[Denny]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')here’s no reason why the US can’t do it., but I get the impression it would take a culture change.

[Novus]

I live in the suburbs of New Jersey. These suburban towns could be cites in their own right but they lack any organization and are completely car dependent. The town I grew up in had a population of 80,000 and it was just miles and miles of sprall all of this 50 miles south of New York City. The main local road was ten lanes wide and pedestrians had to sprint to cross it. The politicians in charge were just incompetent. Their reasoning went as follows:

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{Image now linked due to page formatting issues- jato}

I moved to a smaller more livable suburb but they are making the same mistakes. Would it kill them to put in some mixed zoning so people don't have to take a car just to pick up a coke?

[pea-jay]

Transportation is an absolutely huge problem and suburbia is ultimately the worst off.

Why? Because, you need to transport not just people but goods from point A to point B. Thanks to suburban development patterns all of the residential point A's are not located near the employment point B's or shopping point C's. Thanks to cheap oil and globalization, all of the lovely stuff you picked up an your nearby point W (walmart) came from halfway around the world while your food came from halfway across the country.

Heck, even if you live in a food producing area, it still may travel. The milk I drink here in the Central Valley was milked only 10 miles from where I live. But it is trucked 200 miles away to east of Los Angeles, bottled and sent back to the nearest grocery store 2 miles away, where I drive (not walk) to pick up. That's abysmal. Economics has decided that this is the optimal arrangement.

But economics won't save suburbia. The inability to easily move people or goods from one point to another will be suburbia's demise.

Large urban areas will hang on longer due to their close proximity before succoming to disease famine and violence, when they become cut off from their food supply and no one can feed them (think government relief)

Ultimately without cheap energy, transportation will devolve back to mostly rural agrarian existance. With a little luck, some remnants of a rail system will be able supply smaller pedestrian oriented cities and small towns with most of the food and other resources they need to survive on while exporting manufactured goods and services to their hinterland.

But here's the key. Cities will have to more or less survive on their hinterlands while those areas will only ship to the closest cities. None of this intercontinental global trade. (with maybe a few exceptions)

Sounds an awful lot like pre-oil living.

[Claudia]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he milk I drink here in the Central Valley was milked only 10 miles from where I live. But it is trucked 200 miles away to east of Los Angeles, bottled and sent back to the nearest grocery store 2 miles away...

[KiddieKorral]

I hear ya. It distresses me to think that the radishes in my fridge were grown within walking distance of my house, trucked to Lakeland, then trucked back here.

[pea-jay]

Not sure if it will pan out, but small towns and cities would behoove themselves to start working out arrangements with local land owners that surround the town to start producing for local consumption only. This could start out as some sort of CSA/farmers market arrangement, with guarentees to the farmer/would be farmer that they would be able to get a consistent income and not be forced to play that corporate farming game.

Then as our petro-economy petro-fies, these farmers would have access to labor and a guarenteed market for their crops (with little to no transportation expenses-pedal powered produce anyone?). THe town would hopefully start producing most of its essentials from homegrown cottage industries. With any luck some sort of sustainable local economy will ensue.

'course i am feeling optimistic at the moment.

In reality, it may work for some places. However the rest of humanity, survival may not be so gradual or calm.

[pea-jay]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', '
')We have 3 to 4 CSAs in my little city of 15,000 and a real vibrant farmers market system. I am working with the County to reverse our cattle/meat distribution system. We are hoping to fatten them locally (on irrigated grass) and slaughter and market them directly to the local population. The main obstacle is enlarging the local USDA slaughterhouse.