Those cities are completely different than cities like Phoenix, Dallas, Los Angeles, Denver, and the like that aren’t nearly as centralized and thus much more difficult to have reasonable mass transit in place for. There are people on the north end work working on the south end, people on the south end working on the north end, the west end working on the east end, etc.</p>
<p>People tend to buy a house in an area that appeals to them based on cost, surrounding area, convenience to work, etc. but when they switch jobs to another part of town or the county they can’t and usually don’t want to just uproot their kids from school, sell their house, and suddenly move there and then maybe repeat that several times. When both the H and W work it’s possible they could live on the south side, one works on the north side and the other works on the west side.</p>
<p>Regardless - I’d hate to live in the city but I think it’s fine that others like it.</p>
<p>For most people learning to drive is a good skill to learn even if there are times they won’t need to know. </p>
<p>I think driving best learned when they’re young, when they can practice driving in a relatively controlled fashion, such as from the house to the HS a couple of miles away, and under some restrictions from the parents or the graduated driving privileges some states have now for those under 18. I think some of those learning ‘in a hurry’ at age 30 because they suddenly have a need to drive may not always end up to be the best drivers.</p>
<p>@GladGradDad -
I’m not sure I quite get your point. The reason I listed those cities is because they were essentially abandoned during the height of suburbanization. They’re notable because they have surged back to life as demand for transit and density has increased. LA actually has one of the highest densities, is substantially expanding its subway, and has many walkable communities. It’s just hard to retrofit once the damage of highway dependence is done.</p>
<p>Just look at the most popular TV shows we came up on: Friends, Sex and the City, Seinfeld, etc… A running joke through all of them was how these “hip” sophisticated people didn’t know how to drive. </p>
<p>But I agree knowing how to drive and having access to a car of some sort is valuable. It’s not about eliminating the car entirely, just reducing its role as central to our lives. Many rent cars when they travel away from what Amtrak or Megabus type operations serve or to get out to nature for a weekend.</p>
<p>You might perceive the city as noisy and chaotic, but many of us find it far more peaceful to be able to wander our neighborhoods, meander through a farmer’s market or art fair or a nice park (sometimes massive parks), enjoy a meal with friends at a sidewalk cafe, or get a nice walk / bikeride in on our way to or from work than deal with all the traffic and isolation of auto-dependent landscapes. </p>
<p>A lot of us were raised in car dependence and just realized it’s not very appealing for us. Maybe the ideal for a lot of people would be a quaint, walkable small town / city surrounded by nature, but those places don’t have a lot of jobs.</p>
<p>Oops, applejack, your examples are actually fairly weak.</p>
<p>Friends, Sex and the City, Seinfeld… Every one of those series has numerous episodes when someone needs a car for one reason or another. And in every series except, perhaps, Sex and the City, at least one of the major characters owns a car, and uses it quite often. Off the top of my head:</p>
<p>Seinfeld: Trips to the various airports to bring/pick up friends, trip to a mall to buy a TV, trips to parties on Long Island, trip to weekend vacation on Long Island…</p>
<p>Friends: Phoebe owns a taxi which her friends borrowed frequently. Ski trip, trip to find Phoebe’s dad, road trip to Las Vegas…</p>
<p>Sex and the City: At least one episode where the women rented a car to take them out of town, and realized that only Carrie could drive because no one else had a license or had driven in years.</p>
<p>^
You undermined your argument on your own by citing examples where they used cars for specific trips, central characters didn’t know how to drive, or one friend was notable for owning a … taxi. That’s pretty realistic of how we live (how cool would it be if a friend owned an old taxi?). Compare that to 70s and 80s shows where cars were sometimes the central character.</p>
<p>If you would have kept reading, I said that this isn’t about eliminating the car but reducing it from the central focus of our lives. It’s about creating a freedom of choice to drive, bike, walk, or take a train / bus, depending on the circumstance.</p>
<p>I put my tiny eight-pound baby in the bike trailer to drop him off at daycare on my way to work. He changed my life plenty, but he didn’t convince me to drive a car.</p>
<p>And if I needed to transport a desperately ill person to the hospital in the middle of the night? I’d call an ambulance. Or, if it was less urgent, a taxi. </p>
<p>Applejack’s point is well taken. Older Americans love their cars. Younger Americans, not so much. As younger Americans begin to buy houses/apartments and have families, they will choose, insofar as they can choose, places to live that support a more walkable, bikeable life. And developers will respond, of course, because developers care about money.</p>
<p>Step one is to get rid of parking requirements that make developers provide acres of “free” (but not really) parking.</p>
<p>But having just said that, I sincerely would like to see our country make strides in making it possible to get from point A to point B without a car.</p>
<p>(I do keep getting stuck on those years with kids, sports, music, etc. I can see where a New York City family could live in such a condensed neighborhood that cars aren’t necessary. But for the family who can’t afford to live in NYC, or whose jobs take them elsewhere, life with kids but without a car would be … pretty awful.) </p>
<p>On the other hand, we’ve spent several weeks in the Bavarian Alps south of Munich in the past couple of years, and I envy the ability of many of the people we met to be able to conduct their lives without cars. Bikes take them around their villages and the city, and public transport between towns and within the city is quick, on time, reliable, and easy to use. It is a fine goal to work towards.</p>
<p>We’re running out of the easy stuff. Our oil supplies are increasingly relying on expensive, complicated sources, such as tar sands and shale fracking, that have a much lower EROEI (energy return on energy invested) than traditional drill-a-hole-and-pump liquid petroleum and have a significantly worse impact on the environment. These sources are setting a new floor on energy costs - the only way to make recovering them economically viable is $4-per-gallon pump prices.</p>
<p>Are we going to run out of oil in 25 years? No. But will $10 per gallon seem cheap? Quite possibly.</p>
<p>One of the tenets of the peak oil theory is that we are running out of oil because it has all been pumped out of the ground.</p>
<p>This is wrong - the total of proven resources is continuously going up as the science and technology gets better. Who knows how much is available in areas that are currently off-limits to exploration. It might be more expensive to get to, and that’s ok. Increases in fuel efficiency counteract a lot of the increase in price.</p>
<p>The “paradox” is that the more expensive oil gets, the more we have, because it becomes profitable to extract from lower efficiency sources like tar sands or oil shale, or to re-open old wells and get at the oil that couldn’t be retrieved the first time around.</p>
<p>No, that’s wrong. Nobody claims it “has all been pumped out of the ground” - but the “easy gets” like Ghawar have all been found and supply is more or less stagnant, while worldwide demand continues to expand. The remaining supplies are, as you’ve noted, increasingly expensive and energy-intensive to extract from. So, prices continue to increase and can never fall back to prior levels. Economically, that pattern is consistent with a scarce and depleting resource.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Um, there aren’t that many geologically-feasible oil-containing areas off-limits to exploration. There’s ANWR and… that’s about it. If you want to destroy a national wildlife refuge wilderness to feed your oil addiction, you’ll have to get through me and a bunch of others first.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Except that inflation-adjusted wages for the average American are not rising anywhere near as quickly as the price of fuel. It’s a zero-sum game: more money spent to pay for motor fuel is less money to spend elsewhere in a person’s household budget.</p>
<p>Ergo, more people making the choice to do less or do without, and choosing to live in places compatible with that lifestyle.</p>
<p>I’m pretty familiar with some of those cities we mentioned and somewhat familiar with all of them. They really are quite different from each other which logistically impacts the ability to get along without a car. NYC and DC in particular and Chicago as well have huge numbers of people working in the central core. That’s not true for LA, Phoenix, and a number of other cities. San Francisco has the central core design and if people can afford to live there then a car isn’t needed there either. In some of these cities a car is more of a liability in finding parking, which costs money, and more hassles to drive than to take public transport of bike/walk. But LA or Phoenix? No. Businesses and housing are too scattered. Even though LA has a subway and bus system, and some people use it, it’s just not logistically similar to NYC or DC due to the way the businesses and housing is so geographically dispersed. </p>
<p>For some people it’s easy - if they don’t have to work, or have lifelong employment in a particular location that happens to also have easy non-car commuting options, and want to live right there, and don’t care to travel independently to areas without public transport options, then they can do okay. People in NYC can do okay if they never have a desire to get out and go anywhere a train/bus doesn’t go.</p>
<p>For others, they’ll need to drive a car or have to make a choice of a 1 hour commute on public transport vs a 20 minute drive, they’ll want a car to drive the the head of that hiking trail Great Lakes Mom likes, and hundreds of other logistical reasons. And I know some people only look at cars in a purely practical sense to get them from point A to point B but there are actually some of us who enjoy particular cars, enjoy certain drives. For example, I enjoy driving with the top down, 4 wheeling in the desert and mountains (only on approved trails), driving some scenic roads, visiting national parks, etc. Of course, some people don’t care about any of this which is fine.</p>
<p>Again, there’s not a single ‘right way’ on this. I wouldn’t impose a mandatory requirement that someone learn to drive and have a car and I don’t want anyone to impose the opposite on me but I don’t think anyone here’s suggesting that.</p>
<p>But on the topic of the thread - learning to drive at a younger age is a good idea whether one plans to buy a car and drive imminently or not. It can be logistically difficult to do in some locations perhaps but for the majority of the USA it’s a good idea. I think it’s a basic skill most people should try to acquire if they can.</p>
<p>polars,
" Public investment is needed now more than ever."
Then invest, we are in free country. Funny, people who are talking about more taxes are often tax cheatters, I am not talking about you specifically though. For those who advocate more public investments, there is a website where you can freely pay more taxes, go ahead, there is no reason for pushing the rest of us, we are barely making it, deeping into retirement funds…</p>
In that article, the author pointed out that Hubbert originally predicted there would be no oil left in the US by this point. He was clearly wrong. He also stated (this was in the 50’s) that the maximum amount of oil left in the US was 200 billion barrels. We now have 200-400 billion barrels of reserves, and that’s after 50+ years of consumption. And that amount is likely to be much higher with new technology.</p>
<p>
83% of our coast is off-limits to oil production. I’m not advocating we open it up, just saying there may be more out there.
That’s only true for the last 10 years or so. Maybe you should take a longer term view.</p>
<p>But then, that’s not something the doom-and-gloomers are good at. I came across a fascinating article that went back and analyzed some of the predictions made 30 years earlier (at the time of the article) on the first Earth Day. Executive summary: they were all wrong, spectacularly so:</p>
<p>If I advocate a rule change for everyone, but the rule change is not adopted, I have no obligation or reason to follow my proposed change anyway. If my San Jose Sharks lobbied for hockey games to be 55 minutes long instead of 60 minutes, but their proposed rule was not adopted, should they unilaterally stop playing after 55 minutes? No, that’s just silly. </p>
<p>The claim that I should voluntarily pay higher taxes is equally silly. I can’t go out and fix roads and bridges with my own money, nor would my contributing more in taxes go to fixing roads and bridges. I think everyone in my tax bracket should pay higher taxes. If my tax bracket’s taxes were raised, I would pay them. But I’m not obligated to pay higher taxes now, nor does it make sense for me to do so.</p>
<p>The same reasoning goes in the opposite direction. If a Senator opposes some spending plan giving grants to states, but the plan is passed anyway, the Senator is not being hypocritical by lobbying that some of the money goes to their state.</p>
<p>Hmm, romani, what happened to the Wings the last two years in the playoffs? Let me just refresh my memory. Perhaps the heartwarming picture I have as my screensaver, of Dan Boyle crosschecking Tomas Holmstrom into the crossbar, will recall to my mind those happy events. ;)</p>
<p>OK, no more derailing of the threads. Sorry, everyone else.</p>
<p>notrichenough, the underlying theory of peak oil is not disproven by the failure of one early calculation. For one, Hubbert had no way to predict the massive decline in consumption that occurred in the 1970s due to the OPEC embargo.</p>
<p>Furthermore, U.S. production of conventional oil has peaked already. King was right. What he couldn’t predict was the development of unconventional oil production, which now constitutes the growth in American oil production. Again, those sources are significantly more expensive to produce and their rate of depletion is uncertain. Some Bakken wells drilled a few years ago are already coming up dry.</p>
<p>The Alaska pipeline is within 10-15 years of being permanently shut down because the Prudhoe Bay field is rapidly declining and soon will no longer produce enough oil to keep the pipe from freezing up. Look it up - Alyeska engineers are frantically trying to figure out how to cope with reduced flows. They may have to start burning some of the oil en route to heat the pipe… which means less oil coming out the other end.</p>
<p>The fundamental truth of peak oil: it is a finite, non-renewable resource and the easy, cheap sources of that resource are effectively tapped out. Is there oil left? Yes. We’ll just have to spend more and more money and more and more energy chasing smaller and smaller reservoirs of it.</p>