The Price of Gas

Hopefully the US will establish a policy through a mixture of replacement cost accounting and vastly increased taxes to gradually but relatively rapidly increase US gasoline and diesel consumer prices as one tool to reshape the US and move us away from individual car ownership and widely spread communities towards public transportation and a return to neighborhoods.

Note that I said we need to do more than just raise gasoline and diesel fuel prices and also do it gradually and yet relatively quickly.Just raising fuel prices will simply harm the poorest, so we need to totally restructure the US. In this case 'relatively quickly' would likely be a 50 year period; gradual will allow the citizens to adjust to the changing restructuring.In general, the US has been on an expansionist phase for about a half century, beginning with the 'Levittowns' and the Interstate Highway system, the creation of 'suburbia' and the advent of the 'Harrundale Mall'. It would take at least as long to consolidate and return back to an Urban and Rural standard.We need to move away from suburbia and back to a supportable structure, one where the car is really not a major factor, where most everything anyone needs is available within walking distance, where jobs are local, where most of the land is used for productive purposes instead of roads, parking lots and as a foundation for a single family home.We need to urbanize our population and then interconnect the urban areas with high speed rail networks, and provide real mass transit within the urban areas. We need to look back to Europe and learn how to actually be civilized.

It may not happen, but in that case life will get very bad very quickly for many, many people.

Honestly, I very much doubt that the public will be convinced until the shit really hits the fan and a great fall.If we continue down the same old path then is there any reason to expect reaching a new destination?