I had to pick up a new electric car the other day. It gave me a chance to see how other people experience time and distance.
We think of these as constant but they’re not. They depend on how you get there.
Car drivers experience distance at a minute per mile. That’s what you expect on a freeway. When you leave it, you try to get that feeling back. You look jealously at other lanes, and your vision tunnels into a battle for space. Life becomes a video game.
I don’t experience time and distance that way on my e-bike. If something is 5 miles away or less, that’s 30 minutes. A 21st century urban environment accommodates this. In a car it’s 30 minutes to downtown Atlanta from Decatur, plus 10 minutes to park. On a bike it’s a 40-minute ride. This infuriates drivers, who can’t conceive of someone getting there ahead of them.
On foot, a walk of just a few blocks seems to take forever. What can you reach in your city, on a 30-minute walk? Trains and buses take you further, faster, but they always drop you back into that slow environment. Transit is for walkers. It’s why the poor use transit.
These experiences of time and distance define life in American cities. The constant is time. The constant is 30 minutes.
Drivers think the outer suburbs are 30 minutes from downtown. E-bikes seek safety within 5 miles of where their owners live. For drivers, walkers are there to get run over. For many drivers, E-Transport looks like walking.
My Trip to EV Land
If I live in Alpharetta, 30 minutes should get me anywhere within 30 miles. State policy is geared toward this. Freeways are widened because Alpharetta drivers see themselves at the center of 30 minutes to the mountains of north Georgia, the canyons near Georgia Tech, the fun of Lake Lanier or Lake Allatoona, along with everything in between. (Note that the train ends on the right side of this picture, and there are no plans to extend the line.)
Inside Atlanta, 30 minutes on an e-bike gives me a living radius of 5 miles. But that’s fine. My grocery store, my doctors, and all my favorite restaurants are within those 5 miles. What I want along the way is safety. Atlanta’s transportation policy aims to isolate Alpharetta traffic onto the freeways, or a few wide stroads, and offer trails so these can be avoided.
It’s near those destinations, and along those stroads, that most incidents happen. Cities must accommodate both e-transport going at 10-15 mph. Drivers who want to go 60 can’t, or won’t, get their heads around that.
A pick-up ran over a cyclist and drove off just an hour before I hit the same intersection in my neighborhood just yesterday. It’s a war, and e-transport users are taking too many of the casualties. We need more drivers to see the inside of jail cells. But we also need all the city’s road infrastructure to accommodate e-transport.
Change is coming. Alpharetta is getting bike trails and as more people use E-Transport, demand for routes is growing. E-bikes change the biking game, from recreation to transportation. Suburban density is increasing, so that within Alpharetta moms can take their kids around on cargo bikes, workers can get to jobs inside the area, while dads can practice their packing and racking skills on the weekend.
Why Transit is Ignored
It’s what is happening in Alpharetta, and suburbs like it, that will change the E-Transport debate. Accepting E-Transport in suburbs leads to accepting it in cities. (Not shown is the H Mart almost 1 mile up from the top of the pink line.)
This is why transit gets no consideration in current transportation debates. Even if a bus can take you 5 miles in 30 minutes, or a train 10 miles, you’re still not at your destination when you get to the station. You’re a walker, and in modern cities walkers are the lowest form of life.
I saw that on the train. The train itself was modern, but homeless men were sprawling in seats at mid-day. Lazy men were dropping drinks on the floor. Panhandlers roamed through the cars. Dirt, smells, and horrible sights were everywhere. There was no security.
Still, I was lucky. The train left me just a mile and a half from the car dealer. Walking that distance, of course, took another half an hour. It was a trip all by itself.
For one thing, I had to cross an enormous parking lot where I was nothing but a target. Then there was a 7 lane stroad near the freeway intersection. (I chatted up one of the sewer workers there so I could wave to him when I drove back the other way.) There is no sidewalk in front of the dealer, so I had to trudge over a culvert to get there.
The guys in front of the dealership assumed I was a bum, which was sort of my intention. I simply said, “I’m here to pay for a car,” and enjoyed their confused looks as I walked in. Waving to the sewer worker on the way back home was also fun. But here I was to experience time and distance again as a driver. Once I hit the freeway I wanted everything to be out of my way.
Conclusions
In modern cities we think of travel time as 30 minutes. That’s 30 miles in a car, 5 miles on E-Transport, 1 mile on foot. Optimists and advocates may talk about transit, and they may talk about walking, but they have no financial constituency, thus little political currency.
The E-Transport Revolution can, over time, make some form of transit possible, by creating density, and making short distances easier to navigate. But it’s the middle class that will change our cities, and for now we want safe bike routes, period.
