NYC IS TOO GOOD TO DRIVERS 546

If only it was that easy. Automobiles play such a prominent role in our culture that attempts at reconfiguring the order to build a healthier, more feasible alternative will certainly provoke wide opposition. Expect the solutions to be multifarious and their inducement to be crises - ecological, economical, or otherwise. When there's no choice, there's no recourse but to make the right decision.

Much of what is advanced as an 'answer' seem stop gap measures. The real problem IMHO is the premise underlying too many communities and whole cities: they are commercial ventures, built from the ground up FOR the automobile; they are not organic reflections of local economic and environmental realities nor designed for their citizens.

The typical suburb attests to this. It's utterly uniform in character whether it be in the desert of Nevada, the mountains of Vermont, or the marshes of Florida. It's a repudiation of the uniqueness of its locality, and the reality of its surrounding's interdependencies and capacity to sustain it.

The absolutely indispensable key to the low density, sprawling burbs' viability is the automobile; and by implication, cheap, readily available fuel - nowadays, an increasingly precarious buttumption.

What's the difference between being up a creek without a paddle and living in the suburbs without a car? I can only ponder with what ridicule history will regard such a society that requires a suburbanite, picking up a pack of smokes, to move tons of metal over several kilometers and to bear the cost of the extravagant infrastructure this entails.

Now it's finally dawning as we submit to usurious gas prices, recoil at the despoiling of the environment with autocentric commerce (malls, burbs), choke on exhaust, stew in traffic jams, and circle for parking spots; that what once delivered freedom and mobility is now denying it. But foundering cultures have their inertia so I expect North America's love affair with the car to continue yet, no matter how jaded. In the end there's no avoiding a reckoning.

Stepping from the soapbox now.