Thoughts on highways

Recently I had an opportunity to hitch a ride along the famous interstate highway system in the US. I had heard a lot of paeans about how amazing and well maintained the highways are for the average motorist. Till now the woefully limited amount of travel that I have done was limited to hopping from one airport to other or traveling in night to catch a flight in the morning. So the first experience of zipping along the interstate in a car was surreal to say the least. Though I was not the one driving, the 600 odd miles that we covered gave me ample time to appreciate how easy motoring has become on these highways particularly now with online maps when one doesn't even have to be that careful about navigation either, not that it is that complicated to rely completely on the well designed directions on the roads themselves. Curiously just couple of days after this I happened to come across a documentary on the very same topic "The End of Suburbia" dealing with the oil problem and also the effect these highways have on the global energy crisis. Some of the salient points from the documentary are eye opening to say the least. Here are some thoughts which came to my mind, perhaps worth noting down.

The twin factors of major reforms in the New Deal era and the bungling of Churchill to revert back to gold standard, which initiated the decline of the British economic might, had set the wheels in motion for emergence of the US as the dominant western economic power. Still even in the early 1940s Japan, Germany, US and UK along with USSR were still jockeying for the dominant position in the political as well as economic spheres. The end of WW2 with the decimation of Germany and Japan and though victorious the extensive damage to the Russian economy from war efforts and the unraveling of the British imperial dominance was the turning point in the race for global domination. The US was the only major industrialists nation unscathed from the ravages of the war and had built up a huge war industry to a large extent sustained the allied war effort. This war time boom needed to be sustained in long them as the assembly lines of Ford and GM which were rigged to manufacture tanks returned to their prewar operations. Crucial decisions at this time utilised this early US advantage so well as to make US the pre-eminent economic power till date. The first step was the Marshall plan for reconstruction of Europe which would kick start the nearly destroyed European economy and hence form a captive market for the US consumer goods.

Then there was a national reconstruction plan to create 2.7 million new houses for the returning war veterans. This the movie claims led to the emergence of the suburbia in public imagination to the extent that 50% of US population now resides in these urban sprawls. Apparently the initial popularity of such a living concept was due to the grimness of life in the industrial cities of the early 20th century which the public wanted to escape from. Social aspects of living in far flung verdant clusters aside, where daily commute is upto 100 miles, the suburbia made a compelling economic sense for sustaining the US auto industry. For starters the population density is low in the suburbs to sustain any public transport like buses, trams or trains. Further they are all sustained by stand alone superstores which makes it imperative to own personal means of transport. It is rumoured that auto, oil and tyre companies at the end of WW2 came together to buy out and destroy the existing rail road systems. The effect of this was so devastating on the rail road system that US probably now has a worse railway network than even 3rd world nations. Comparing this to the European intercontinental railways and the German, Japanese and now Chinese bullet trains just shows the dominance of wasteful automobile based transport over more efficient public transport in the US. This woeful state of the railroad system meant that transportation is dependent on an intercontinental trucking network across the US dependent on the highways! Curiously the existing highway system in 1950s was not good enough and hence there was frequent axle breakdowns during the average intercontinental trucking expeditions. Now we had a compelling case for the building of the super highways that the present interstate are! The economics of this intercontinental trucking system is so bad that people in Ontario get their salads from California after several thousand miles of trucking wherein the average cost of 1 calorie worth of food is accompanied by energy expenditure of 16 calories! Back to the suburbia, the emergence of super highways led to property development along a narrow strip adjoining these roads so that residents could use the fast commute that these highways offered. Now there was a vicious cycle of enforcement in operation so that the residents staying along these highways sometimes were so far off from the city centres where they worked , that the average daily commute amounted to 100 miles, needles to say the original motivation of calm country living was being lost somewhere with traffic congestions making one spend more and more time on the roads! The statistics of all this is even more staggering. US with 5% world population now has more than 30% of the cars worldwide and uses 30% of the oil produced daily worldwide to run these on commutes from far flung suburban centres and intercontinental shipping operations. Even neglecting the perilous effect on environment, the sustainability of this whole enterprise in the light of dwindling oil reserves calls for actions to secure supplylines and hence the recent Iraq expedition. It is just not by coincidence that the US government is so keen on promoting democracy in Iraq, Iran and the Caspian states which together control most of the oil reserves while there are far more dictatorial regimes starting from nearby Cuba to Zimbabwe to Pakistan and North Korea! Perhaps all wars are driven by the mundane economic necessity of ensuring supply of limited global resources than inspired by some lofty ideals of democracy and human rights!

All this begs one to question the oft repeated platitude about captialism and market forces being the most efficient resource allocators! Efficiency and optimality, actual or imagined comes at a price ... and that seems to be the wars which sustain the modern brand of market capitalism, calling for the most wasteful expenditure of economic and human resources.