Anyway, the Law in itself is pretty thoughtprovoking.

the following is from the link at the top of the list after a google serch on "jantelov":

http://www.bearcy.com/janteloven.html
http://www.bearcy.com/janteloven.html#Anti-Janteloven

the "Jante-law"

You shall not believe that you are somebody.
You shall not believe that you are as worthy as us.
You shall not believe that you are any wiser than us.
You shall not imagine that you are any better than us.
You shall not believe that you know anything more than us.
You shall not believe that you are more than us.
You shall not believe that you are good at anything.
You shall not laugh at us.
You shall not believe that anyone cares about you!
You shall not believe that you can teach us anything!
Aksel SANDEMOSE 1899-1965 (famous Danish writer)

The "Anti-Jante-law"

You are exceptional.
You are more worthy than anyone can measure.
You can do something special.
You have got something to give to others.
You have done something you can be proud of.
You've got a bundle of unused resources.
You are good at something.
You can accept others.
You've got the capability to understand and learn from others.
There are someone who love you.

I think much of this is from our country being rural and quite cold during wintertime. You absolutely have to have your house in order, stockpiled food and stockpiled firewood otherwise you die. You have too take very good care of your animals otherwise they die and then you. You have to cooperate with youir neigbours for defence otherwise the Danes or Russians come and steal your stockpiles. You need consensus and working solutions for your problems otherwise nature kills you. This gives that people can be neighbours their whole lives hating each others guts but still get some things done togeather if they must be done.

We also had no nobelity to speak of. Our farmers have allways been an independant class and we have most of the time had an alliance between the king and the farmer class to ballance the small nobelitys power. This and very orderly and logically run state have for most of the recent history made us efficient. It can however backfire into extreme militarism that has bled us white a few times. Authority has been very respected although after a sufficent period of incompetence it is usually replaced, Swedes are very obidient as long as things work well. This has probably been eased by our town, corprorations(bruk) and even state being fairly small.

We logically tore down a large part of our regulations and liberalised in the mid 1800:s to industrialize and attract foreign capital. We had untill the late 1960:s almost exactly the same kind of development as China is halfway thru right now although it took us a hundred years, not two generations.

Our national character with jante, consensus culture and respect for authority was very susceptible for socialism. Communism was rejected as dangerous, probably due to the civil war in Finland. The liberal ideas lingered and influenced our politics and the early generations of socialists were practical people that realy did work for the common good, at least for large scale capitalists. Nobody complained since we had enourmous growth fueled by hydropower, oil, innovation and not being bombed out during WW2. It started to rot fast in the 70:s some years after the original socialists were replaced with career politicians. Now we have a socialist nomenklature that works for maximizing our state to provide jobs for them and their friends.

The local politics are right now quite intresting. I think our socialists are breaking down, more due to internal incompetence then the opposition. Market solutions and pseudo market solutions have for some years penetrated some sectors and the consensus regarding how to run things have started to change. I think we are due for a total state renovation as the one we had in the mid 1800:s.

I am not terribly worried about local large scale prepartions for peak oil. Our authorities are usually logical and we will do the right things if people encourage them to do so, a little late but before most other countries. And there is a small engineer inside most swedes that I am sure will survive our generation of dumbing down culture.

The bicycle lane network has continued to grow. http://kartan.linkoping.se/lkkarta/default.htm tick off "cykelleder" for bicycle lanes, whole drawn are for biking and walking, dotted line is mixed with car traffic, circles are tunnels. The map is unfortunately not complete some tunnels and bicycle lanes are missing from it.

I live in Skäggetorp, Tornby is the mall area with IKEA and so on and I bicycle to the university in västra valla.  Tick off "hållplatser" to see bus stops, it looks better then it is since the bus traffic only is dense along a few routes.

Other kind of green infrastructure is almost complete coverage with central heating. Most of the heat comes from a garbage incineration plant that also produces electricity. There is also a heat and power plant with three boilers, one for biomass, one for coal and one for oil to diversifie the fuel use to optimise for changes in the market and tax system. And there is a small combined heat and power plant in the form a a marine diesel that is part of the cities electrical icelanding capability if we get national grid problems. It was originally built as an emergency powerplant for meat processing food industries and I think it still can provide them with steam. There is also a fairly large central cooling network wich uses excess heat from summertime garbage incineration to produce chilled water with large centralised absorbtion heat pumps.

All of the busses and most of the taxis and a lot of other cars run on biogas from a local plant that mostly ferments waste from the food industry. The second generation plant is now being built in the neighbouring town Norrköping where it will use left over protein from ethanol fermentation and fresh grass and cereals as feedstock. Yesterday it was decided that the ethanol plant owned by cooperating farners will increase its production from current 50 000 m3/year to 200 000 m3/year in 2008.

Linköping is not conciderd to be an especially green town exept for the biogas where we are a few years ahead of most of Sweden and we have one of the best bicycle lane networks.
Most of the transportation infrastructure money goes to new roads and we need some more roads since a 4 min stop is conciderd a queue problem worthy of solving. People from Stockholm laugh at this where an about 15 min stop is regarded as a real problem. I guess Californians etc laugh or cry at us all. It is nice to have parallell infrastructures for public transportation commuting, car commuting and bicycling, how could you otherwise get it to work efficiently?

We need to invest more in the raiway infrastructure to get parallell high speed double track alongside the current double track that soon will be full with traffic. We have some fairly unused railtracs that could be renovated and replace a fair ammount of car commuting giving a lifeline to some smaller towns. It is unfortunately very expensive but the investments last for decades, if I remember right the normal design lifetime for large road and railway bridges is 120 years. (If that is correct, a lot of the bridges from the 60:s have needed realy major maintainance after only 30 years. I hope that gives lessons learned. )

The main industry in Linköping is not as green. Saab Gripen fighter planes, but it might become a popular product. It is at least the most fuel efficient fighter in its generation and well suited for cost efficient national self defence.  :-)

With todays world price on oil and the current taxes biofuels have become cheaper to use then oil based fuels. A mass replacement of oil based fuels have started and if the trend holds it will be complete in less then 20 years. This will destroy the tax base financing our roads and silently funding other parts of the state budget. The biofuels can handle the general sales tax but nothing more and how do you regulate fair tax levels between half a dozen biofuels and industrial feedstocks? The only way to solve this in an easy to regulate and efficient pseudo market way is to have a fee related to road wear and roadspace use. This would also make it harder to siphon off money for other uses within a state budget, that is good since our state is too big and inefficient.

This can be compared to the fees on railway use. The cost for running a train is the cost for the additional maintainance needed when one more train is run on the tracs. New investments are financed with the state budget, the pseudo market only finance the upkeep. The idea is that very expensive "structural" infrastructure is decided by the political process but the running and upkeep of present infrastructure is too be run withouth a political process.
This works to about 50% since the fees are a too small and the state budget for the additional maintainance is too small in favor of large new projects. I hope this will change so that we dont have to have infrastructure maintainance on the day to day agenda.

Furthermore, if a community wanted to add a new road to create a new suburban neighborhood or shopping center, all they would have to do is increase their local gas tax another penny or two a gallon to cover the expense of building new roads.  

The cost for such roads is mostly charged from the people building a mall or other development. General improvements of the road network in municipialities is paid by their part of the income tax. Large improvements are conciderd a national priority and are bult after 5 to 70 years (and counting...) in the nation road building queue with money from the state budget. Rich municipialities jump this queue by lending money for building major rodas from their own budget and then wait a number of years for their place in the national queue to get the loan back without intrest. The same system is used for railway investments.

Local fuel taxes would only result in manny petrol stations right at the municipialities border.