Has the posse been assembled for the writer of the first piece yet?

I thought this statement from the first editorial was a bit strange: We might not be at the end of the cheap oil era yet, but when that day comes, its dawn will look something like what we're living through today.

So far, I haven't seen anyone change their ways -- we're still buying big, driving long, accelerating hard -- and living large. If changes are being made, they're not being made where they are apparent. And implying that this may not be the real dawn just hurts the efforts of those who need funding to work on fixes -- investors won't invest if they think PO is a sham, or a future event (isn't 30 years from now being bandied about?).

What will high-priced fossil fuel do to the cost of launching and maintaining communication satellites, cellphone towers, undersea cables, fiberoptic cables on land? What will Google's server farms cost with $300/bbl oil?

Do the great minds of TOD believe that this communication network, let alone the transportation network, can be sustained?

I ride DART rail daily, and it has been standing room only for some time. They are working on modifications to the stations that will allow the use of lower floor cars that increase capacity from 75 to 100 ppl/car. I haven't seen the new cars yet, but I'm skeptical that the increase will be that great, because people are already standing on the steps since they're always so full.

When I look at the DART website, the emphasis is clearly on adding miles, but other than the new cars, there's nothing about increasing the capacity of the existing lines. The only fix that I can see would be to modify the schedule to have them run every few minutes during peak hours. The way their budget process appears to work, I guess that will take several years.

High cost rules out trams

...Regardless of which council is responsible for transport, the cost of introducing a new tramway system into the city on any significant scale would be between £100m and £200m, and could only be funded by central government or by the private sector.

For private investors, the return on such a massive investment is unlikely to be attractive.

For central government, facing a large public sector borrowing requirement already, and a myriad of demands for public investment, a tram project for Oxford is also unlikely to pass the tests used by the Treasury to assess return on investment.

CONGRATULATIONS !

I know that you had some influence on the editorial board of the DMN.

WELL DONE Jeffery !

Best Hopes,

Alan

In many respects, the small town where I was raised in Northern Illinois during the later half of the 50's was much like the towns I've heard described by people of my parents generation. The early 20th century was a time when agriculture was still local and there was a great deal of regional autonomy. Housing was affordable, you could walk to school, neighborhoods were safe and neighbors were closer, both in proximity and in terms of social behavior. A nearby commuter train could be used for those who worked in factories or offices up and down the shores of Lake Michigan. You could drive south or west and in less time than it takes us to drive to work today, you would be ‘out in the country' amidst an apparently endless vista of farmland. My family moved to Dallas, Texas in 1970. The transition was interesting, away from vestiges of regional autonomy I had grown up with, toward urban sprawl and entrenchment in car culture. The central Texas corridor was such a rapidly growing region; infrastructure was very new and reflected the less permanent minded, rapidly changing landscape and economics of cheap oil and gas.
The issue is quite complex, but it appears that at as liquid fuel-oil demand meets or exceeds supply, this car dependent, sprawling economic jungle gym we have constructed may no longer work, and though people will desperately seek to sustain this infrastructure and economic paradigm with alternative energy, at some we may want to revisit some of the living arrangements we had in the early twentieth century: A smaller ecological footprint per person, less energy and less resource use, and more regional and local autonomy. We will need more diversified local economic models when transportation fuels become relatively expensive, but living standards may actually be better for a given ecological footprint if modern technologies that have been developed during the cheap oil age are integrated into our new living approach.
Population is an important factor that should be considered too. In order to achieve sustainability for current population numbers, how much will living standards have to be reduced, in spite of technological advances? What will we find the carrying capacity to be, for a desirable – acceptable quality of living conditions? The region where I grew up is now no more sustainable or self sufficient than in Texas or anywhere else: Cities have been reduced to monolithic office complexes, the countryside has become saturated with widely dispersed single family housing, homes and offices are far distant and connected by a highly inefficient network of roads that can be clogged by a single accident, the labor for manufacturing has been exported overseas with material goods all imported by way of a continual stream of trucks and boats used to supply warehouse like stores that we can only reach by way of cars and freeways. Even if regional autonomy is rebuilt over time and a diverse energy alternatives are employed, I still wonder if it will be enough to sustain the numbers we currently have, or will have as the population of the world continues to grow exponentially. Perhaps our energy, resource & environmental challenges are solvable, rather the question might be: Can people cooperate sufficiently to change sufficiently and soon enough to achieve sustainability at an acceptable standard of living, before nature imposes, perhaps, a much lower standard of living on it’s own terms?