Friday Pondering Brought to You By This Morning's Shower

Some say our city, Dallas (or for that matter any sun belt city) just isn't built for any form of transportation other than car travel AND we're SO spread out, no other form makes sense. We're stuck with it, may as well make it work. I see this as a form of reverse chicken and egg.

It's more like all we have to eat is a rotten egg and a chicken infected with bird flu and told to survive.

To quote Mayor Carcetti from the single greatest and most profound television show ever created, "how many bowls of shit do I gotta eat?!"

-----------------

Side note for the day...is there a way to keep the homeless from defecating all over the city's sidewalks at night??? My dog decided it would be a good idea to roll in some when I wasn't looking and after a morning spent scrubbing and bathing I still feel like Lady MacBeth.

Is This an Industry Worth Saving?

An addendum to yesterday's post:

From Culture Change: "Cars were a bubble." ~GM

End of the Auto

...and all of those commercials where everybody is so happy driving their new hummer around. Not so coincidentally my own mother was just hit at a light by some maniac going 60 mph. Fortunately, she was ok. But, is this what life is? Sitting around in metal boxes, playing bumper cars, if only to have some human to human contact.

Harvey Wasserman on the end of the era of the automobile:

But the larger transition is epic and global, based on a simple structural reality: the passenger car is obsolete. Auto sales have plummeted not merely because of a bad economy, but because the technology no longer makes sense.

Franklin Roosevelt took GM over in 1943-5 to make the hardware to beat the Nazis. Barack Obama should now do the same to beat climate chaos.

Make streetcars, not passenger cars.

Hybrids are too little, too late, with problems of their own. Solar-powered electric cars will help phase out the gas guzzlers.

But in the long run, the automobile itself needs to be dismantled and re-cycled, not retooled or rebuilt.

The fact of the matter is that Car companies are broke because they can't run their business profitably, cities are broke because they over extended infrastructure and the costs to support car culture, people spend roughly 20% of their income to operate and maintain this machinery to get us around, and urban development is crippled by the cost of constructing parking. All barriers to progress.

And all of this BEFORE energy costs really start to cripple this energy-absurdly intense economy. Just wait to some real disruptions in the energy markets. How about we just rid ourselves of these burdens now???

Time Machine with Guy Pearce was a pretty shitty movie, but to this day I still have with me the scene from the near future in NYC where everyone is moving around via bicycle.

More from Wasserman:

We need to dig up roads, not build more. We need rails and coaches, bio-diesel buses and self-propelled trolleys, Solartopian super-trains and in-town people movers, not to mention windmills, solar panels, wave generators and geothermal piping.

In America's corporate-conceived “love affair with the automobile,” our first spouse---mass transit---was murdered. Now the unsustainable obsolescence of the private passenger car is collapsing a global financial system built on the illusion of its constant growth.

If the automobile and its attendant freeways continue to metastasize in India, China and Africa as they did in the 20th Century United States, we are doomed.

Quote for the Day

The necessary melt down of the 2oth century phony economic model of quantitative growth; of robbing peter to pay paul; of buying other debt, bundling it, repackaging it, charging a fee to do all that and calling that economic development; is making a house cleaning of the conventional, the generic, the suburban, and ultimately the worthless.

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. We don't need no water, let the mother fucker burn. Burn mother fucker. Burn.

Yes, it is painful. Yes, I am finally feeling the effects too. But mostly through others. I strongly recommend everybody reposition themselves for the future.

To quote another song, this time by TOOL:

This is necessary...

GM is done

...err Toast, according to Megan McArdle.

I previously suggested that they need a visionary plan to save them by reconfiguring their shop to build things we might need. You know, perhaps like the trains to go on the high speed rails that apparently we will be building.

Now? Since they clearly lack the leadership to do anything but "stay the course," it's time to let them go under and liquidate. Allow a new company to build those trains.

Here is where I would suggest that all the boomers should think about retiring and let us take a crack at running this thing we call society...but wouldn't you know if they ruined those retirement plans as well.

The Myth of the Efficient Car

Let’s get something straight about green industry: in its basic form it means we all have to buy new stuff … lots of it. As an industrial policy that will create jobs and increase spending, it’s pretty sound. As an environmental policy, it’s largely a fraud.

Bravo.

...and what you might not think about:

But there’s an even more profound problem with building more efficient cars. In 1865, English economist William Stanley Jevons discovered an efficiency paradox: the more efficient you make machines, the more energy they use. Why? Because the more efficient they are, the better they are, the cheaper they are and more people buy them, and the more they’ll use them. Now, that’s good for manufacturers and maybe good for consumers, but if the problem is energy consumption or pollution, it’s not good.