Is the ruling assumption that most crude oil imports of the U.S. are ultimately refined into gasoline for fuel-guzzling commuting contraptions ? I don't have any stats on this, but I would assume that less than half of crude oil imports go for this purpose. What about plastics -- both for capital goods and consumer goods ? What about fertilizer, pesticides, specialty chemicals, solvents, degreasers, etc. ? Fuel oil to move _freight_ (not people) -- air cargo, containerships, not to mention whatever substance it is that fuel the 6th and 7th fleet themselves !!! Heating oil for the buildings of New England and the mid-Atlantic states. The debate all too typically centers on the most ecologically rational/socially progressive means of moving people, while overlooking the way in which 20th Century Capitalism would have never achieved the growth rates it did (and managed to articifially boost the standard of living of the working class in the North, thus forestalling social revolution) by sucking down vast reserves of "Promethean" fossil fuel. One need only mention the Green Revolution and cheap food for elites/masses in the North and elites of the South (as well as misery for the petty producer, now shantytown dweller, of the South).
Also, being of the Bay Area, Brad Meyer has good reason to be suspicious of talk of raising the gas tax to fund mass transit. The transportation planning agency would just shove more money into BART (which already gets a shitload of regressive regional sales tax dough), which is basically a subsidy to financial and high-tech capital, who want exurban tech-prof workers to show up at work (in downtown SF and Oak) on time and refreshed, instead of late and stressed out by spending 3 hours on the Bay Bridge or climbing Sunol Grade in their late-model Land Rover. Meanwhile urban bus systems (especially East Bay's AC Transit) gets starved of funds, no money for maintaining rolling stock, cuts service, speeds up drivers, leaves working poor stranded at night to call a cab or a friend for a ride.
(Which is not to say that I don't _detest_ SUV's -- but probably as much or more so as exemplars of commodity fetishism, of enthusiastic working class worship of passenger vehicles as conduits of social identity, than as exemplars of environmental bad habits. Most laughable and disgusting is the way in which so many clowns seem to willingly embrace Madison Avenue's marketing of SUV's as _pro-environmental_, because with an SUV you can escape to the outback, to get away from all these mediocre slobs trapped in the urban muck. But I digress).
Moreover, in the Bay Area, under a lite green pretext, the transportation planning agency allocates little funding to goods-moving projects (investments such as dedicated road freight corridors). Sounds good, but owner-operator freight truck drivers, mostly Central American, East African, Middle Eastern, and Sikh immigrants, glorified sharecroppers for the road-hauling firms, paid by the delivery, get stuck in bad traffic dominated by passenger vehicles, speed up themselves to stay afloat financially, short-cut through poor neighborhoods where freight truck bans aren't enforced, have deadly accidents (high rate of jacknifed trucks on Oakland's notorious I-880), etc. Freight truck driving is most dangerous occupation in U.S.
Context is everything. A forward-looking segment of the ruling class (well, maybe ruling class is too strong a term), with their green lite think-tanks and foundations, understands that in the fossil-fuel constrained future, dense built environments and mass transit will keep labor reproduction costs and hence production costs low, all good for export competitiveness. Detroit and Texas might not like it, but the Bay Area and NYC do, as do some of the big banks and metropolitan landed capital. In the Bay Area, Bank of America and the Urban Land Institute (lite green "New Urbanist" front group for metropolitan landed capital) sponsored and endorsed an anti-sprawl, pro-mass transit regional planning vision. None of this is to say that red-greens shouldn't support dense built environments and mass transit (or why not live-work cooperatives surrounded by urban gardens), but for entirely different reasons than winning the cost containment wars with Tokyo and Frankfurt (just as red-greens of Tokyo and Frankfurt should not be concerned with winning cost containment wars with the Bay Area and NYC twenty years hence).
John Gulick