Originally Posted by
JeffS
Sure, because people have chosen to live places without mass-transit, or chosen to live or work off the lines.
How many times have we heard the "I have to drive because I just bought a house 30 minutes outside of town" line... Let's stop the BS excuses. Everyone wants to drive. If they lived a block from work, they would still drive so they would have a car to drive down the street to buy lunch.
The infrastructure would be built if people actually wanted it. Gas would have to instantly go to $20/gal before the middle class would even consider giving them up.
Quite often the places don't exist or are priced out of the range of the common worker. I have also seen many, many instances where because of zoning the jobs ARE NOT in the same place as the housing. ie; RTP. I have an office in Apex, NC (I only stop through once a month) but there is little in the way of affordable housing with in a 10 mile radius of that office for someone making $10-$12 an hour. There is NO mass transit in Apex that I am aware of. You have to go where the jobs are. A person working in that retail hell at the juncture of 55 and US64 doesn't make enough to live in any of the surrounding neighborhoods. If you look back at a town built in the 1920's up until just prior to WWII you will find a more sustainable infrastructure. Grid streets, neighborhoods, separated from the industrial zones by rail lines, etc. Quite often the factories have been converted to lofts or razed, but it was a pattern that was repeated in many small and medium towns all over the country. The oil companies and the auto manufacturers colluded to kill that style of living all in the race for profits.
I think that it will be sorting its way out in the near future as the economy slowly collapses, the cost of basics escalates and the dollar continues it's decline. We will switch from a consumer based economy to something more sustainable. And hopefully learn some lessons in sustainability...but being humans, history has a way of repeating itself.
Aaron
