Tales of Our Times
By JOHN BARTLIT
New Mexico Citizens
for Clean Air & Water
The Hardest Parts To Create Are The Miracles Of Change
A mix of concerns stirs ideas about making changes to our nation’s private transportation. This juncture is a good time to look back at how the system grew in the first place. Signposts show the road traveled.
The auto story involves many parts and includes an impressive run of good luck in how things stood at the time. The phasing of steps will never again be as plain to see.
The country’s first working oil well was drilled at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859. The name that history associates with it is Col. Edwin Drake. In 1859 the U.S. had a population of 30 million. The interest in crude oil was the market for kerosene, a good lamp fuel that was much cheaper than whale oil. The fledgling oil business was a spoiler for whalers, and a lifesaver for sperm whales.
A bare 20 years later, Edison’s ingenious little electric bulb began capturing the lighting market from oil, as oil had from whaling. Another 30 years takes us to 1908. Henry Ford’s first Model T rolled from a Detroit workshop onto a nearby street. Oil again had a market. The U.S. population was 90 million.
Then all that was needed was paving to towns that drivers wanted to visit; frequent gas stations and pumps beside the paving; refineries to turn crude oil into gasoline, not lamp oil; and gasoline tank trucks. Oh. And materials to make tires last safely for long distances at high speeds. And widespread repair sites, stocked with spare parts and people who know how cars work. And tow trucks.
Then came business competitors who sold better products and services for less money—onward to mass methods of supply that raised convenience and lowered costs. How it all happened was no miracle. Or maybe it was.
Imagine all the contests that occurred among innovation, laws, and consumer demands. The parts grew up together, like siblings. They learned as they grew. They schooled each other at countless business intersections. The parts were aligned by chance, skill, and years. “Aligned” means cars had enough customers, enough cars were built for the customers, enough crude oil made enough suitable gasoline for motors that would run cars to places car buyers wanted to go.
Now for today. Today’s U.S. population is 330 million. The U.S. population of cars is about 270 million. Gas stations number perhaps 150,000 and declining. As a guess, an average gas station has 10, more or less, calibrated, certified, and computerized pumps. In a word, the picture is not 1908.
People talk about changing fuels or fueling methods. New ideas come down the pike. We hear about biofuels, electric cars, fuel cells … others to come. The scale and complexity of interests involved now are orders of magnitude greater than when the system first sprouted. Many large businesses have stocks of trained workers, senior officers, and supply chains that stretch across the country and beyond. The roads are still useful.
So the natural forces of enterprise have a harder task to change out parts of the system. Similar interchanges have kept the U.S. from switching as yet to the metric system. That maze has too many decision points to get through, and too many layered motives at each point.
Furthermore, transitions by laws, which may or may not shift with voter swings, mesh no easier. Would multiple systems work well? Timing the phase-in of new fuels and fueling technology is in the news, more often in campaign season. Opinions of every variety come from all directions. Broadly, they range from familiar to fresh to far out.
One opinion more, such as mine, would add little to the total. Instead I contribute something else needed these days. I offer this tiny history of our nation’s system of “folk” transportation. It brings to mind problems linked to change. The problems are difficult in proportion to the size and complexity of the complete system. And how much luck and genius go into the task.