patrick.net

Cheap oil is no longer relevant for daily work commutes. You can get a Nissan Leaf for the same price as any ICE based vehicle. Even without the tax subsidies, you can lease one for $199. That's only twice the cost of a bus pass.

The embedded rant about electronics was more than a little over the top. Very much a "get off my lawn!" vibe there. It seems like this guy is just reflecting his own dysfunctional relationship with his children.

The idea that suburbanites have nothing to do is hogwash. People hang out with their neighbors, have get togethers at the local school, and play at parks.

Suburban living is definitely less fun than urban living, but it isn't this weird vision of loneliness that this post portrays it as. I'd definitely like to see a world where people live in higher density housing developments, but purely for environmental reasons. I just don't see it happening in our lifetime though.

Leafs are pretty cool, I got to drive one for 2 weeks not too long ago.

Gimme a Leaf an some decent satellite ISP service, and I could live pretty far out of town I think.

30 miles out (about the safe range for a Leaf) from eg. Bellingham's Trader Joe's looks like this:

http://goo.gl/maps/gg4jo

I wouldn't want to drive any further than that to get my groceries anyway, LOL.

As for the satellite ISP, apparently Hughes has some sort of "Gen 4" thing up there now that gives decent DL speeds. Good enough for getting SDKs I guess.

Far flung suburbs and their roads, utilities etc. were "developable" for profit but "unsupportable" and too expensive to maintain over the long run.

The cost estimates to support the infrastructure of suburbs, especially with escalating gas prices, are estimated to be too onerous for future generations to tolerate, except for the wealthy. Increasing density with retraction from the "too expensive to support" suburbs is going to be the wave of the future according to some urban planners.

Of course, the so-called economy is not recovering because there is no more cheap oil. If oil ever gets cheap again, it will be because nobody has enough money to pay for it and surely you can connect the dots to what that hamster wheel of futility means.

It's not "IF" it's when. The Liberal Jig will be up, eventually.
This fantasy lifestyle can't sustain, in a time when wages are getting lower and lower. While goods and services are inflating unchecked and unacknowledged by our economic policy makers.
And the answer is a $29,000 electric car, really?

and FTR, Subdivisions are only a Nightmare for smug condescending Liberals, that snoot from a far from the comfort of their inner city Starbucks couch.

Actually I wish just for one month you Libs could get your wish.
That every person in America would move to the in the inner city.
It would only take a couple of day for that society to totally collapse, by the third day, the smell of urine and feces would be unbearable, that those Libs in their inner utopia society, would scream "NO MAS!"

But they should have to wait another 27 days for punishment for proposing such an outlandish idea with out considering the ramifications.
Plus by the 31st when all of the food ran out because there was no one in the rural areas farming, and the supply trucks stopped delivering goods, because the 1200 miles of roads in between the inner city hubs were baron waste lands, and no one was there to sell gas along the way. There would be pure cannibal anarchy alright.

Just for the record, Kunstler lives in a single family home on a 3 acre plot on the outskirts of a small town in rural, agricultural Washington County, New York. The minority population is almost non-existent. Shopping requires driving. Before moving to Washington County, Kunstler resided in pricey, snobbish Saratoga Springs. There are many cities (Albany, Troy, Schenectady) near Saratoga Springs that have extensive inner city neighborhoods in desperate need of revitalization. If Kunstler wanted to practice what he preaches, he could have relocated to any one of them.

You have to admit, Knustler does have a way with words. This sentence was worthy of surfer-x: I think they [the millennial generation] will make out better in this project than their Boomer forerunners, who started out in communes sharing toothbrushes and graduated to dismal McMansions in a geography of nowhere, while dedicating their careers to the looting of posterity.
As a footnote, I've noticed a couple of used Leaf's on Craigslist for sub $20k (around 10k+ miles on the odometer).

The Leaf is receives power from the electrical grid, which comes from where? Coal, natural gas, nuclear and oil. A solar powered car would be more the answer.

I never see anyone out and about in the local suburbs where I live. I know from the cars parked in the driveways that there are people inside. But never outside. All plugged in to electronic entertainment? Or in hibernation pods?