It sounds more like rewarding with lower taxes those who drive less miles.

Cost of living is a deterrent for many people who might otherwise like to move to that area.

You seem to be ignoring the concept of finity. Californians are dong OK because they are stealing water from other sources. When those sources run dry, they will steal water from the Great lakes or Greenland, if allowed.

They certainly don't want to move away as long as they have enough money to get others to sustain them for a few more years. I don't know how many more years. Maybe 50? 100 for the wealthy few?

Once hyperloop is broadly established, Californians might be living and/or working near the Great lakes or Greenland, but then they'll be midwesterners/Greenlanders, in addition to being Californians.

If you're talking big construction projects, maybe desalinization would be a better idea than the hyperloop?

Idk how energy-efficiently desalination can be done on a large scale. There are also ways of sterilizing and filtering wastewater, but I think people shy away from that. I think hyperloop will simply be a reality in the coming century and people will live and work hundreds of miles apart. Ultimately, this will be good because it will mean people have to conserve as individuals instead of as local communities, which will be good for the planet as a whole. The downside is that it's not easy to get people to take personal responsibility and the consequences of them failing to do so are harsh.

It will also mean getting around car-free once you leave the hyperloop port, by whatever means that takes place (automatic cars? local transit? bike riding?).

I'll have to cross link this thread to my predictions thread.

We all could be guilty of using resources from other places just because we can afford to do so. Think of oil, cars, cell phones, computers, produce, and other foods.

I don't even know the last time I bought something that was made in the USA other than food. My used van was made here but I didn't buy it new. The engine might have been made in Korea.

It is a mystery why they put all of our oil underneath the sands of the middle east.

There's a lot of oil elsewhere. Just not near as cheap to collect and refine. But when we tap out the Mid East things will change a lot.

The foot crank could even replace the entire engine! Wonder what kind of name they'd dream up for a vehicle like that. Maybe "footmobile"?

Gerv,

Getting back to your original post - I believe Kunstler is correct, though his timeline may be off. Home from Nowhere was the first book of his I read. I must say, it was a lot like the theme from the movie "The Matrix". I had a feeling that there was something wrong with the world, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Kunstler has. We've built an exceedingly ugly world, based around automobiles, not people.

Whatever the actual timeline turns out to be, Kunstler is correct - the future will not look like the auto centric world we have today. A very simple principle - "Things that cannot continue, WILL NOT continue". There is NOT an infinite supply of oil on the planet, therefore, oil production will not continue to increase, and at some point (who knows exactly when), oil prices will go sky high. The end of the game comes when it takes more energy to extract the oil than the extracted oil produces.

I've never been mistaken for an optimist, but there is one hopeful sign that could mitigate the coming peak oil crisis - and that is the dropping cost of solar energy. The stuff I've read says that the cost of solar is now on par with the cost of fossil fuels. If we head in that direction, it could be possible to meet our energy needs. And possibly society would be the better for it - solar could be used to create liquid fuels. It would be much more expensive than simply pumping them out of the ground. But liquid fuels have something electric batteries do not: energy density. More energy per pound of liquid fuel. So even if the fuel cost much more, it would be worth it for critical applications. Non-critical uses would fall by the wayside - joy riding, single passenger commutes in 2 ton vehicles - these types of things would become too expensive.

If it happens slowly enough, we might just come out on the other side with a more vibrant and secure society.

What did he get wrong?

Most of the prediction part. The book is now 20 years old and he said this.
Originally Posted by James Howard Kunstler in Home From Nowhere Anybody who thinks we're going to be using cars twenty-five years from now the way we've been accustomed to using them in the recent past ought to have his head examined. That phase of out national history is over.

Car sales still are doing pretty well in most places. Cycling is still under 5 percent, walking isn't much better. Mass transit is begging for money and congress is resisting funding for it but granting funding for road building, and Hybrid car development. So it seems as if that phase is not over at all. And with the multiple posts in this sub forum about automated vehicles is any indication cars may be with us for quite a while after everyone that read his book is looking at the grass from the wrong side. Look at how things are working out in China and India and see if the car culture hasn't grown from National to international.

mass transit loses money.. because it's run by crooks.. Autos won't die in my lifetime.

It looks like some other folks are seeing the "light" $$$$.

Minn. regulators approve site permit for huge solar project | Minnesota Public Radio News

Okay, sorry, I thought you were talking about some more detailed predictions than that one general quote. I agree the trend away from cars in the USA hasn't picked up much steam yet, and I don’t think we'll see a huge shift by 2021, so as others say, his timeline may be off. Still, he made a very non-specific statement that "the way we use cars" will change, so I'd have to see that statement in a fuller context to know if will turn out to be prescient.

25 years is specific. "That phase of our National history is over" is specific. That phase is no where close to over so what you call a little off I call missing the ball. And that was the post that started all of this.

"The way we use cars" has already changed significantly. Vehicle miles traveled have been going down for several years, as we have discussed on other threads. although this isn't the type of change you can observe on the highway, it is meaningful when it comes to planning for future infrastructure needs.

The cars themselves are very different from what they were 20 years ago. They will continue to change at a more rapid pace over the next five years as more stringent fuel efficiency standards continue to phase in.

It's too bad we don't have the context, because it was a pretty vague statement. On the one hand, I agree with Mobile 155 that it seems to imply a much larger change than what we are seeing so far. On the other hand there are some trends in place (reduced driving, especially by younger people; more bike facilities, walkable communities and and traffic restrictions, especially in urban areas; a potential tsunami of retirements) that might snowball in the next 6 years, so stay tuned.

Roody the great thing about the human mind is it is free to believe what it wants. If you believe the auto age is over, fewer cars are on the road now than 20 years ago, the mass purchase of private motor vehicles is down from 20 years ago and they are building fewer roads today you have that right. I am just not seeing it. The fact that cars are getting better hardly seems like the end of the auto age to me.

Car-free innovations, such as shopping malls, don't really show up on the radar as growth in car-free living because people drive there mostly. However, in terms of road congestion, places like shopping malls, big box stores, and other one-stop shops, including walkable downtowns, open-air shopping centers, mixed-use residential/commercial areas, amusement parks, etc. all have the function of combining a number of sequential life activities within a single stay at a parkable location. In other words, for driving-dependent people, just the ability to leave the car parked for more than a few minutes constitutes a bit of salvation from more-or-less constant imprisonment on the roads.

What we talk about as 'car-free living' in this forum is really a fairly advanced state of living car free where people can forego driving altogether. There is a lot in between total freedom from having to drive and total submission to the need to drive and park numerous times throughout the day for everything separately. Some cities/areas are still probably filled with drivers filling up their days driving around running errands, visiting people, making deliveries, etc. etc. Many such people probably don't really accomplish that much in terms of how much time and effort it would take them to do the same things in a more efficient car-free infrastructure, but that is part of the reason the lifestyle appeals to them; i.e. their time is occupied so they don't have to face the awareness that what they ultimately accomplish in life doesn't amount to that much. As long as they are patronizing businesses and spending money, they feel that they are accomplishing life and thus feel validated.

So, in all likelihood, for many if not most drivers, they would like to see their drivable areas hover in the middle-ground between more driving and less driving. They are frightened by the prospect of no driving as a radical change from what they're used to. Their hope is that motor-congestion can be kept just low enough to avert headaches and excessive time waste while keeping driving dominant and thus mainstream/normal enough not to cause them any feelings of responsibility to change their ways. Driving is their status quo and they hope it is protected and enshrined as such. The question is whether that is even possible; since it is obviously not desirable from the perspective of those of us who have seen beyond automotivism and want progress in the pursuit of car-free life, liberty, and happiness.

Here's the most recent data I could find showing a decade long slump in driving per capita in the USA, possibly partially reversed in 2014 with a drop in gas prices. However you can see that driving is no longer tightly coupled to the economy as a whole - GDP rebounded and driving didn't - so there's clearly a sea change of some sort in place, although where it will take us is in 6 years is hard to predict.
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/me.../0c9e48ee0.jpg

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/...normal/388421/

+1. Any decrease in miles driven has been modest at best and seems to track with increased fuel prices. Then last year prices went down and driving is on the increase again.

I don't believe, and didn't say that any of those things are true. I said only that vehicle miles traveled is down on a per capita basis. That's a pretty big deal, since it has gone up every year for more than a century, except for the Depression and rationing during WWII.

And fleet-wide fuel consumption is starting a big decline also, as I mentioned. That is mainly due to stricter government regulations that continue to get stricter every year for the next few years. The only thing that can stop this from occurring is a change of party in the White House, IMO, and probably not even that.

These are not observable changes in the way cars are used, so I don't know if you want to count them as a fulfillment of Kunstler's prophecy. Really, saying thaat Kunstler was wrong about some things is not logically the same as saying he was wrong about everything.

As I said earlier, I respect Kunstler a lot more for his critique of the built environment, not so much for his prophesies about Peak Oil.

I have never been a big Peak Oiler, personally. For one thing, cars will use other fuels--certainly electricity, and perhaps some sort of biofuel. For another thing, I don't think the end of oil would be as economically challenging as Kunstler and other Peak Oilers thought. On balance, I think it will be (if it happens) a good thing. My big worry has always been not that we will run out of petroleum, but that we will not.