Piano Lessons, Carbon Footprints, Economic Choice and Big Sorts

After weeks of conferences and speaking gigs, I’m finally back to trying to be a good mom (and a good blogger!) for a bit.  But even in Mom mode, there’s a lot to learn about how our communities and our economies work, and what we will have to do to move into a successful future.  Here’s some Thoughts from the Front Seat of the Saturn:

It’s Saturday, 12:30 PM, and I am driving my 12 year old from his brother’s soccer game to his piano lesson.  He is in the backseat studying a catalog (instead of reviewing the music that I asked him to look at).  So I have a couple of minutes of quiet — rare on a weekend.   

The piano lesson is in a music store about 5 minutes’ drive from my house.  Relatively convenient.  But I was giving someone recommendations on piano teachers this morning, and as I am driving I am listing to myself at least four teachers who are closer to where I live.  At least one is within an easy walk.  I am fairly well versed on carbon footprints and sustainability and the like, and I know that I am making a far greater negative impact on the environment by driving the kid to a place two miles away instead of sending him to walk two-tenths of a mile up the hill.   So why am I doing this? 

The teacher my son is seeing now is a little different from any other piano teacher he has had in the past.  He’s a professional jazz musician, and the 12 year old is clearly sick of the Suzuki he’s been doing for years and ready to do something different.  And he’s a young male — first male piano teacher my son has had.  Despite scheduling issues, despite having to drive him there, the kid is doing better and more interested in the piano than he has been for a long time.   The grandmotherly woman up the hill, I know, teaches conventionally and focuses on the classics.  I think the kid would have dropped out by now. 

When I was a kid, my piano teacher and my voice teacher were both within walking distance in the small, Bedford Falls-esque town where I grew up.  My parents didn’t pick those two ladies because they were the best around at what they did.  They picked them because they knew these two ladies, and because I could walk there.  Which meant that my mom didn’t have to load my two younger brothers into the car and drag them along.  A good deal all around. 

Except…. how good were they?  Were they the best we could get?  I don’t know, and I don’t think my parents knew…. or were concerned about that.  They limited their choices to a walkable radius. 

The difference between my experience and my son’s experience is subtle but profound.  I could have just sent him to the closest piano teacher, but I didn’t.  Every time we have changed piano teachers, we have done research — what teaching method are you using, how do you teach theory, etc. etc.  We have balanced the costs in terms of time and travel, but we came at it from a perspective of having multiple potential choices.  My parents didn’t ask questions like that, probably because they didn’t have that frame of reference.  There was a teacher nearby, and that was good enough.

This is a deep, and I think often overlooked, challenge to those of us who want to promote walkable, non-car-dependent lifestyles.  We no longer live at the scale of Bedford Falls, we live at the scale of the region, as my friend Bill Miller says.  Living at the scale of the region has accustomed us to having a regional scale of choices — not just for piano teachers, but for all of our purchases, services and activities.  I don’t just make my economic choices from within the one-mile radius of my house, as I would have in the days when Bedford Falls was built, before the car.   I make them at the scale of what I can conveniently reach in my car – a much broader radius.   I can buy my groceries at a store less than a mile from my house, but I know that I can get better produce, the kind of apples my husband likes, healthier cereal choices, etc. at a store three miles away.  Guess where I am going?

If we want people to seriously decrease their driving, and benefit from all of the health and environmental and societal benefits that we are told would come with that, we are going to have to deal with this question.  We are going to have to figure out the balance between widened economic choice expectations and more compact lifestyles.  From my perspective, I can see three alternatives,  but each these requires significant, life-changing tradeoffs. 

1. We can make a dedicated effort to go back to the Bedford Falls model of development — residential areas focused on a neighborhood – scale retail center that provides all their basic needs.  A very popular idea among walkability supporters and New Urbanists.  But the critical and oftenoverlooked word there is basic.  If you don’t like the one grocer, the one coffee shop, the one doctor that your walkable residential area can support, what do you do?  What do you do if your child is allergic to wheat?  Or wants to be a jazz pianist?  Bedford Falls didn’t try to accommodate the full range of variations — it couldn’t.  There weren’t enough people needing those specialized services to make it economically feasible.   Anything specialized could not be supported in that environment.  You either had to find it outside Bedford Falls (“Get in the car, son”) or you did without. 
2. We can build massive, interlacing transportation networks.  In Chicago, for example, I could theoretically put my son on the train in Skokie and send him to a world-class piano teacher in Streeterville.  Environmentally friendly, I can live in my walkable community and get him access to a much higher level of training.  Sounds good… except, of course, most U.S. cities don’t have this level of transit system.  And building it, if you don’t already have it (not to mention maintaining it to a level of safety where I am willing to put my 12 year old on it), is incredibly, unbelievably expensive.  Money that we may not have, or that is at best already dedicated to something else.  Which means that to get that network, we will have to make sacrifices — bigger sacrifices that anyone, so far, seems truly willing to admit.      
3. We can re-design our communities to accommodate increasingly finer slices of potential customers — basically clustering the people who are mostly likely to be seeking certain types of services, to provide sufficient mass of customers to support those specialized services within a nice, compact, walkable area.  Which, of course, would be unbelievably complicated… except that we have been doing it already.  Spend the morning in a hip urban neighborhood , and the afternoon in the suburb with the Best School District in the Region, make a list of the people and the stores you see in each location, and you tell me what you see.  Economic choices typically follow the path of least immediate resistance to the things that the chooser wants.

 

The downside?  Complete stratification — of who you see, who your kids know, what you and your neighbors assume, how your environment influences your thinking.  For a powerful overview of how this is impacting political discourse alone, check out Bill Bishop’s book The Big Sort.  Or look at one of those red-blue maps by precinct after November’s election.   

So the result of my drive to the music teacher is…. a pretty extensive lack of answers.  And a headache, which might have been from the 14 variations on “Twinkle, Twinkle” coming through the violin teacher’s door into the waiting room.  What do you think?