Dusty Furtile Morrocan writes:
> Much of the USA has been built around the assumption that cars will be
> available to all forever. That demand is enormous, and unless the
> USA's middle classes are going to be decimated, a way will have to
> found to maintain this mode of transport.
The time may come when those automobile-oriented cities will be decimated
instead. If fuel is truly unavailable, or is so expensive that it simply
cannot serve as a basis for commuting, people will have no choice but to
abandon large cities that depend on automobiles, or redesign parts of them to
accommodate mass transit, bicycles, or walking, while the rest of the
metropolitan area decays slowly into rust and dust.
It's interesting in that densely-populated cities like Paris or London have
the opposite problem today: some people absolutely insist on driving cars,
producing huge amounts of noise, pollution, and traffic in these cities, even
though the cities could easily survive without any private motor vehicle
traffic. |