A Carfree Culture

The auto is great for intra city transportation at times but not for commuting, suburban sprawl and that trip to the convenience store and the shopping center.

In the long run we will need to live in sky scrapers in the city where we make the smallest footprint, where we can walk to work and wear off calories rather than sitting in traffic, where we can shop, where we can have parks where kids can play and puppies can run, where we can take the elevator and within walking distance have 100 restaurants and coffee shops and where we can again meet our neighbors and say hi rather than giving them the finger when they don’t yield the right of way.

Once we eliminate all the parking and parking lots, all the support services for the auto, all the six lane boulevards that spread out our cities we will again have pedestrian friendly cities as the “old towns” are in Europe. (Then we should take all this money were saving and resources and human resources we’re wasting and cure cancer, heart disease and others. Then we’d be talking quality of life.)

Pedestrians are so much more efficient at people flow than cars where one has to go single file (per lane) and at a safe distance. Many many more people can pass a certain point on a sidewalk than even a multilane highway.

I have been to Eastern Europe, China and India. Some of the fastest growing industries are the automobile and related. But it really doesn’t matter because everything is gridlock anyway in the cities. But the point is, another 5 billion people in the world cannot burn the resources for a car culture that we in America and Western Europe does now. It’s not just oil but all the other natural resources that we trash the earth to get at and for what? If you really think about it the automobile adds absolutely nothing the quality of life and actually takes away from it.

In another 25 years there will be 9 billion people in the world all wanting to drive cars. Whether it’s global warming or lack of resources the car culture is dead in the long run.

Whether we like it or not it’s the beginning of the end to the suburbs and Wall-Marts and suburban shopping centers. We can’t pave over the whole world. The country is for golf courses, cows and trees to use the CO2 we’re producing. I hear our American way of life needs to be protected but I cannot find one good thing about this car culture we have. Another thing I don’t understand are the traffic fatalities we put up with. We have some 43,000 traffic deaths in the US every year with another 500,000 serious injuries. Terrorism is not even an issue compared to this yet the idiots in the White House have spent $3.4 trillion on this “war”.

href="http://www.safecarguide.com/exp/statistics/statistics.htm">http://www.safecarguide.com/exp/statistics/statistics.htm

And wouldn’t it be nice to stop funding these countries who hate us?

How about humans living in cities and leaving the country for cows, squirrels and golf courses? I’ve moved to a condo in downtown Seattle:

1.I no longer waste TIME and MONEY commuting. I just watch the commuters waste their time in that “parking lot” twice/day while I’m reading a good book or magazine.

2.I have a choice of about 100 restaurants with walking distance for lunch and dinner. Same goes for entertainment. Actually I have a lot of money left over for both since I no longer need a car.

3.When I do need a car less than once/month I just rent one.

4.My ecological footprint in a condo/apartment is a fraction of a single-family. There is at least a 75% reduction in energy consumption and a 90% decrease in smog causing pollutants.

5.Have I mentioned all the extra time I have since I don’t have to maintain that single-family house.

6.There are 4 decent parks within 1 mile to enjoy and walk the dogs. (Our cities need more parks though and we also need to get the vagrants out of the parks – both are solvable problems.)

7.If I had kids they would have a pool, sauna, recreation room and other benefits they would never have in a single-family.

8.I get lots of exercise walking to lunch, coffee shops and shopping every day. (You get ABSOLUTELY NO exercise going to the 7-11 in your SUV.)

9.I find it particularly entertaining walking the streets. In the suburbs the distances are forbidding and sidewalks are deserted.

10.I also save the time I would spend washing, gassing, fixing and all those other car maintenance jobs.

11.I feel good not sending money to the foreigners so they can use it to buy our assets and finance terrorism.

12.Almost all government services like police, fire, ambulance and utilities are more economical in the city.

Now I just have to refocus my assets since I’m convinced the outer suburbs will become the new American slums. But that’ll be a good thing since they can then go back to parks and nature for people to enjoy and also eliminate the CO2.

And this all just stands to reason. Nine billion people in this world cannot live in single-family homes with an hour commute every day.

James Kunstler:"There are many ways of describing the fiasco of suburbia, but these days I refer to it as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

I say this because American suburbia requires an infinite supply of cheap energy in order to function and we have now entered a permanent global energy crisis that will change the whole equation of daily life. Having poured a half-century of our national wealth into a living arrangement with no future — and linked our very identity with it — we have provoked a powerful psychology of previous investment that will make it difficult for us to let go, change our behavior, and make other arrangements.

Compounding the problem is the fact that we ditched our manufacturing economy for a suburban sprawl building economy (a.k.a. “the housing bubble”), meaning we came to base our economy on building even more stuff with no future."