Rising oil prices, and a recent trip through rural Pennsylvania got me thinking about small towns and their residents. We are in an oil crisis – meaning people are having a hard time paying for it as the cost rises each day. While the end of oil in our lifetime seems like blatant paranoia to some people, there are plenty of smart people out there saying it’s going to happen much sooner.
During my trip back East a few years back, I had to travel roughly 1,000 miles altogether by car to visit various family members strewn about the state. Along the way, I passed through towns with zero public transit – where you were naught to see a person who wasn’t walking to or from his car, where the signs along the highway started at $2.57 per gallon. And now since Wal-Mart and other large retailers have gutted the downtown areas of many small towns in my native state, people are forced to drive even more to purchase essential goods like bread and milk. Always. They have to drive cars everywhere.
The manicured retail plaza has ripped sprawl into the landscape of these small towns, driving out the downtown merchants who couldn’t compete. So what happens when there’s no oil left? How do these towns survive? Will we start to see Wal-Mart shuttle service being offered? I don’t claim to be the idealist who doesn’t drive to work in a car everyday, but at least I have the option to take the subway or bus. What happens to the people who don’t? Or more importantly, what happens to the local economies that can’t support a non-car society?
I’m not a Wal-Mart hater – really, I’m not. I watched the episode of Penn & Teller where they did a story on whether Wal-Mart was really evil and I came away seeing the company in a new light. But these big retail chains do perpetuate a lot of sprawl in the towns near where I grew up. I wonder if they will play a part in more car alternatives like light rail train service to and from the big centers.