Tuesday Morning Quarterback has long feared parking space, not resource exhaustion or population pressure, will doom civilization. Already it is hard to park even in many suburban areas of the United States; many shopping malls are hard to park at, and the whole premise of the shopping mall is ease of access by car. Streets in New York City are clogged in part because many drivers are circling looking for places to park. In downtown Bethesda, Md., the small city near my home, it is hard to find a place to pay to park. Every year 16 million new cars, SUVs and pickup trucks are bought in the United States, but few new parking spaces are added. It's even becoming hard to park in remote areas! Grand Canyon National Park is vast, larger than all of sprawling Los Angeles, but five million cars per year now flood into this nature preserve, and all parking spaces are gone by eight in the morning. Visitors become outraged when they discover they have driven hundreds of miles to great outdoors and can't find a place to get out of their cars.
The country that is really going to collapse under the weight of cars with no place to park in (sic) China. Holding 1.2 billion people, China has far less usable land area than the United States, owing to mountains and deserts. And those 1.2 billion people crammed into less usable land than in the United States are buying cars at the furious rate. Under Communism, the Chinese masses were kept poor; as recently as the 1990s there were only five million cars in China, most held by government officials. Now there are an estimated 25 million cars; at the current rate of expansion in car ownership, around the year 2015 there will be more cars in China than in the United States.
I think he's overlooking something obvious here: the Chinese will probably be more willing, as a group, to drive little bitty stackable cars, thus allowing them to park more cars per square foot than we can, with our urge toward great big roomy double-cam 8-seaters.
Ha! a 46-word sentence!
Thus, culturally, our society is still far more likely to fail than theirs is.
1 comment:
Dude! As a German major, I could easily whoop ass on a 46-word sentence. I consciously try not to do so.
Of course, like those German sentences, it would be as impossible to negotiate as the parking ramps at the Mall of America and you'd also have to go all the way to the end to figure out what the hell's going on.
Post a Comment