Fossil fuel use is about 150 years old and automotive use about 100 years old. Look how absurdly, the personal automobile dominates our life and is destroying any hope for a future.

We need to deal with more than incremental adjustments from the modern automotive age. If we want to continue the many benefits of precious fossil fuels, the many opportunity costs of those fuels, to personal autoumobile usage, then we need to set as a goal (here in the USA) and realize it, to reduce the use of the personal automobile by 80% in the next 20 to 40 years.

It is not encouraging, because Obama explicitly stated the other day that the automobile is such an important part of American history and culture and needs to remain so. This is a statement of a myopic politician beholden to special interests.

If you’ve never lived in the Northeast (USA)where much of the city, town, and village centers were built before the automobile, it may be hard to imagine a future with the greatly reduced automobile use, but it is very possible and absolutely desirable.

The key is the walkable neighborhood. That is, neighborhoods for everybuddy where everyone can get what they need within walking distance of their residence. This will take a major shift in the way that resources are allocated and products distributed to communitites. The major over-supply side mall outlets (for those products and services that have utility) could become regional warehouses and older town and village centers, where they exist could be explicitly brought back as outlets for these products. Where the town and village centers do not exist, such as here out West (I’m in Eugene, Oregon), where the mindless assumption of the automobile has led to the mindless, endless residential districts with their equally alienating and squandering (strip) malls, communities could be rebuilt (think of all the jobs) to provide community centers and outlets.

Of course, this will not happen in the absence of a complete commitment to neighborhood/inter-community/inter-regional/worldwide ecological economic resource planning and allocation and redevelopment.

This Plan is too bold for American Politicians. This Plan is Socialism. With advances in communications technology, much progress, in the development of community centers, could help greatly increase the amount of tele-commuting that could help people work from and/or near their homes.

The resource allocation issue could be handled with a reformed economic system, an equity union, with a “plan and implement” modus operandi for economic operations. Reforming the financial system to take the fundamentally inflationary Capitalist aspect of “discounting the future” (i.e. assuming that money in the future will be worth less)could lead to a system of ecological economical redevelopment where only true growth in wealth would occur and be shared and could occur under the aegis of a mission emphasizing peace, equity, humanity, quality of life, and sustainability.

Removing the gluttonous oil resource use by the USA and Capitalist automotive oriented allies would slowly rescind the need for the hegemonic occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and a world acting in concert would stand much better prospects for peace.

I’m a Work kin for peace and cooperation.

With much love and care,

Mike Morin
http://www.peoplesequityunion.blogspot.com

Not true. GM and Ford are already building ‘good quality small cars’ in Europe and competing on even terms with European, Japanese and Korean makers in this market.

They are not five years behind. All they need do – if they wanted to – is take what they already have and bring it to the US market.

http://www.gm.com/europe/brands/chevrolet/matiz-spark/

http://www.ford.co.uk/ns7/ka/-/-/-/-/-/-

In fact cars are isolating and are a very inefficient means of transportation. Who really, really enjoys their commute anymore?

The word “bus” derives from “omnibus” as in Latin “for all.” Early carriages were for private transport, and horse-drawn omnibus carriages were precursors to our modern buses. For many, they were an improvement over walking.

Our American aversion to buses is partly rooted in an aversion to community (we’d have to slum with the poor folks) and partly an aversion to anything that’s inconvenient (we’d have to wait to be picked up, have to schedule ourselves).

For buses to be on a level playing field with cars, we’d need to add a very high penalty to driving. Gas is way too cheap, parking is way too cheap, roads are way too cheap. Make all those things more expensive, and watch buses get more popular.

Take it a step further – improve bus operational practices (more routes, more frequent pickups – like in European cities) and watch buses get more popular.

Take it yet another step – lower the speed limit for cars to 55 mph, have a separate lane for express buses, and sell “speeding license tags” for use of the left lane (75 mph) – make it a privilege to drive fast and save time, but make those who get that privilege pay for it, then use that money to subsidize other necessary changes to improve transportation problems. We need to be more creative and open to new ideas, challenge all of our assumptions.

Thoughtful article.

How about using the auto workers and auto plants to build:

a) wind turbines – we need several million of them. They are technically comparable to automobiles. There is also a new design which is much more efficient. http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21737/?a=f

b) solar themal collectors for base load power. These are used to heat a fluid which runs a turbine. The hot fuild can be stored for hours which makes them suitable for base load power generation. They could be used to replace the coal boilers in conventional power plants thereby making them green, and eliminating our number one source of greenhouse gases. We need several thousand of them, and they are technically comparable to automobiles.

Domestic manufactures do make quality small cars, they just don’t sell them in the USA. Take a look at Ford’s European car lineup to see what I’m talking about.

You criticize the Chevy Volt, an almost production ready vehicle, but laud praise on the natural gas Camry hybrid, which is just a concept car at this point, and on a Toyota all electric commuter car that hasn’t even shown up in concept car form yet.

It is a fact that GM is further along on PHEV technology than Toyota or Honda.