Traffic

If you consider, even for a moment, our society’s necessarily inevitable transition to the post-petroleum economy, you’re going to conclude that we’re all totally and utterly FUBARed; so much of our world depends on the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine that the path from here to whatever lies beyond for recreational and commercial transportation and small-power generation seems absolutely impassible

The world may not end in December of 2012, as New Agers, conspiracy theorists, and allegedly, Mayan calendar-makers, forecast, but insofar as the next few years represent a watershed period in humanity’s exodus to a time when life runs on something else than burned-up hydrocarbons, it sure seems like the world-as-we-know-it, anyway, will pretty soon meet its demise, if not before the curtain rises on 2013, at least not too long afterwards.

It’s hard enough to imagine how it’s all going to happen in the United States, whose empire, such as it is, is pretty much founded on cheap gasoline and where the personal automobile is probably a more appropriate symbol of the country than the Stars and Stripes or the Bald Eagle, but maybe because being native to the society, I can sort of envision how a confluence of events, including lots of governmental support and industrial innovation, might almost begin to build a road (no pun intended) to a future in which the gasoline-powered car is not so king.

But here in India, and especially when I’m in a motor vehicle—be it scooter, autorickshaw, or taxicab—enmeshed in the crazy traffic that characterizes pretty much every trip I’ve taken, it just seems impossible. What will happen to all these vehicles and how in the world will people and goods get moved around without relying on gasoline engines?

What’s weird to think of, though, is how new it all is. A hundred years ago, none of these vehicles existed; besides walking, it was all horses, cows, donkeys, and other four-legged creatures moving folks around; it had gone that way for thousands of years; this period of fast-moving cars, trucks, and motorcyles is just a blip on the screen of human history; I suppose there’s no real reason to assume that it won't all be gone in another century or so.

It’s conceivable that it will actually be an easier switch here in a country like India where so many people already use less gasoline-intensive vehicles—small cars and scooters, for instance—so maybe as the oil runs out, the people here will be able to fun on fumes a little longer and extend the status quo until new solutions emerge, but it also seems likely that because so much of everything depends on petroleum, things are going to get a lot uglier before they get prettier—which I assume they will at some point, when traffic lightens up.

But frankly, all this discussion of cars and traffic represents only a theoretical concern right now; after all, I’m cruising along comfortably from Bangalore to Mysore on the express train.