Transportation modes: Lots of Choices
Infrastructure saturation has precluded scalability on all levels.
Changing modes of personal transport are significant:
Canadian Example:
What happens when no one uses mass transit infrastructure?
And its clearly business as usual for the US
of existing networks:
The System Never Changes
Only Individuals Migrate off path
An Example of an Ecological Footprint:
The true cost of our private conveyance habit:
In the US CO2 emission from transport
is about equal to that from Coal Fired Electricity Generation
This means there are two clear targets, in terms of new energy policy,
available to us if the goal is reduce the carbon footprint of
the USA.
Only in World War II was there an aggressive public relations campaign
to get people to drive less. It worked. Here is some propaganda
from that era.
Major cause of air pollution which is
a health hazard that kills people!
We export billions of dollars of US
currency overseas for fuel and then evolve a
foreign policy to protect that this
is beyond stupid ...
We consume lots of resources (steel) via the relatively
short lifetime of a basic non-recyclable unit.
Automobiles basically serve to transport iron ore from mountains into
distributed junk yards across the US (entropy at work ...)
40,000 people per year are killed in
accidents compared to 500 per year in mass transit.
Infrastructure and maintenance costs are
absolutely enormous where is high speed
rail when you need it ...
Everyone's has got to park (except at
the UO) so we convert green space into parking lots (e.g. malls).
We end up with Grid Lock
