Cars suggest freedom, safety, and achievement, cars are the icon of the American dream and every little boy dreams of driving a car one day. We actually define ourselves by the name of our cars - Explorer, Venturer, ... and whatever they are called. If you build a highway system you get congestion & pollution. With the growing population there’s not space to accommodate all the cars & have places with character (suburbs have none). Commuting times keep increasing with more cars on the road & people living further away from work. Automobiles cause 1/3 of all US greenhouse gases.
"Suburbia" is a car-depended living arrangement, where you have to drive to work, to shop, to get services, to run simple errands, to take the kids to school & other activities. It's also the greatest mis-allocation of resources in the history of the world because we know that it is the living arrangement that does not have a future. As we are trying to get out of this "stuckness" we keep putting more resources into trying to solve the problem by doing the same thing ... growing outwards. Besides, upkeeping the ageing infrastructure costs society a lot of money and adds on to the federal debt. If you had to commute by foot, public transit, or bike ... you would not live in the suburbs. Generally, living in suburbia requires trade-offs, so why not rethink city design, car efficiency, and public transit – and find other arrangements for daily life in America?
Every year 30 billion barrels of oil are consumed worldwide. Experts predict an increase to 45 billion barrels in 2020 – but consumption will outpace production. Peak oil is about the rate of delivery not the resource availability. With most of the easy-to-reach conventional oil gone, most of the oil that’s left will be expensive and difficult to get too – currently we don’t have the ability to increase supply as fast as demand. Consequences of the great gas shortage in the 1970s were cuts in the speed limit, car pooling, and switching factories from oil to natural gas and coal. But this happened when the US had lots of time and money which now they don’t have any more.
China plans 65,000 miles of expressways as more and more Chinese own a car. Even a marginal increase in cars will be devastating. The car culture in US is a near-disaster, it’s a guaranteed disaster in a populous country like China but China still tries to copy the US living structure. China has 4 times more people than the US but today the US still uses 3 times more oil. China takes the money that it gets from producing Walmart merchandise and spends it on oil from Alberta, Venezuela and Libya.
Each US American consumes 5 times more oil (20 lbs) per day than oxygen (4 lbs). US Americans spend an average of 25% (another expert said 19%) of their income on automobiles – the most expensive transportation system in the world. Rich people spend about 5% of their income on their car, poor people about 40%. Consequently poor people often have to give up something that they could have spend the money on but decided to invest their limited financial resources into a car, for whatever reason.
Americans think, thanks to advertisement, everything is choice instead of circumstances of reality! Peak oil climate change and a few other big issues aren't choice though. One wonders what are they willing to scarifies? In the film some interviewed Americans still said they didn't believe that the US will run out of oil.
There is the temptation to maintain oil resources through military actions but it will not work – it's too expensive and too intense. Venezuela is already past its oil peak and quality of oil is bad, the US itself has nearly no oil left, Canada has the tar sands but it’s expensive to produce. The US needs a new energy policy since heavy unconventional oil can not take the place of light conventional oil. There’s still lots of coal (I wished there wasn't), hydro, sun, wind to generate energy from. But there’s no single solution/ energy source that could keep up the level of oil usage. There's the dillusional thinking that the unmaintainable can be maintained for example through technological advancement. In the meantime, resources will be wasted to prop up our current comfortable living until the last one realises that when you have a shortage of energy you can't simply replace it with technology. Technology requires energy.
It takes political will to break the concept that cars are more important than pedestrian. Americans have to figure out what kind of life to they want to have, what kind of activities they want to pursue, what kind of spaces they need. Then they have to fit the buildings in. Ideas include giving a suburban city a centre, that city planners need to be walking planners, that public transit must be a "first class" alternative to get people out of cars. The city & transit planning need to go hand in hand to create "living local" that benefits people & environment. The good quality of life needs to be there for everyone not only for certain (rich) parts of city. Poorer people will be better off with public transit because they save the cost of having a car & spend it on something more valuable to them like health, education, travel.
Finally there's the option to wait until the pain arrives and change then but it will be awefully expensive. Or you can change now while the US still has the strength and energy to do it without facing so much pain and it will work better - unfortunately it's harder to sell to people too. If politicians started change now it would prepare cities better for the future and make them more competitive. The knowledge, information, and expertise is there already. But there's a lack of vision, a lack of realisation how psychologically rewarding and economically sustainable a life without car & oil dependence could be.
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