves a lot more successful than I expect it to, I imagine I’ll be stuck driving my old 1996 Toyota Camry for two or three more years. I’m fine with this, as it’s a great car that will likely have few problems lasting me that long and it’s served me very well over the years. I like the boring little thing.
Still, that doesn’t keep me from dreaming about owning a nicer, shinier, newer vehicle someday.
There are a pretty large number of reasons why I’ve thought for a while that a hybrid vehicle might be a great fit for me as a my first car purchase. The part of me that cares about the environment and sees a green vehicle as a small way to help is one reason. Perhaps a bigger reason is the fact that the Prius, my current hybrid of choice, packs a whole lot of technology for your car buying buck which plays nicely to my infatuation with gadgets and gizmos.
I could go on, but the point is, many different parts of me want a Prius.
Whenever I dwell on the subject for any length of time, however, I often find my mind wandering back to the same environmental quandary: How in the world is a country like the U.S. going to wean itself off of its reliance on (and love of) cars and rework its infrastructure to one that’s more sustainable?
The issue is perhaps a little simpler with big cities. The dense space makes it, at least theoretically, easier to make public transportation a viable option and to arrange things so citizens don’t have to travel as far to get to where they need to go. I don’t want to make this sound easy or anything, but comparatively it seems like they are much better off than somewhere like, oh I don’t know, Oklahoma, as a wild and completely random example.
Living in a place like Oklahoma really gives me a good perspective of exactly how difficult this sustainability thing is really going to be. Oklahoma actually might be one of the most prime examples around of a state constructed with the exact opposite of sustainability in mind. Our entire infrastructure, every road, every interstate, every city, was constructed with the boom of the interstate and the automobile in mind and now we’re nothing but one giant, tangled, spread-out mess of roads, flat land, and lots and lots of space.
How in the world is a mess like this ever going to become sustainable?
For a great many people in Oklahoma, myself included, going without a car is not simply difficult, it’s flat out impossible. Public transportation is a joke when it even exists and things are just too darn far apart to make anything other than driving a personal vehicle a viable means for getting place to place.
Norman is fairly small, but even here I’d hate to think how much of a hassle it would be not to have a car here. The giant urban wasteland that is Oklahoma City is another beast entirely.
All of this is to say nothing of the political climate around here that is, shall we say, not exactly the eco-friendliest around. We’ll leave it at that for the scope of this post.
Some European cities have a built in advantage because they were designed before cars even existed, so they are much smaller and more compact, making walking and public transportation much easier. Even some larger American cities could conceivably work this way in the future, though most are not even close to set up for this kind of thing now.
But it seems to me as if most of Oklahoma would have to be wiped off of the map and rebuilt for a more compact, car-free design to work. To say the least, I’d imagine the costs to make a place like Oklahoma “green” would be astronomical.
Hybrids are cool and more efficient and everything, but they’re a stop-gap measure at best. What we really need to do is find entirely new sources of energy and, if possible, move away from cars altogether.
But even were that to be possible, where would that leave a place like Oklahoma? How are we going to adapt to the sustainable future?
My guess: lag way behind even the rest of the slow-moving world and not do anything about it for as long as possible.
Hey, at least it gives us time to consider our options.
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