Wogster

Actually there are 3 things that will mean the end of car culture, fuel cost is actually number 3.

The first is traffic, with the rapid increase in the number of cars over the last 50 years, trips that used to take 20 minutes can now take over 2 hours during "Rush Hour", which in some cities is now 4-5 hours in length with another similar length "Rush Hour" in the evening. This is one of the reasons that Ontario's GO Transit is getting more and more popular, 30 minutes on an nice comfortable train, versus 2 hours of tiring frustration in the car. A recent study in Canada determined that the cost of Traffic, in the Greater Toronto Area, on commerce, was $6,000,000,000 a year. This would include the cost of truck and bus drivers sitting in traffic, small business vehicles stuck in traffic, people late for work because of traffic, etc. One of the reasons traffic is so bad, is that for the municipality, roads are a black hole that sucks up copious amounts of money, and they get almost nothing to build or expand one from senior levels of government and nothing for maintenance.

Second is actually parking, this is a big one, it doesn't matter if it takes you 10 minutes or 10 hours to get to work, if there isn't sufficient parking, and this is also a problem for cities. Take a strip of land 200' wide and 500' long, as a parking lot, the property tax on it is equal to or a little more then it would be for an empty lot, and that wouldn't be much. Now divide that into 28 building lots, and put some houses on it, with each one paying $2,000 a year in taxes and the city gets $56,000, versus maybe $6,000 for the empty lot. Because there isn't enough parking, and not enough land to dedicate to parking, the cost of parking goes up each year.

It doesn't matter if your fuel costs $10/Gallon or 10¢/Gallon, if there isn't room for traffic and there isn't room for parking, then it doesn't matter, it does become a factor though, as the price goes up, to put one more nail in the cars coffin.