I also think any government that wants to rule how we live, will gladly expand its powers to the point of cutting off discourse to cut off discourse (in the name of the greater “good”). Fuel efficiencies and other improvements in technology will be market driven, pure and simple.

The reality is the Earth isn’t in the dire straits that you see. Technology is addressing the ecological damage we are doing to the environment, and animals are evolving to live with us. Out here in flyover country I don’t think I’ve seen as many predatory birds and animals like I have in the past decade. If the predators are doing well (and not getting large from eating teacup Chihuahuas), I think the environment in this part of the world is recovering. There is still much work to do, but I don’t see us reaching max carrying capacity for a long time.

And, even at $20/gal, emergency services can function, I think. You’ll have to use technology to make ambulances more efficient, sure, but there’s no reason that an ambulance has to be an F-650 that gets 10 mpg (especially in a dense city), it could be something like a plug-in hybrid Transit Connect-like vehicle getting 50-70 mpg equivalent – combine that with shorter distances for the ambulance to travel, and the energy usage falls even more. And even in rural areas, give that vehicle a diesel through an efficient gearbox (not a torque converter automatic), and it’ll get 30 mpg.

As far as trains and such, they’ll still roll – trucking will be reduced, putting more burden on the rail system. Costs will go up, but not by the full amount that they would if long-haul trucking were still being used. And, technology can improve things here, too – right now, most trains are diesel/electric, using dynamic braking – that is, braking energy is dumped into a resistor bank, and shed as heat. Energy usage could be reduced some if that energy were instead stored (and light rail systems already use technology like that – flywheels at points where trains often stop and start, to collect electricity), and then reused to accelerate the train again.

Also, I’m not convinced that a safe (not nice, but safe) standard of living – reliable food supply, low crime, safe housing, quality healthcare, and even communications – requires the majority of the population to work, given the advances we’ve made in automation. (It obviously requires some human labor, but I think you could just use those that were highly motivated to work as it is (and reward them for their work, which would be the source of money into the economy above and beyond sustenance living, which could also be spent to run private enterprise), and almost all manual labor could be replaced.) In fact, I wonder if we have to figure out how to solve the social problems that make communism difficult to implement, due to the fact that we’re running into the limits of Earth’s carrying capacity of humans, and as we approach those limits, the need to work together becomes even more critical.

You realize at $20/gal, all essential transportation stops. No ambulances, no trucks, no rail or ship. All the creature comforts that you hold dear (plus imports such as coffee, computers, organic foods) will just not exist anymore at your local store. They will be far too expensive to bring into the country. Hope you like milk, cow, and possibly deer with whatever fruits and veggies that are grown up the road. Transportation will move from being 20% of the cost of an item to well over 60%+.

For purchased individual property, property taxes inversely indexed to population density, with purchase price controls, might be the ticket, to incentivize living in higher density buildings.

Price controls? Seriously? Have you ever seen what price controls do to an economy?

We as a society/species/etc don’t need bureaucrats to tell us how to live. Seriously. As much as you think the world is completely going to shit, the reality is we as a species (and as a steward to other species) are doing a far better job than we were fifty years ago. A good chunk of that came from the environmental movement which unfortunately has morphed into an ideal of living in high-density apartments (harkening back to the days of Communism and central planning) with us walking to work in a glorious workers paradise.

But it’s not going to be replaced with the bicycle or walking. The two examples given were technologies that were replaced with something that did their basic core function (transportation and communication) better and cheaper that still delivers its core function (personal transportation to any location). Now will that be a vehicle with an internal combustion engine? Possibly, but I do think the Volt model (electric with a generator backup) is probably the most likely solution in twenty years or so. How Chevy and the others are building these cars (and the incentives to do so) are entirely suspect.

Moving into the suburbia topic now….I think the trend has clearly been the opposite (and for people with families it’s been well documented). Most people WANT a detached house with properly to call their own. While there is a subset of people that want to live in exceptionally close proximity, there are simply far more that don’t, especially here in the States.

While the trend in Europe may be different, why is it that people moved out of the cities and into their own suburbs (London comes to mind…same with Sydney, and a host of other cities) that have their own suburban sprawl because of the same mitigating factors. People wanted a cheaper place to live with the benefits of having their own property.

After all, if there is one trait that I would say defines Americans more than any other nation, it is that we are more flexible, more open to change.

Also, $10/gal is probably too cheap, once you consider all the negative externalities of fuel usage, as well as the fact that it’s critical that it be saved for uses where it really must be used, unnecessary personal transport not being one of them.

$20-50/gal may be more accurate, to make sure we have enough petroleum to last us for the foreseeable future. (Although, using a straight fuel price increase to reduce fuel usage is rather regressive.)

And, it doesn’t necessarily make your life more expensive – for rented property, rent caps combined with high property tax can help here (because it strongly incentivizes people moving into the downtown core, while also incentivizing maximum population density). For purchased individual property, property taxes inversely indexed to population density, with purchase price controls, might be the ticket, to incentivize living in higher density buildings.

That way, your life being cheaper in terms of resource use can be reflected in lower actual costs.

Isn’t that sort of Orwellian/1984 in nature? I’m not sure how or why people should have the government force them into living a certain environment that is clearly acceptable now (I don’t see living in a two story home on .33 acre to be a crime against humanity as opposed to living in a condo).

Here’s the thing…even with a commute I would still live in the house I live in, even with gas at $10/gal. I want to live out in the woods, and for government to come in and purposefully make my life more expensive in the name of politics….that’s pretty crappy to do to a vast majority of people.

And, people are just going to have to learn to live with high density, or get into farming (which means they’d be living at work, reducing resource usage that way).

But some people don’t have a choice and some people can’t afford to live in metro areas (or gasp….don’t want to). Yes, I do think there will be an increase in the number of delivery services (possibly driven by the drone revolution….yeah, put that together and the thoughts of dozens of drones whizzing over your head every minute).

I think the future depends on what we want from our government. A number of the replies have been geared towards “well, when the government finally bans/taxes/kills this type of planning THEN it will work”. But I don’t see that happening. Making millions of homes suddenly worthless due to government interference….is probably not going to be popular with politicians since their voters will gladly remove their asses from office.

I think the talk about commuter rail and bikes ignores the other options out there of more vehicle sharing, either through car sharing programs in areas where a pool of cars can handle peak demand, more busing on demand where you can have the bus drop you off close to home or come pick you up when you book it, and also a revival of home delivery – the milkman now delivers your online grocery order. 

Considering how rapid suburban communities appeared, it is not inconceivable that they reshape into something more pedestrian-friendly just as quickly. We may look back on the suburbs and exurbs with their huge sprawls and lack of anything in walking distance as quaint, laugh at how large parking lots had to be to accomodate all of those oversized gas guzzlers.

Replace a certain percentage of “housing units” with mini-shopping/market/service areas, preferably run and owned by locals.

How is that going to happen when the food chain is owned by the Waltons and people like them?

your post connects all the dots.  five-star post, man.  brilliant.

So basically you’re saying that your kids can’t get to school, or a friend’s house, without you chauffeuring them, until they get their licenses. As someone living near Boston, I have a hard time picturing that as an acceptable state of affairs. I’m in a suburban house, with a car, but the stores are a short walk from here, as is the library, When it snows, the car is the LAST thing that gets dug out. And my kids will be learning to manage independently long before they can ask for a driver’s permit. 

Yeesh, slipped my mind tbh. Holding a grudge over the Chavez thread that you quickly torpedoed?

OTOH, you *do* need to replace all dirty energy on a timescale of decades, or at least reduce it drastically. That doesn’t mean you need to eliminate the burning of hydrocarbons, just the burning of fossil hydrocarbons.

Cars vs. no cars
Only urban farming vs. only rural farming
Only green energy vs. only dirty energy
etc. etc..

Refugees, retirees, people on any kind of welfare who don’t have to work can live out there as long as groceries are somehow trucked to within walking/bicycling distance of them, but that few people across that big of an area will leave pretty much the same situation you can already see in places in Michigan where the jobs have left: block on block of decaying rubble, with an average of one occupied house per block. We won’t keep trucking produce to within walking distance of that one occupied house indefinitely, let alone continue providing one house per block with police and fire protection indefinitely.

We’ve been trying to find a technologically and economically plausible replacement for fossil fuels for transportation since the OPEC crisis of ’73. 40 years of heavily funded research, and the best we’ve come up with so far is lithium-based batteries, which are no solution at all because lithium’s even more rare than petroleum. We need to face up to the possibility that there may not be one.

We can make electricity so many ways that we’ll never run out of electricity, but there may come a point, maybe soon, maybe not so soon, where we have to prioritize what petroleum we have left for agricultural use, trans-ocean flight (which will be super-expensive), and probably military use. We will have to price petroleum distillates for personal transportation out of the reach of all but a couple of percent of us to make sure that there is enough for farm equipment. We can run street cars and trolleys and passenger trains and even cargo trains on electrified rail; we are not likely to run tractors and combines off of glorified extension cords.

If that happens (and I think it’s “when,” not if) we absolutely will have to go back to building cities around the economics of rail, and our remodeled central cities will resemble late 19th century cities, albeit with better HVAC, better plumbing, and wireless internet.

And that world will record that the automobile was a 20th century fad. And within two generations after that, it will have been seen as an especially silly fad, at that.

I live somewhere where I can walk to a grocery store and some restaurants and a few other stores; take a bus, train, bike, or electric bike to work, school, or retail stores; have access to a car (own or rent within walking distance) for day trips; and take a train or flight for longer trips. I spend, in total, about $200/month on transportation (public transit + zipcar use + and I’ve never been unable to conveniently get somewhere I want to go.
For groceries, except for fresh produce (which I buy at a farm stand on my walk home from work) I usually use peapod and once a month or so I go to Costco.