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Doors, are you capable of starting a thread with a straightforward OP, or is sarcasm your one and only mode of discussion?
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The sooner this country has to confront and deal with (probably very creatively) with the realities of the world petroleum situation, the better. Bending over and spreading 'em for whichever backwards country holds the most oil (which is what the OP suggests) is simply prolonging the inevitable.
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Just imagine the possible collateral benefits of the scientific breakthroughs that one hopes would be the fallout of having to deal with the actual petroleum situation, rather than enforcing a fiction that is only setting us up for a REAL catastrophe, if it comes before we’re prepared for it.
Ah, I thought the Big V wasn’t in OPEC. Maybe I confused it with another country.
The contention that only New York City and Boston are dense enough for mass transit to work like it does in Europe is nonsensical.
Folks, have you been to Europe? While Europe as a whole has a higher population density than the US, it certainly isn’t as dense as Manhattan. The state of New Jersey has a greater population density that The Netherlands.
We aren’t as dense as Europe because we have endless acres of almost uninhabited mountain, desert, tundra and prairie. But the Eastern Seaboard is just as dense as Europe. So the contention that mass transit works in Europe but can’t work in the US is nonsensical. We have plenty of parts of the country that are as dense as Europe, and while maybe we aren’t going to build mass transit systems in North Dakota, we surely can build them in the, you know, big cities and metro areas.
People who whine about density are conflating two issues…metro area mass transit, and cross-country rail service to every village and hamlet.
Also, the argument for public transit being “not profitable”…
In what ways is ours extensive system of interstate highways “profitable”?
I’d like to see a real cost-benefit analysis comparing highways and freeways (and the extremely inefficient consumption of petroleum in personal vehicles) with rail.
The American dream of a detached home, a yard, and a driveway is getting a rude wake-up call. And it’s coming on the heels of the mortgage crisis. Yippee!
It started with the baby boomers, and it’s likely going to end with them too. As long as we are dependent on oil to move from point A to point B.
There are two choices:
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buy a smaller, more expensive home closer to where you work. If you’ve got public transit access, more power to you. (This is the option I just picked, so yay me)
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wait around and bitch until someone comes up with a replacement for the internal combustion engine. There are electric cars out there, like the Tesla and the Zenn, but I don’t know if they’ll ever be capable of hitting the road for a cross-country trip.
Anyone ever read Pacific Edge? It’s about a post-oil world, where people pretty much have to bike everywhere, grow as much food as they can, yada yada. Basically it’s the 19th century with electricity.
It’s a dystopia, but it’s easy to read the book and say “yup, that’s where we’re heading.”
No, not any more than you are capable of being pretentious in movie threads.
I didn’t suggest that at all.
Now that’s a good point. One out of three ain’t too bad.
It seems to me that part of the problem is that our current zoning laws keep things from being high density. I know a lot of places try to fight to keep things from being too built up.
Also, have you ever looked for a condo that is larger than 2 bedrooms? I would love to have a three bedroom apartment or a four bedroom apartment but at least around here, they aren’t that easy to find.
I agree with Barbarian that the American Dream of a large house with a yard and garage is dead. I personally would like a large apartment with a garage spot.
Actually… those areas do have a lot of mass transit.
I live in one, but it was hard to find.
Single family homes are slowly being replaced by condos on L. A.'s west side. (In the non-ritzy parts at least.) Every year a handful of houses in my neighborhood get torn down and replaced with 4-5 story condos. After a few years it starts to add up to a real increase in density.
I think the 2-bedroom condo has been the norm because they’ve been targeted at first-time buyers and retirees. I think the assumption is that people with larger families will want houses. Well, yes … but when houses in the city start at $900K that prices a lot of people out of the market. Hopefully it will dawn on developers that condo owners include families with kids and they’ll start including larger units in the mix.
Brilliant comeback. :rolleyes: (Just because you don’t understand what the grownups are talking about doesn’t mean they’re only *pretending *to be smarter than you.)
You did, in fact, suggest exactly that. “Let’s bite the hand that feeds us, so to speak.” Riiight. We should be nice to OPEC simply because they “feed us” oil. I don’t see much difference between obsequiously promising not to bite their hand, simply and only because they’re feeding us, and metaphorically grabbing our ankles.
Now that’s a good point. One out of three ain’t too bad.
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Well thanks, I guess. My point is of course that every such challenge we have confronted has resulted in more than simply the intended solution. What technology trickled down from the space race? the weapons race? ad infinitum. Imagine the technology of energy, miniaturization, portability, public organization, etc., that will inevitably branch off from the efforts to wean ourselves from the “hand that feeds us.”
A lot of these areas, these desirable neighborhoods, also usually have small roads. Either the roads in the neighborhood don’t really support 2-way traffic, particularly large buses, or the blocks are really close together so there are people and cars jutting in and out slowing down traffic. High density means more trash removal, too, which will slow down commute even further. Cars and just too nimble and flexible. I’m sure there is a balance though…I’m just saying that the US would have a difficult, probably cost-prohibitive time to convert to European style mass transit, definitely not nationwide. As people gather to the city, what happens to the outlying neighborhoods? They become gentrified as property values rise. What happens to commuters who commute between suburbs? There’s precious little mass transit there, too.
Wow. This is both incredibly terrifying and amazingly hopeful. Fear Itself, your user name says it all.
Bibby
Not be practical. I used to live in Rochester. Pull up a map on Google or Mapquest, whichever you like.
You have a fairly sprawly area incorporating Old City of rochester more or less at the center, surrounded by a fan of smaller towns it sucked up into its maw. OK, go all the way to the east. See Fairport? To make it easy put in the street name Whitney Ridge Rd. I used to live there. Now remember where that is. Now go to Rochester Institute of Technology. I used to go to uni there, as well as University of Rochester. THey are reasonably close together by looking at the map. There was not a single bus that would take me from Fairport to RIT. If I wanted to bus, I would have to walk about a mile to Fairport town center, catch a bus to the center of Rochester, then catch another bus to RIT, something on the order of almost 2 hours.
Why Fairport? Well, I could spend $300US for a roach trap of a flat near school, or I could spend the same money on a nice flat, in a safe area, with the electricity included in the rent [heating, air conditioning and hot water were all electricity.]
That is actually a fairly typical city. The bus lines might run from the edge of the city to the center, and if you live on one edge and need to go to a different edge, you still have to go all the way into the center and transfer to get a second line out. Most areas never actually have any sort of bus service to more than 10% - and frequently not to any major residential area. Where I live now, the nearest bus is Willimantic, and it is a regional bus - it goes to major city center areas, and is 18 MILES away from me, and would cost me $30US to ride from Willimantic to Hartford. One way. Definitely not an option. The Willimantic town bus? Since I would have to drive to Willimantic to catch it, I might as well g the last 2 miles to the store for my shopping.
So one hopes. And in what court are we supposed to sue OPEC in? 
Is OPEC supposed to care what a domestic US court does, or do we plan on taking this to the Internationa Court of Justice (who’s jurisidiction we don’t even accept)?
March 1979 CPI was 70.300
March 2008 CPI was 209.147
The Consumer Price Index has almost exactly tripled.
http://www.finfacts.ie/Private/curency/goldmarketprice.htm
If gold is an indication of the actual value of a dollar, in terms of how other countries see it:
12/31/1978 $264.20 high
12/31/1979 $578.70 high
01/14/2008 $914.00 high
$4.00 a gallon isn’t very out of whack, IMO.
I work in a gas station and I just realized I’m not sure how we could charge $10 or more per gallon for gas. I think the pump displays themselves can go up to $19.999, but the big display sign can only go to $9.999 (and we don’t have enough 9s to do that). Maybe we’d just sell it by the quart?
I wonder about the fate of “The Great American Road Trip”. I guess I should feel lucky that I had the opportunity to take them. Love of an open road, the promise of something new around the next turn – it’s been part of our psyche since the beginning. Nowadays driving for pleasure feels politically incorrect.
And all those retirees driving around in bus-sized RVs…guess they won’t see quite as much of the country as they expected to.
If only there was some way a new sign could be created, or the existing one could be modified . . . Oh well, too bad. I guess we’ll never have to pay $10 a gallon, at least. Can a mod lock this thread please?
My brother worked in a gas station in the early '70s. I worked at one in the mid '70s. And wondered the same thing.
And I bought gas at the time when gas went over a dollar. The pumps where adjusted so you just doubled what was on the pump. $9 of gas was $18.
I wonder why we are not using more of the existing small dams to generate electricity?
If I where to put a wind farm or solar panels on my house, the electric company has to buy it back.
The water is running in Colorado. Id like to see us make use of it for energy. Before we give it away to LasVegas.
Um … wow. I live in the DFW metroplex. I have, in the past, lived in Chicago. Chicago has a public transit system. DFW has a bad imitation of one. It would take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make it functional enough to replace a significant fraction of our auto traffic.