I'm a retired North Dakota farmer. There is nothing downtown I want. I'm not interested in the bars, the concerts, the trendy shops, the traffic, the noise, the sensory overload. The Walker Art Center is an ugly, ugly building with the face of an angry robot. The inside is just as ugly as the outside and screams anomie.

At my son's house in Burnsville I'm a block from Red Oak Park and two blocks from Highland Park, places I take my granddaughter twice a day. There's a commons area within my son's immediate community that has large grassy areas and paved walkways that are not next to car traffic. I can watch Coopers Hawks nesting and yesterday a doe and fawn ran across the street in front of me. I'm a 15 minute walk from Mexican and Thai restaurants, two Russian grocery stores, and a drug store, as well as several other services. I'm a 15 minute bike ride from two Cubs and one Aldi's supermarkets and a Target and hundreds of other stores, restaurants and services. For a city, it's pretty quiet, except for airplanes going up and down the Cedar Ave. glide path. When I look out my son's sunroom windows, all I see is trees, a slough and no buildings. The neighbors are friendly and know each other.

Why would I want to go downtown, where everything, except Loring Park, is concrete? When my wife was going to graduate school at the University of Minnesota, we lived on the West Bank in the Riverside apartment tower complex. It was all concrete. You can bring vegetables to the Nicollet Mall, but it's still all concrete.

These blogs tend to focus on metro areas. What about the rest of us? On weekends I'm in Mankato, where my wife is a professor. This is a community of 45,000 and has city bus service. But what about the rural area surrounding Mankato and its small towns? There's an aging population. It's going to need the American equivalent of the Turkish "dolmus" bus system in the future, but something like that never gets discussed. Our permanent home is in northern Minnesota near the Canadian border. Bears outnumber humans. I'm 14 miles from the nearest village; 45 miles from the nearest city; 110 miles from the nearest SMSA; 250 miles from the metro area. If you don't have a car, your mobility is seriously curtailed. There is no public transport. Winter lasts six months; continuous snow cover goes from Halloween until after Easter. The temps Portland has in winter, we can get in July.

If one thinks that changing our transportation system will be expensive, changing housing practices for Americans will be an order of magnitude more expensive and difficult. That's the point I was trying to make. There are no fill-in areas in the Twin Cities metro area inside the outer ring suburbs, unless one is talking of pouring a lot of concrete to build high rise condos. And then these people will be commuting from the core city out to their jobs in the suburbs, unless you want to move the jobs and schools and services into the core cities too. That's a lot of real estate to change.

Let's think about how to move people efficiently using linear transport to meet an isotropic flow. That's a difficult and expensive enough problem without also trying to move real estate.

High density development is like moving the mountain to Moses. It requires huge real estate investment while at the same time not obviating the need for change of transportation infrastructure. There may be many good reasons for high density urban residential and commercial construction, but not as a primary way of solving our transportation problem.

I think the last two decades have been the bottom of the barrel in residential housing design: the ugliest, most oversized houses in American history; the housing corollary of the SUV. However, it is easier to move Moses to the mountain; that is, we're going to have to work with what we've got, because the job will be expensive enough without getting into real estate as a solution.

I think a more cost-effective approach would be to focus on legislation to provide for health insurance and pension plan portability. That would allow people to change their jobs to shorten commuting distance without losing those two essential parts of modern life. When my grandmother visited us from Austria 40 years ago, she said America was an uncivilized country because it didn't have national health insurance. Well, we still have our expensive mish-mash of private insurance and people are trapped in long commutes because they can't afford to give up their benefits.