Not much room for optimism

Thought I’d copy this here for posterity – this is a comment I made to an excellent entry by Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly blog, in reference to somebody who thought that since we adjusted to the 1970s oil shock (he’s right on that one) that we could just as easily adjust to the oncoming (soon or later, depending on your alarmism) peak oil shock.

Adding this comment to my blog has made me recall that I still owe an analysis of “fire stations per capita” back to the Texas Fight guy. I’m sorry, I’ve been busy at work and at home, and will try to get this done soon.

My comment:

John,
The answer to why this shock will be much worse than the one in the 1970s is two words:
suburban sprawl

One thing Kunstler gets right is his analysis of the complete lack of options in a modern suburban development (really exurb) to the single-occupant vehicle and truck delivery to strip malls. There’s no way to carpool. There’s no way to use transit. There’s no way to ride your bike or walk. There’s no way for the store to switch to freight rail deliveries (not even the way it used to be, which was truck for only the last very small N% of the trip, if even that).

The ONLY things modern suburbanites can do are:

1. Trade in their SUV for a compact car – works well if you’re one of the early adopters, but what if everybody else is trying to trade down at the same time?
2. Move back to the cities – see above.

We would have had to change our development laws twenty years ago in order to have a prayer of solving this problem, but instead we’ve been operating on a regime that not only requires urbanites to subsidize wasteful suburbanites, it actually PROHIBITS BY LAW (through zoning codes) the development of additional urban neighborhoods.

For reference, my last two homes have been in two center-city neighborhoods where 80-90% of the dwellings would be impossible to build today due to suburban-influenced zoning code which applies even in these older neighborhoods. Of course, to even get to that point, you’d have to overcome their fanatical opposition to infill, but every bit counts.