Yes, it is. If you saw the layouts of some cul-de-sac suburban neighborhoods you would immediately understand what a problem this is. Point A and point B may be 100 yards apart, but it can take a mile to walk there because streets don't connect.

gg3,

actually, I believe the "private" or "used by owner", is more important than "wheels" for pinpointing the issue. Recreational snowmobiles (almost all snowmobiles in Sweden) adn recreational motorboats (almost all motorboats in Sweden) should be targeted too. Main difference to cars: they do not require lots of concrete and asphalt underneath.

nocar

uh 4 wheels uh you know car

uh four wheels uh car?

1. It's privately owned (by a citizen or household) and used for commuting, shopping, and other personal reasons. So as nocar mentioned, ambulances, delivery trucks, and police cars don't count for the purposes of this thread.

2. I would exempt scooters, mopeds, electrically assisted bicycles, and golf carts from my definition. Although I worry that it allows loopholes, for the time being I'm going to draw the line at anything that's freeway legal. A motorcycle counts as a private automobile because it can be seen driving at 65 miles an hour down the 880. A Yugo counts as one, as does a Mercedes Benz and a Lincoln Navigator. A scooter, driven only on city streets, does not.

Claudia wrote

Yes, I have seen it. It is to stop throughtraffic. Everyone hates other people's cars. Other people's cars is called "traffic". But the solution is to make pedestrian short cuts through somebody's lawn or backyard. With compensation to the owner.

nocar

I get it.

We need a massive new fleet of commercial autos to make up for the private auto. If I'm going to get my milk sent to my house, I'm going to need someone to do that for me. I used to get PeaPod which was basically an online grocery store. I guess a system like that might work. But we would need to ramp it up substantially to make up for the massive just-in-time Food Marts across the country.

Okay, so the present definition of "private automobile" consists of the following parts (all of which must be present)

= four wheels and a motor -or- recreational nonroad vehicles such as boats and snowmobiles that are propelled by motors (see below re. "recreational").

= freeway legal, i.e. speeds of 50 mph or above.

= used for personal trips: shopping, commuting, etc.

To which I'll add:

"Recreational" is defined as any trip in which the objective is the experience of driving, rather than getting to a specific destination and back for some utilitarian reason.

"Personal" trips also include social functions, i.e. visits to friends, family, etc., and trips to movies, restaurants, and so on.

Exemption for "emergencies," defined as situations where there is an immanent risk to life, health, property, or civil rights (where the term "civil rights" does not include a presumptive right to automotive travel per se).

Note: Pstarr, without a definition, you don't have a basis for policy; implicit assumptions about definitions lead to all manner of trouble, e.g. when does "life" begin? Tyler, not to worry, I think you'll be intrigued at where I'm going with this.

Note: Claudia & Nocarr, re. suburban layouts: Exactly; the underlying problem, without which nothing else will get solved (transportation or otherwise) is the layout of the built environment. About which more later this evening.

Re. paths through yards: Not through the *middle* of someone's yard, but via an easement of a few feet in each direction at the property line. You do not want random neighbors walking by your bedroom window while you're making passionate love, or walking through your kids' play areas (kidnappers, drug dealers, etc.). However, a path through the property line allows pedestrian traffic while preserving privacy & safety for residents, and can be fenced or planted on one or both sides as needed.

Palo Alto, California has many bicycle/pedestrian paths like these, as well as bike boulevards that are through streets for bicycles but not for cars. The city may be a good example of how suburbia can be made more amenable to car-free living.

Yes, perfect. A streetless sidewalk. With a little bit of municipal investment to keep it clear in winter.

Streetless sidewalks: Yes, and probably these need to be about 6' wide to allow two wheelchairs to pass, and graded for wheelchair access, and paved (recycled road material), and provided with some kind of lighting (LED lamps?) for safety (not only against crime, but wild animals and so on), and occasionally swept (not just due to litter, but leaves and sand/grit, which are serious slip-hazards) as well as plowed (snow). Sweeping & snow removal in turn introduce more power-driven equipment of one kind or another, even if only small pedestrian-controlled machines. And the adjacent trees & shrubberies will need to be pruned periodically.

All of this added maintenance could be contracted out to the same local kids who offer to mow their neighbors' lawns, seeing as there won't be much lawn left when people have converted their yards to agriculture, and there won't be powered lawn mowers either (speaking of wasted fuel). Or it could provide employment to regular city workers at dignified municipal wages.

So back to those pesky cars now...

Anyone have a proposal for *how* to go about banning private use of automobiles? What specifically would the regulations call for? And how would they be enforced?

I guess i shouldnt post to this thread because I believe only demand destruction will make personal transportation unattractive or impossible to the masses.

When it costs too much to drive a car you wont need to create and spend resources enforcing new laws.

Ok hmmm in the very recent past to conserve energy in the US we were all forced to drive 55 mph on most federal and state highways.

So the U.S. would enforce any new law with fines and other penalties.

As far as alternatives I dont see many.
The average person has little choice but to conform and drive or jump off the merry go round.
My family sold the farm long ago - it appears I will have to be the one to buy it back again!!!

We came to america because we were starving, we moved to west virginia and kentucky for jobs mining coal, after WW2 we accepted the new american dream and moved to the city and newly created burbs with our war pensions, benefits and other social programs.
Many of the descendants have now moved on to larger cities for better jobs regardless of the lesser quality of life.

What are we chasing?
Why is returning to the land seen as such a bad thing?
It seems we have suffered far worse chasing the dollar when all we came here for was food in the first place!!!!

You guys and gals have good ideas.
It would work if the masses believed that it needed to be done.

$10 a gallon? $20 a gallon? sooner or later it wont be a choice for us to make and thus demand destruction is king.

group hug?

I have a thread focusing on the Living Infrastructure: http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic7259.html

We cannot get rid of automobiles without first looking at the whole living infrastructure of our society. The current living infrastructure cannot be without cars, trucks and other vehicles involved at great lengths. It is designated for that mobile get-arounds. Decades ago, cheap oil was the reason. Today and in the future, cheap oil will be gone for good (as oil become more expensive, unaffordable for the rest of the mass).

Your jobs and livinghoods will be affected by rising oil prices. Costs of foods and beverages will go higher due to transportation costs. Our local and national infrastructures are engineered for people moving about in vehicles. Markets and taxes are the big factors in affecting people's livinghoods and jobs.

Poor people who works in warehouses several miles away but cannot afford living in fine-looking housings near the warehouses (so they can walk or ride bike to work). Middle-class people have jobs all over towns or cities and get around by vehicles. People like to travel around. Kids like to cruise around in fancy, sporty or nostalgic cars. One grocery store may not offer the values and kinds you wanted within your housing area so you drive halfway across town to another one with better values.

Too many illegal immigrants are driving their vehicles without licenses. Many people don't give a f**k about what YOU think about them driving their vehicles, so in their words: f**k you. (This is not from me, it's just a general opinion of people who like to drive around and don't care about what others think). Many people LOVE cars and trucks and there are fanatics who are nuts about any or all types of vehicles.

Now don't get me started on motorcycle bikers! Don't tell them to abandon motorcycles because of peak oil and you'll get a horde of mad bikers with chainwhips, like it's straight out of Mad Max movies.

Before you eliminate cars, trucks and other vehicles in general, look at your current living infrastructure and how it is all designed, engineered, developed and structured for people, their jobs and livinghoods. Granted, in some small countries, it's different. In the US, it's very different and we have plenty of spaces in the US to expand the living infrastructure, albeit it cannot last forever.

Yep the price of gas going up is all that's going to do it.

Propaganda against smoking cigarettes has been around since the 1970s, and the films I saw in high school creeped ME out, but what made me decide not to smoke was economics - ciggies costed 50 cents a pack, and were inching higher, I decided 50 cents a day more food would do me a lot of good so, better not smoke!

Now cigs can cost $5 a pack, it's an expensive habit! Meanwhile the working class has been losing ground, not staying level, LOSING ground, since 1975. That increase in cig. cost plus the effective decrease in working-class earning power may well have been what's decreased smoking among that broad base of the social pyramid, the working class.

California has been most successful in decreasing smoking, but California has also been consistantly the most expensive place to live, so even in my own state sheer economics can argueably have had more to do with decreasing smoking than propaganda.

Translate that over to car use, and keep in mind, in the USA, car use has been artificially kept cheap.

We probably agree that Europe as a whole is much less car-reliant than the US mainly because of two factors:

1. Most of the infrastructure (town layout) is old and planned pre-automobile
2. High gasoline prices ($5-6 per gallon)

You can add in a third if you like:

3. More centralized governments that tend to make large investment in public goods, like public transportation, and prohibit many of the kinds of inefficient development we see in the US (a "benevolent dictator" scenario).

I live in a small town (in the US) ruled by the "benevolent dictator" of the local university. They have put together a fantastic planning group that specifically is working to implement a more European town infrastructure. They are largely responsible for:

• All new growth is clustered around liveable units -- either downtown, or in self-sustaining neighborhood clusters that have both housing and shopping.

• Sidewalks and bike lanes being built everywhere, especially connecting the main work places to town.

• Free public transportation! Our only bus system in the area is competely free to everyone.

• Revisement of entire town zoning system to discourage sprawl and, as much as possible, leave existing farm, forest and wetland intact.

We can all wait until oil price shocks send gasoline to $5-10 a gallon, and watch neighborhoods crumble as their infrastructure becomes unsustainable. In the interim, it seems like the best place to work is with your local zoning laws -- and fight like hell to stop any crazy new development proposed by the professional developer barracudas that prowl the country for new land to ruin. My family spends many hours in local planning board meetings opposing corrupt condo development schemes, etc. Many of the proposals are flat-out illegal, but will pass with "exemptions" unless someone is there to raise a fuss. They live in the neighboring town to mine, which lacks my benevolent dictator.