In the gulf oil spill thread Loki was comparing regulating the oil industry's deep sea drilling activities with regulating the auto industry. He tried to create a trap where if you didn't support banning automobiles outright in the US then you were hypocritical for wanting the deep sea drilling industry regulated. (Yeah, Loki does that sort of thing...)

Anyway, that got me thinking about the auto-industry, what it is, what ought to be done with it. FAIR WARNING - this is another one of those very basic look at a common thing threads (like What is Memory). I've taken to thinking about the automobile, how we use it, and the highway, road, and parking system we've created to support it, as modern civilization's Great Pyramids. If you could talk to Egyptions from the time in a modern context and ask them WTF? vis a vis the pyramids they'd likely say something equivalent to "it made a lot of sense to do it at the time." Fast forward a thousand years and we'll be in those shoes.

Why? Because the automobile is an inefficient, resource intensive, polluting way to get around a city or between cities. Its common use have led to land use practicies that has resulted in sprawling, crumbling, hollowed out and extraordinarily wasteful cities. And we use them in such numbers that large segments of the economy have become dependant upon their manufcature and support. Worst of all, none of it is sustainable. The automobile practically defines our era of waste and excess and many a future book will be written about the insanity of it all and the price humanity eventually pays for it.

What should modern civilization look like? Rail. Light rail, heavy rail, communter rail, tram rail, maglev rail. (And dirigibles. I love dirigibles!) A road network is necessary for emergencies, for short haul spot freight and for non-regular travel long and short distance. But regular commuter travel and freight should all be rail. You should be able to walk or take a tram to your job, your stores, your church, your neighbors, your entertainment, your schools, your hospital, your university and your shuttle to orbit. Cities should be built to facilitate this transportation methodology and if they were they'd be a LOT cheaper to maintain and they'd be a LOT less polluting.


And best of all, 50,000 lives would be saved a year!

Thoughts? Complaints? Missed points? Counterpoints? Devils advocations? Cynical sarcastic remarks?