The New Nation - Internet Edition

Paul Harris Riverside,

California Observer

It is known as the Inland Empire: a vast stretch of land tucked in the high desert valleys east of Los Angeles. Once home to fruit trees and Native Americans, it is now a concrete sprawl of jammed freeways, endless suburbs and shopping malls.

But here, in the heartland of the four-wheel drive, a revolution is underway. What was once unthinkable is becoming a shocking reality: America's all consuming love affair with the car is fading.

Surging petrol prices have worked where environmental arguments have failed. Many Americans have long been told to cut back on car use. Now facing $4 a gallon fuel, they have no choice.

Take Adam Garcia, a security guard who works near the railway station in Riverside. Like many Inland Empire residents, he commutes a huge distance: 160km a day. He used to think nothing of it. But now, faced with petrol costs that have tripled, he is taking action. He has even altered the engine of his car to boost its mileage. "I have to. Everyone does. I can't afford to drive as much as I did," he said.

Recent figures showed the steepest monthly drop in distances driven by Americans since 1942. At the same time car sales are collapsing, led by a decline in sales of SUVs.

General Motors, once the very image of US industrial might, is in deep trouble. Cities are now investing in mass tranist hoping to tempt people back into town centres from far-flung commuter belts where they are stranded by high petrol prices.

Jonathan Baty used to be a pioneer. The lighting designer has cycled to work every day since 1993. It's a 14 km trip through the heartland of a car-based culture once famously termed "Autopia". But now Baty

has company on his daily rides as others choose two wheels rather than four to navigate southern California's streets. "We have seen a whole emergence of a bike culture in this area. There is a crescendo of interest, said Baty, who does volunteer work for a cycling group, Bicycle Commuter Coalition of the Inland Empire.

In Riverside, bus travel is up 12% on a year ago, rising to 40% on commuter routes. Use of the town's railway link is up 8%. A local car pooling system is up 40%.

It is the same in the rest of the US. In South Florida a high rail system has reported a 28% jump in passengers. In Philadelphia one has shown an 11% rise. Even scooter sales have shot-up. At the same time car sales are hitting 15-year record lows. Last week major American car-makers reported a devastating 18% drop in car sales.

The numbers point to a more fundamental shift. In American car sles carry a sysmbolic value that transcends the wheeler-dealering of the Showroom. This is a nation of fabled road trips and Route 66. "There is an American dream of mobility and freedom and wealth. The car is part of all that," said Professor Michael Dear, an urban studies expert at the University of southern California.

In the 1950s the confident nation was expressed in classic car designs of huge fins and open tops. By the 1990s it had become the Hummer, a huge bulking car born from the military. Now there is to be another shift. For, hidden within the car sales figures, is a more complex story than a simple fall. Sales of big cars are plummeting while smaller vehicles, especially fuel-efficient hybrids, are replacing them. GM has now closed SUV production at four plants. Its Hummer brand is up for sale or might even be closed. GM is ploughing huge resource into its 2010 launch of the Chevy Volt, a bybrid car that may get up to 1.6 litres per 100 km.

But America's changing relationship with the car is just part of the story of how it is changing in the face of the oil price rise. America has been built on an oil-based economy, from its office workers in the suburbs to its farmers in the fields.

Since the 1950s and the building of the pioneering car orientated suburb of Levittown in Long Island, the US city has been designed for the convenience of the car as much as its human inhabitants. People lives miles away from jobs, shops or entertainment. If you take away cars, the entire suburban way of life collapses. To some, that development is long overdue.

"Suburbia has been unsustainable since its creation," said Chris Fauchere, a Denver-based film-maker who is producing a documentary called The Great Squeeze. "It was created around cheap oil. People thought it would flow easily from the earth for ever."

Fauchere's film, due but later this year, aims to tackle the profound changes caused by a world where oil is becoming scarcer. He does not think that it is going to be easy for America to make the adjustment. "It is going to be tough. It is like a chain reaction through the economy. But if you look at history, it is only crisis that starts change," he said.

"Distance is now an ememy," said Professor Bill McKibben, author of the 1989 climate-change classic The End of Nature. "There's no question that the days of thoughtless driving are done."