The Oil Drum

Alan, I think New Orleans is the best city in the USA. Great food, great people, great music. The fact that the feds abandoned you just shows the superiority of your home, its too good for that obnoxious bunch in Washington.
The island nation of Galveston is pretty fine too, but we're definitely outclassed on the food and music. Still, we have a 17ft. concrete seawall, never topped by a storm surge. Here's hoping ya'll can get some 1903 technology!
Bob Ebersole

OTOH this perhaps deceptively hints at the existence of a free lunch - which is the typical problem discussing transportation, all modes of which are massively overused because they are massively subsidized.

The typical Japanese household pays the equivalent of thousands of dollars a year in taxes just to support JR, never mind the Tokyo Metro. Despite that, a $1.50 fare generally only takes one a kilometer or two. To go much of anywhere one usually must pay a JR East (which, in Tokyo, functions as their equivalent of an S-Bahn or RER) fare ranging to somewhere north of $5 just for a mere ten or fifteen km, and/or an expensive fare on one of the fully private rail lines.

In exchange for such heavy expense, the trains are very efficient and nice - and, most of all, punctual, which is always a pleasant shock to one used to the shiftlessness, sloth, and mulish stupidity of US transit operators - but in some cases they are inhumanely overcrowded. And they are trains, so they only go where and when they go, not necessarily where and when you need to go. (That's less of a problem for tourists and visitors, who have more than they can ever see even if they limit themselves to where the trains go.) For example, after about midnight, all you get is the shaft.

Oh, and the frequent and relatively comprehensive service near Tokyo does rely on the oppressive presence of wall-to-wall people stuffing every conceivable nook and cranny, as not only is Japan the size of California but with nearly half the US population, but much of that population is crammed into Honshu's tiny eastern coastal plain. To put it mildly, not every North American is going to want to live that way in order to have the service. And away from that crushing mass, transit service even in Japan becomes the same logistical nightmare that it is in most uncrowded places throughout the world.

Econguy,

"Cars are a major financial burden"

really like your post and its description of the true burden of car ownership and driving. I have many patients on public assistance or who are elderly on fixed incomes. They would never think of it this way, but they often spend as much or more on their car than they do on their house. A common scenario around here (Appalachia) is a $25,000 SUV parked outside a $20,000 trailer home. At least the trailer home is good for 40 or 50 years if maintained.

I've said before that in America you're better off in many respects if you're paraplegic than if you are epilleptic and have a seizure every 6 months. A paraplegic can at least still get just about anywhere in his car, whereas the epilleptic in most places in America has no options but to go on disability and sit at home, at the mercy of friends and family to escort them on a weekly trip to the grocery store.

"I've lived both ways, and not having a car is true freedom. A car, in the US, is like a tax on being alive."

I've always felt the same way- that cars are not "liberating" as the automobile manufacturers would have us believe. That notion of freedom is a theme in many car commercials- driving on a winding road with the convertible top down, beautiful sky, no other cars in site. Most of the time, however, much of the driving one does is hardly liberating. You're stuck behind slower traffic on the freeway, battling to change lanes. You're stopping every block at a light. You go when you're told to go, and stop when you're told to stop. You're stuck in one seat and in one position the entirety of your trip.

Personal cars are imagined to be a sort of "liberty" in the US, the product perhaps of watching too many car commercials. In actuality... Cars are a major financial burden.

Not just a US phenomenon, but worldwide. Whenever personal income reaches a certain level, large numbers of people chose to spend on personal transportation. Consider China and India today; look at South Korea and Japan previously. For many people, personal transportation unquestionably expands their options: more employment choices, more educational opportunities for one's kids, greater freedom as to the time of day when various activities can be pursued. A large fraction -- I would estimate a majority -- of the world's population appears to believe that the benefits of personal transportation outweigh the costs, once their income is large enough.

Clearly, the world's desired level of personal transportation cannot be sustained with petroleum. I think it is nearly as clear that it cannot be sustained with liquid biofuels (eg, ethanol and biodiesel) either. Engineer-Poet makes a reasonable argument that electrification is possible (eg, his calculations on zinc-air storage with wind/solar generation). Unless it can be shown that no personal transportation solutions are possible, better not to demand that people will have to give it up, because much (most?) of the world's population believes it is highly desirable.