Platy

Taking a long term perspective, that's one reason architectural visionaries should identify and promote the few accidentally carfree friendly neighborhoods that already exist. If people gravitate to the magic neighborhoods because they like to have local resources and transit options, the local opinion may come to support further carfree development.

Can't do much in the near term to pacify Granny Grumps who still thinks it's 1960, at least until one day her kids gently take away the car keys...

HoustonB

Lets see, I spotted the link between the rising price of oil and economic problems in September 2007, more than a year later, this (pdf) report by a leading economist agrees with me:

Perhaps it is wahoonc that has the questionable logic and education.

gwd

In the novel "Grapes of Wrath" about the depression farmers gave up their land but not their truck. Was that the type of thing that actually happened? It seems like a reasonable response for a family to take off in a truck looking for a livelihood rather than keeping the suburban house and limiting their job foraging range.

Platy

Very interesting to pick up this thread after a year.

"Grapes of Wrath" was kind of the worst case scenario for people. It was just a three day drive from the Dust Bowl to California, not the rigorous epic journey depicted by Steinbeck. The Joads were dead broke to start with, they were not educated, they didn't have any family support network to help them get established, and possibly worst of all they tried to stay in the agriculture business at a very bad time.

What happened in my family was that the younger people got in their cars and drove to town to get jobs: accountant, electrician, mechanic, textile mill, heavy equipment operator, gas station operator, carpenter, oil field worker, etc. The few who stayed in agriculture got by only by abandoning commodity type row cropping and specializing in something more profitable, like poultry and vegetable farming. The fact is, what saved many rural families in the 1930s was turning from the land as their primary resource to their motor vehicles.

wahoonc

Oil prices are down and the economy AND the mortgage market is still collapsing...American consumers have been over reaching for several years. Some of us have the good sense to live with in our means. But it looks like we may be penalized anyways.

Aaron

Longfemur

There's no bigger money pit in modern life than the car, except maybe the house that seems to be everyone's dream. At least a house has real value, but the car has less every single day you own it.

But to be carfree, the society around us has to cooperate with us. This means some rational, logical thinking that most politicians, taxpayers and developers are not capable of. You need intelligent placement of the things that people need within the urban area, safe roads (and personally, I think good bikepaths/lanes too whenever possible), and you need decent public transit because there are times when you won't be able to ride a bike unless you're a permanently healthy young hipster without any real world responsibilities.

And you also need to live in a city that isn't too close to the North Pole, especially if you don't have the above.

I am carfree, by the way, but it's not always easy or practical.

gwd

Yeah, we'll be penalized. It looks like every solution to the bankers loss involves injustice to the people who behaved. Since most people haven't they turn on us, the rich won't pay so the only source of funds is the the people who saved for their retirement. They'll take it from us through devaluing the money or stocks or taxing us. They know we won't fight back since we tend to be the peaceful collaborator type.

Doug5150

There's a lot of people here (not Newspaperguy in particular) who have no idea what you are wishing for.

If the price of fuel rises dramatically, people aren't just "going to stop driving" while everything else stays the same. Fuel is an energy cost, which would affect a lot of businesses in bad ways. It's not just stinky car exhaust, it's all of the fuel for moving all of the raw materials from wherever they come from, to all of the factories where they're used, and then to all of the stores that end up selling the finished junk. Most of those factories are located in cities. And most of the places that sell the finished stuff are located in cities. So in an economic downturn, the urban areas lose far more jobs than rural areas do.

And what happens in urban areas when the economy goes down the toilet has already been demonstrated more than once: crime in the urban living areas rises dramatically and the people who still make enough money to be able to afford to choose move out to the suburbs. Any business that deals with retail sales doesn't want to locate in a high-crime area either, so they leave for the suburbs too.

An economic depression is not going to draw people into urban living. There's a lot of "car free" people in Detroit, a lot of cheap housing, and a lot of very empty streets too--even during rush hour--but that doesn't make it a nice place to go bicycle riding.
~

Roody

Have you ever cycled in Detroit? These people seem to be having a good time in the Motor City:

mike

(How old is this post? Seems it was from before gas prices crashed)

I am not sure why the OP uses Britain as an example for high gas prices.

However, if we use Britain as a model, then we can assume that high gasoline prices will not encourage bicycle commuting or car-free lifestyles.

Gasoline in Britain is over $12.00 per gallon. Still, bicycle commuting in England is not overwhelmingly popular.

Bicycle commuting seems to be a cultural thing. In the developed nations, the price of gasoline does not have as great an effect on bikership as you would think. The price of gasoline in Japan, for example, is slightly less than it is in England, but the use of bicycles is significantly greater than in England or the rest of Western Europe.

By observation, it seems that bicycle use in the USA is at least as common as it is in England despite the fact that gasoline prices in the USA are less than half what they are in England.

Doug5150

Yea, they do.

They also don't appear to be in part of the motor city that's economically depressed.
~

Roody

Difficult concept: people in "economically depressed" regiond do ride bikes. And they might even have a little fun doing it.

The larger photo was taken at the Detroit Institute of Arts, a beautiful facility tht happens to be a dead rat's throw away fron an "economically depressed" region.