Recent ruminations

Monday, March 05, 2007

Wonderful Hans Noeldner provided the following thoughts:

If conservation is the cheapest form of energy, then proximity is the cheapest form of transportation. Which is to say, nothing beats being there already.
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The problem of America’s profligate resource usage is remarkably simple: a great excess of nonessential and often detrimental employment for fossil-fuel consuming machines, and a great shortage of meaningful, useful work for human beings.
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Our attitude towards our twin addictions to oil and the automobile resembles nothing so much as the habit of alcoholics to vociferously deny that intoxicants are the vehicle of their demise.

Distorting Space & Time
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By collapsing a mile into one or two minutes, the automobile in motion has so profoundly distorted our sense of space and time that few living Americans comprehend the nature of a truly walkable community. And the automobile further warps reality when at rest. The amount of real estate “consumed” by only four or five off-street surface parking stalls would suffice for a modest-sized retail business and several floors of residential units. Multiplied by hundreds and thousands in a community, the resulting patchwork of surface parking scatters day-to-day and week-to-week destinations over miles rather than blocks, thereby establishing a ceiling on density well below practical thresholds for pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit users. Multiplied by a billion and more, accommodations for the automobile have rendered the greater portion of modern-day “developed” America unfit habitation for the non-motorist. The species homo automobilicus dominates the field.