Well said.  Thanks.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Yesterday David Brooks urged the Obama stimulus plan could help localities create suburban town squares. Many communities are trying to build focal points. The stimulus plan could build charter schools, pre-K centers, national service centers and other such programs around new civic hubs.

This kind of stimulus would be consistent with Obama's campaign, which was all about bringing Americans together in new ways. It would help maintain the social capital that's about to be decimated by the economic downturn.

I've seen this described as "infilling", trying to make a town, or in some case, reconstitute a town, from a suburb.  Maybe that will gather some steam.  The only real estate that is maintaining its value or even rising is near transit, which I would think might take a few years for developers to quite understand, but then maybe they'll turn their full focus to it (of course, Brooks can't bring himself to call for a full-blown town square with markets, post offices, etc., but since he made his reputation writing about exurbia, I'm still amazed).

Note the call to build "charter schools" in the burbs, and "national service centers," whatever the heck they are.

Hate to break it to him (since it will be lost on him) but the biggest problems in the burbs is going to be dealing with all the gigantic empty big boxes.  The sprawlplex is costly to serve because of the many square miles devoted to the major American Idol called "Free Parking."  Now Mr. Burb wants to take even MORE money from the cities (still reeling from the disinvestment and destruction of the interstates) and give it to the burbians.  What a moron.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Notice also that he mentions "social capital", which he thinks will be declining, but it is exactly the exurbs and suburbs that have led to  most of the decline in social capital.

In other words, the conservatives have themselves in a bit of an ideological pickle.  On the one hand, as I've tried to argue, the Republican party has thrived on the lack of community that sprawl engenders, because it makes it more difficult to organize people into parties or unions.  On the other hand, conservatism, as generally understood, is supposed to value community.

However, there is also a progressive view of community that has been floating around for years, which Gar Alperovitz discusses in his book "America after capitalism", and which David Morris has done quite a bit to advocate (although Alperovitz doesn't discuss suburbia either, so there's probably a tension on the progressive side when it comes to suburbia and community as well).

As long as the only conservative alternative to anything is privatization and anti-government in the charter school and more-for-defense mode, they'll continue to become more and more irrelevant to national (and local) politics.

i think people are supposed to ignore me but in this case i might be right and i wish someone would notice that.

if you adjust that total miles traveled curve for population, without adding in the spike in undocumented population, you get a drop in person-miles starting in 2005 or even 2004, close to when gas prices started rising. if you then look at something like krugman's recent employment chart post and then think about underemployment and hours available and stuff, you see that probably along with corporate route-consolidation and stuff, there were a lot of people who were vulnerable to gas prices, and they were likely doing some mild conservation already; when the housing bubble burst and commodities went nuts (in response), it exacerbated an existing problem and moved it into the nielsen family homes, where it got noticed.

i wish somebody would do a more thorough study of this. it behooves greenish people to better understand what happened to the lowest three quintiles in the bush years (and before) in order to set an ecological course that serves all.

hapa, that's a great point (I hope I'm not violating something I'm supposed to be doing by not ignoring your point).

Several people have made the same point about overall oil consumption --- that it peaked years ago on a per-person basis.  

It's an excellent observation and worth noting whenever it occurs.  Like all measurements of  access to goodies under our "free market" system, we like to ignore distribution because it highlights how broken our systems really are -- such as the "world's best health care system" that isn't (a) the world's best; (b) concerned with health; or (c) a system, what with 45-50 million entirely excluded from it.

By failing to note the peak in VMT/person, we probably missed a key inflection point.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

(and nice comment hapa)

in 1030 we found 10bbls of new oil and used 1.5bbls.

in 1964 we found 48bbls of new oil and used 12bbls.

in 1988 we found 23bbls of new oil and used 23bbls.

in 2005 we found 5.5bbls of new oil and used 30bbls.

Charles Weeden of Maxwell & Co.
a top US Oil analyst.

I ripped this off from another comment I saw somewhere and have not tried to verify its accuracy, but this is in general how peak oil works.

People who are buying low mpg cars at this point are going to be kicking themselves in the not to distant future.

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world