This is a fictional narrative set 20 years in the future…

…Looking back to 2015, it seems that we didn’t take enough of a step forward as much as take a step sideways. I attended Churchill Club’s Annual Technology Trends the year when Bill Gurley made his proclamation of the end of the auto nation to a skeptical or perhaps indentured audience. Many of the panelists and audience were likely investors in Uber, while I had the luxury of arriving in a brand new Audi A3 — not mine of course.

I don’t own a car, but it still seemed a failure of our collective imagination to understand our societal identity without them — not chauffeured cars, not self driving cars, but no cars. Perhaps hypnosis had brought us to attach ourselves to individual wheeled transport. As Barry Lord has suggested, a cultural makeup tied to our external energy sources.

“Whereas people in the coal culture were defined in relation to the production process (as workers or capitalists, for instance), in a world powered by oil and gas we were all encouraged to see ourselves simply as consumers.” — Barry Lord

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I parked the SAV (Shared Autonomous Vehicle) in one of the many commuter lots in Oakland, home was a short bike ride from there. The roadways — if you could still call them that — barely afforded two lanes of SAVs while dedicated bike lanes networked the rest in the city center. There were far fewer private cars, most designated for goods transporters, the wealthy or the nostalgic. Residents were happily out on their evening strolls car-free. Though electricity from renewables was plenty, most cities observed strict limits on light pollution at night — part beautification and part energy use planning.

When the celestial objects first returned to city skies, it turned all our sights upwards. Had we been standing under this marvel all along? I looked around our block and looked up again, I was reminded of my first visit to Bogotá and Mayor Enrique’s words when he transformed that city. Bogotá was the first to earn the first City Climate Leadership Awards but eventually others followed — they had to.

“True democracy is when the city shows by its urban design that a person on a $10 bike or who pays a $2 ticket is equally important to that in a $20,000 car.” — Enrique Peñalosa

I used to imagine the stunned faces of the World Bankers when he informed them that he would not be building a massive underground subway but a far cheaper system of ground buses. Each word in the final contract a pact with its denizens. Those ground buses recently matured into frequent light rail carriages.

Public Automotive Terrestrial Mass Transport.

Alongside was the equally impressive Bike Paths Network. I’m sure book smart financiers and economists must have scratched their heads at Enrique’s ideas of modernization. I wondered when our cities would boldly modernize. Was efficient transportation or automotive profits the aim?

Maybe I was once a bit naive to think our options were binary. It was either people or cars, it was modern urban or simple rural, it was either capitalism or communism. That’s what happens when you attend one too many anarchist bike rides, halting traffic throughout the city — but that’s not really how it played out in the 21st century.

The energy markets made massive shifts through the 2020s, driven primarily by emerging economies elsewhere in the world. A few nations still held tightly to “burn baby burn”, even as the droughts worsened, even as wildfires spread and even as flooding worsened.

They say ideologues and religions don’t fade because we adopt better ones. Ideologues fail because the keepers of them die. In these last 20 years, as the keepers of the well oiled auto economy faded we witnessed not just new transportation modes but also new city models. Cultural transformation driven by economic necessity as much as the availability new energy resources.

Low cost clean energy had finally afforded everyday people pathways beyond the dystopian monoculture of existence. Much the same as the cultural transition from slave labor to coal to oil transformed our societies, so had renewable energy. But it hadn’t come easy.

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It’s easy to measure the weight of our auto dependency in retrospect. First it was the sheer space occupied by the car economy. In the bay area where I’ve lived most of my life now, investors first saw opportunities in idling parking lots. With skyrocketing rental prices, the poor were the first to be evicted but soon cars followed.

In 2015 there were 240 million cars in the US, needing at least 76 billion sqft to store them. Metro centers and residents simply couldn’t justify the cost to urban spaces for such an idle resource. Skyrocketing rental prices meant parking now cost as much as a room in other cities. Capitalism and innovation simply outpaced the lowly car and its trapped capital — about $25k upfront and $10k every year to operate. Traffic used to be terrible so don’t even bother driving. Taxi apps were the first to signal our cultural transformation but I wish then that Obama had let the car industry die. But tastes changed and successive generations simply bought fewer cars and more devices.

It seemed ironic that the state that first built massive freeways eventually dismantled them. Dismantling freeways wasn’t borne out of any radical idea either — Bernie Sanders never presided over the country as hoped — we were just sitting on a infrastructural time bomb. The roads, highways and bridges built in the post WWII boom years needed billions in maintenance. But as we left boom times, as economic interests shifted and the climate worsened, our infrastructure took a collective beating from neglect, floods and severe temperatures. We’d barely had a chance to assess the extent of damage before determining that there was little alternative but to rebuild, privatize and dismantle roadways. In the last 20 years we’d dismantled half of what stood in 2015. Uber eventually lived up to its mission looking beyond the taxi — transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere for everyone.

As urbanization spread through the early 21st century, commutes shortened and the availability of cheap renewable energy offered vastly more alternatives. Urban light rail seemed the preferred policy passage but alongside came dedicated bicycle lines, and soon after electric bikes. Most of the urbanized rarely needed to travel more than 3 miles in a day, and a mixed transport grid did that effectively enough. Converting huge stores of transportation data from tabular models to spatial models also brought much needed visibility and efficiency to our public transit systems. Sharing data opened the flows of people as other transport service providers began tapping the system.

I remember when Davis, CA became the first Californian city to retool the roads for dedicated bike lanes. It seemed novel in 2015 but was commonplace and affordable by now. It gave denizens confidence in urban cycling, and cash strapped cities like ours — contemplating between foreign loans to maintain roadways and dedicated bike lanes — choose the cheaper route. Other cities soon followed.

We’d always suspected that suburbs would be the ghettos of the future — they were simply not future proof. Stagnating economies along with the rising costs of maintaining low density cities meant major rezoning. Traveling through Northern California exposes dilapidated suburbs reclaimed by wilderness.

Now the landscape is dotted with dense urban centers and off the grid micro towns. Decentralization of energy grids gave folks a lot more freedom and the emergence of the micro town phenomenon occurred simultaneously in rural Africa as it did in America. There are limits of course to renewable energy but we’d learned to live within them. Most of us choose to stay in the cities but many left for remote collectives. I suppose when we were chanting “Decentralize Power”, little did we know how true that’d ring decades later.

Tomorrow I’ll ride share an SAV with my bike in tow, to one of those micro towns in Andersen Valley. We’re still transforming from a culture of consumption through sharing and into stewardship. I hope I’ll see that transformation wrap up in my lifetime but I’ve also never needed to see it to believe it.