The Oil Drum

In the last 9 years, holiday retail sales have increased 50% to $475 billion, a decent chunk of a $13 trillion total GDP. As we've discussed (in detail!) here over the past 2 years, oil is the lifeblood of our transportation system, and thus our economy. Below is a short Christmas post showing the trend of holiday sales, US oil production and US oil imports.

THE OIL OF CHRISTMAS PAST
US Holiday retail sales in Billions $ (left scale) (Source 1999-2006, Source 2007 estimate- National Retail Federation) plotted vs US domestic crude oil production (right scale) (1999 thru 9/2007 then extrapolated - Source - EIA) Click to enlarge

Amory Lovins' Rocky Mountain Institute: Not Exactly Transit Oriented!

Typically, when people think about how sustainable a neighborhood is, they probably think of neighborhoods with lots of organic stores, solar paneled roofs, small hybrid cars and a strong recycling/composting culture. And all of those ideas have their place, but I would argue that the most important is how walkable/bikable a neighborhood is. From Streetsblog, we discover a new website, Walkscore gives us a chance to calculate this aspect of different neighborhoods. While this is admittedly a crude measure and has some fairly obvious flaws, it is in many ways a good rough measure of how walkable a given location is compared to others.

Just pure density does not a walkable neighborhood make. It requires a healthy mix of residential, retail, services and office space. It means basically being able to accomplish pretty much any of your necessary daily trips by foot and not requiring an automobile.

For instance Amory Lovins' Rocky Mountain Institute gets a fairly low score since pretty much anyone that works there or wants to get lunch off campus HAS to drive there. However, most of Manhattan gets a 90+.