>And are the roast chickens going to fly into your mouth?
>Do you think the shops in cities are stocked by bicycle?
You see his point but want to deny that you do or divert the argument to something else. A truck delivers X number of "meals" to a restaurant. X number of meals are sold at location one, same number at location two. Location one in the 'burbs has 80% of its meals sold to people who travel by car 4 miles or more. Location two has 80% of it's meals sold in the city to people who walk to the location to pick it up. Location two is more cost effective based fuel usage per meal delivered and time involved for the purchaser. It does not take substantially more energy to deliver food to Lake Forest than it does to Chicago but it certainly take more energy and time for the average Lake Forest citizens to retrieve their food than the average resident of Chicago. These are facts. The desirability of it is a different issue. The sustainability of it another issue yet. All are connected to be certain.
>Amazing though it may seem, suburban dwellings, like most dwellings, are
>designed to be sold.
>That means that the architects build in features that they think people
>will want.
>Lots of people trade space and seclusion for the physical intimacy of the
>city.
>If you move to the suburbs, then you are making a choice that implies more
>car journeys, not less.
>But nobody is "forcing" anybody to get into a car.
>Is it clever? It is not rocket science.
>It is just a trade-off: control over immediate environment for car dependency.
Nobody is forced to get into a car? Where do you live? Where I currently live, the location of my SO's extended family one of whom we care for, has almost zero public transportation. Where it does run is basically a connection between four locations, three shopping and one where municipal buildings are located. If you don't work in one of the four areas connected, or along the routes connecting them, there is effectively no public transport you can use. If it were costless for me to move to someplace where public transportation was first rate maybe I would not be forced to have a car but that is not the current reality. Everyone does not live where they might choose to if all other things were equal because all other things are never equal. You may be free to live wherever you wish, if you are I'm glad for you, but for millions of people this freedom simply does not exist. Other obligations like family, employment, etc work against the perfectly fluid living arrangements you seem to believe in. Pretending otherwise does people a great disservice. The judgmental attitude of "if you live where a car is required it's your own fault" is neither helpful nor true.
>It is certainly cheaper.
>In 1932 you would have to work more than half an hour to earn enough money
>to buy a gallon of gasoline.
>By 1999, you had to work 5 minutes and 42 seconds (Cox and Alm, Myths of
>Rich and Poor, 43).
>British household expenditure on transport was 14.4 per cent of the total
>in 2000, falling from 15.4 per cent in 1990.
>In Britain just 12 per cent of people lived in a household with no car,
>way down from the 20 per cent that did so in 1991.
>People living in two car households increased from 18 to 22 per cent of
>the popn. over the same period.
Trotting out "Myths of Rich and Poor" is pretty unconvincing evidence for much. This book is full of deliberately misleading statistics and lies of omission. They leave out data that refutes their ideas whenever it suits them. These are the guys who claim that income distribution doesn't have much to do with economic opportunities in society at large! How can a professed socialist believe such nonsense? Give me a break. These guys belong right up there with Julian Simon. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you read the book "Global Warming & Other Eco Myths" put out by those supporters of "free enterprise and limited government" the Competitive Enterprise Institute? If I'm wrong I apologize but I am guessing this may be one source of your skepticism. Gasoline is poor example as evidence for decreased living expenses. Expenditure patterns have changed dramatically since then. Not many people needed gas in '32 and production was low and not very economical. Look at lamp oil from the same time frame and the picture looks just the opposite. Not as much call for lamp oil today as then. Look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics "Consumer Expenditure Reports" and the Census Bureaus "Household and Housing Statistics" to get a truer less biased picture.
>Wayne says that his suburban friends feel trapped, like they had no choice.
>No doubt we all feel a bit frustrated with our lot in life from time to time.
>But look at the facts: people just keep on moving to the suburbs.
People continually moving to the 'burbs is hardly proof of its sustainability. I'm not certain why you seem to approach this problem in such a binary way. Either everyone gets a suburban home with A/C and an SUV or else we have to follow some radical environmental neo-Malthusian plan that forces an austere lifestyle on everyone but a handful of elites. Why not limits to growth, more intelligent planning, more dense living arrangements, rebuilding infrastructure to diminish private vehicle dependence, etc? If everyone wanted their own small nuclear reactor to go with their suburban home would that make that alright too? Of course not, it's a silly idea to even suggest, just because people currently want to move to the 'burbs because we live in such a fucked up culture is no reason we are obligated to continue the trend. What if all the white people want segregated schools again? You write as if you believe the desire to have a suburban home and SUV is sacrosanct. Those desires, while rational currently, are a response to problems. Eliminate, or work to eliminate, those problems and that demand will decrease. Pass the full cost of suburban living on to those who make that choice and demand will diminish further. Cities are social constructs and we should be able to make them what we want. These are not individual choices made in a vacuum. There are society wide implications in these choices and society has every right to dictate some terms to its growth.
John Thornton