<<Furthermore, speaking of rural idiocy, what are people living in truly rural areas supposed to do? Bicycles only go so far and so fast. I guess they can go back to riding horses, but that would entail a larger "human footprint" to provide the feed for them (and so it goes... ).>>
At present, for most of the U.S., what Barkley writes is clearly true. But in the early 20th century (up almost to the War) even quite small towns had street car (trolley car) systems which worked very well. There was a great strike of street-car motormen in Bloomington IL in 1917 (Mother Jones came to town to support the strike), and I can barely remember in the thirties the street car system in my home town of Benton Harbor Michigan.
Moreover, as late as the 1920s a network of electric lines called interurbans crisscrossed the midwest, and even in the early days of the automobile, rural dwellers who owned cars would only drive themselves (they could often walk) to the nearest interurban to go into even nearby small towns. When my mother went to high school and later to what was called "County Normal" (a one-year teachers' college), she walked to the interurban less than a mile away and took it into Benton Harbor.
When I was stationed in Washington D.C. (Air Force, during Korean War) D.C. had the most marvelous street car network then, and though auto traffic was already becoming strangling, the street cars were used heavily even by those who owned cars. In Arlington Co. though, where I lived after I married, it was impossible for most purposes to get along without a car.
(Incidentally, when I say "The War" I still mean "WW 2," not even "my" war, the Korean War.)
While the ecological damage cars do can't (it seems to me) be denied by rational persons, far worse, perhaps, is the negative impact they have on the quality of life of those of us who are forced to use them. They create a Hobbesian war of all against all. I can't imagine anyone forced to drive day after day in the hellish traffic of the "expressways" in U.S. cities (and of even smaller urban areas of 100,000 +/-) seeing cars as "liberating." Depression, which I suffer from, sometimes has as one side effect generating a sort of motiveless rage, and the automobile seems to have the capacity to generate such a rage in the populace at large. By making *possible* the construction of "suburbs" in the American sense, the automobile has lengthened the work day by 1 to 4 hours. Tens of millions of people spend over an hour each way getting to and from work, every mile of the way incredibly provoking and imposing incredible emotional and physical stress.
Carrol