“Superhighway robbery holds progress to ransom”, The Australian, 12-13 Feb, 1994.
Superhighway Nightmares
The image of the superhighway of the future has changed forever. In the fifties and sixties we were inundated with commercial artists’ visions of Jetson-style highways, sleek steel support columns, plastic bubble cars and propeller-less flying-mobiles whizzing on and off fast-flowing networks of streamlined freeways.
Such powerful images remain only as pure nostalgia. Traffic jams, grid-lock, tollways and jangled nerves are the end result of such designs for the future. The automobile and its infrastructure have created incurable headaches that planners and environmentalists will have to cope with for decades to come. Besides, all this has come symbolically tumbling down in the recent LA earthquake, which brought close to a dozen important flyovers and arterial connections crashing to the ground.
It reminded me of an Australian advertisement for Repco auto products from the late 1950s I recently came across (in The Australian Dream: Design of the Fifties, Judith O’Callaghan ed., Powerhouse Publications, 1993). The ad, which definitely encapsulated this impossible modern ideal, claimed the company was doing “Today’s research for tomorrow’s progress.” That tomorrow never came, and now the research has progressed in very different directions.
While many of the Californian megalopolis’s highways have been reduced to piles of rubble and twisted steel, attention is being focused upon another “vision for the future”. However the new superhighways of the future are being designed for traffic of a different kind: information.
Critics such as the American Michael Sorkin have argued that information technologies have made time and space obsolete. He has a point. Computers, credit cards, phones, and faxes are the new cement of our cities. Indeed, it’s hard to argue against his assertion that “recent years have seen the emergence of a wholly new kind of city, a city without a place attached to it.”
Small wonder that the biggest buzzword, dare I say fashion, in Southern California at the moment is “tele-commuting”. In a region where the car is king, information is making it’s grab for power. What better place than California, where there are more computers per capita than any other place in the world. While efforts over the last 20 years to provide alternatives to four car families have gone nowhere fast, the idea of “travelling” to work via telecommunication lines is enjoying a high degree of popularity. But it doesn’t take much to see that the ill-defined concept carries with it much of the same utopian baggage associated with superhighway design of the fifties.
It’s mostly managers of the professional class who are taking the possibility seriously. (Others still have to show up for work.) With the prospect of having employees tied up in six hours of traffic each day, the idea of having them work from home is becoming more and more appealing. With 56 people dead, 15,000 homeless, and damage to property estimated at around $US30 billion, people are thinking seriously about new ways to rebuild the city.
Attention has suddenly turned to alternative means of commuting. And about time too. Transportation department officials conservatively estimate that repairs to the highways will take a year to complete and cost $US100 million. Whether telecommuting will become a viable alternative remains to be seen, but it has emerged as one alternative to sitting in a car all day.
Though business stands to benefit enormously from the construction of new data highways, whatever they might be, it’s argued that this is infrastructure, just like roads. Consequently government officials are becoming increasingly involved in discussions about how to design and manage these new networks. How will people get on them, where can they go, how much will it cost, and who will have access? And like the freeway programs of the postwar era, there are bound to be as many losers as there are winners.
In reality, much of the industrialised world is already hardwired with hundreds of thousands of telecommunications networks up and running telephone systems, computer networks, databases and TV cable systems. The biggest nightmare for governments is getting a handle on all this, and implementing a plan that responds to existing inadequacies and blueprints for future highway “architecture” and development. US President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore have already made their first forays into the new terrain, going so far as launching part of their last election campaign at the corporate headquarters of one of Silicon Valley’s computer giants, Silicon Graphics. Even the conservative Canadian government of Jean Chretien has recently announced a strategy for the implementation of an information superhighway. With a bit of foresight and imagination, perhaps the nightmares of automobile travel can be avoided on the data highways.
But whatever the outcome, there will always be a need to transport goods and people from one place to another. A salesperson in San Fernando may be able to plug a powerbook right into the telephone line, or even have messages sent via a mobilenet to a portable electronic organiser in order to stay in touch with the office. But where does that leave the likes of Mario Beltran, a 31 year old barber who has to commute 55 kilometres to work in LA each day? “When you have to get up at three to get to work by nine, yep, that’s a nightmare.”