This Stuff Isn’t New

Bit by bit, we’re moving into our new office space at the Roanoke Valley-Alleghannewexpanded, commuter-store type services out of our downtown Roanoke location, including transit pass sales (with a credit card!), bike rentals, ridematching, and more.

In the short term, though, you can see that we’ve at least started decorating.

I mention this because we’ve dipped into the historical record for our inspiration, not out of nostalgia, but out of a sense of perspective.  You might be able to see that these three posters, each dating from World War 2 (and the center one original, courtesy of a coworker), bear exhortations to conserve trips for the war effort.  In particular, I found the one on the left to be interesting:

“Don’t waste transportation.”

The wording is a bit clunky but remarkably accurate.  Not, “Don’t waste fuel.”  Not, “Don’t waste rubber” (which is really what these posters were getting at).  But, “Don’t waste transportation,” which I read as “Don’t waste trips” (reinforced by the query in the middle poster, “Is YOUR trip necessary?”)

I doubt the poster copy writers were thinking about things like urban density and transportation demand management, but that’s what they were getting at: the idea that transportation has a number of primary and secondary impacts, from fuel and resource consumption from the trip itself; to environmental impacts such as air quality and climate change; to social impacts such as congestion, commute times, and road rage; to development impacts such as suburban sprawl, economic isolation, and more.

This was a purely patriotic (if not jingoistic) call for sacrifice to meet the immediate need of materials for the war, but in reality our needs have only grown, in size and scope.  No longer concerned solely with the energy and natural resources to run a military operation, we’re looking at things like peak oil and a transportation infrastructure that is completely at the mercy of the oil market; at development patterns established over half a century ago that need to be radically changed into more sustainable, more compact, and more humane systems; at energy sources which are increasingly out of our control, that are increasingly expensive to get at and have terrible impacts on human health and the very shape of our landscapes.  Further, our transportation modes intersect not only with our land use and our environmental quality, but our personal health, as well.  “Wasting transportation” has the effect of wasting time, money, years of our life and even, to an extent, our country’s position in the world.

The U.S. has a history of calling its citizens to service and sacrifice, only in this case the sacrifice really isn’t one.  Changing modes, building smarter, living closer to where you work, biking to the store every once in a while, these all result in measurable benefits, from saving money to losing weight to getting to spend more time with your family, to better real estate values, to more sustainable and manageable cities.  Even incremental change – one day a week, one weekend a month, whatever it happens to be – has an immediate and real benefit.

These exhortations may be vintage, but they haven’t gone out of style.