Most cities in this country were built around the automobile, and in many places public transportion is now almost non-existent, even in large cities.
Public transportion that existed prior to the automobile were dismantled by the emergent automobile industry in a move that came to be known as the Great American Streetcar Scandal; General Motors managed to remove over 100 streetcar systems nationwide by 1950. By the time antitrust investigators could go to work, the deed was done. American mass-transit was "dead".
Great American Streetcar Scandal
One major exception is New York City, the only city in America where over half of the people do not own an automobile. One out of three mass transport riders and two out of three rail riders live in New York City and its suburbs.
Death to the gas guzzler!
After paying $75 to fill his black Dodge Ram pickup truck for the third time in a week, Douglas Chrystall couldn't take it anymore.
Feeling pinched at the pump, and guilty as well, Chrystall, a 39-year-old father from Wellesley, is putting ads online to sell the truck, and the family's other gas-guzzler, a Jeep Grand Cherokee. He knows it will be tough to unload them because he is one of a growing number of consumers downsizing to smaller, more fuel-efficient cars.
Americans are turning away from the boxy, four-wheel-drive vehicles that have for years dominated the nation's highways. Sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks - symbols of Americans' obsession with horsepower, size, and status - are falling out of favor as consumers rich and poor encounter sticker shock at the pump, paying upward of $80 to fill gas tanks.
The sale of new SUVs and pickup trucks has dropped precipitously in recent months amid soaring gas prices and a weakening economy: SUV sales for the month of April alone fell 32.3 percent from a year earlier and small car sales rose 18.6 percent. This fundamental shift comes against a backdrop of relentless gas increases, and growing concerns over the environment and US oil consumption, according to auto analysts and car dealers.
"The SUV craze was a bubble and now it is bursting," said George Hoffer, an economics professor at Virginia Commonwealth University whose research focuses on the automotive industry. "It's an irrational vehicle. It'll never come back."
http://www.boston.com/...
We have seen this movie before about 35 years ago when OPEC announced that they would no longer ship oil to nations that had supported Israel.
Nothing has changed since then except the decline of the American automobile industry to less fuel-hungry Japanese imports.
What we need are cities rebuilt, planned and zoned to concentrate business and commercial entities into city hubs connected with railway lines into surrounding residential communities.
We should not have to sit in traffic on interstates for an hour trying to get to work everyday or spend two hours trying to get to a mall to see a movie.