July 2023 | Eyesore

Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.

Behold: Buc-ees grandest-ever gas-station plus attached mini-mall outside Sevierville, Tennessee — the largest gas-station in the world! Bear in mind the old evolutionary axiom: organisms reach their most extravagant form just before they go extinct. What’s on-board for extinction is Happy Motoring. First, the matrix of global petroleum industries is destabilizing, largely because the energy-return-on-energy-invested EROEI has reached the red zone. In the 1950s, you could get 100 barrels of oil for every barrel-equivalent of oil invested in lifting it out of the ground. Today the ratio average worldwide is around 15-to-1. That is breaking the business model for running industrial societies, including oil production. The available oil left is either in forbidding geographical areas (deep undersea or the arctic), or it’s sequestered in impervious rock (“tight” shale) oil, or it’s less than good quality (sour and sulfurous), or too light (shale oil again), lacking crucial distillates such as kerosene and heating oil. In short: too expensive and falling quality.

Okay, if that’s too wonky for you, consider that Happy Motoring is also failing on the vehicle side of the story. For one thing, cars and trucks cost too much for a foundering middle-class. Second, because the middle-class is foundering, fewer people are credit worthy. And the whole Happy Motoring system depends on buying cars on installment loans. That formula is on its way out now. The dealers must make impossible loans (eight years of payments for a used car) just to move the merch off the lot, and that’s pretty much the end of the line for creative financing.

Finally, Happy Motoring  had to be perfectly democratic — car ownership had to be possible from the lowliest hamburger-flipper to billionaires. As it becomes progressively less democratic (only available to the well-off), it will become increasingly resented, perhaps violently so. Think: vandalism.

We’ll leave aside the architectural or urbanist issues that are the usual criteria here, because the relationship between the highway and the gas station simply obliterates them.

Thanks to Normal Hill for the nomination!