Re: "Change is so rapid, the far future is now only five years away", re BBC

Stoned koala bears drooled eucalyptus spittle in awe
as <me@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> declared:

> Nix <nix-razor-pit@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>> On Sat, 06 Aug 2005, Wayne Throop wrote:
>> >
>> > I mean... you *could* commute to a job 50 miles away in a model T,
>> > but it'd take you six or eight hours a day, instead of two or less.
>>
>> Or you could use a train, and it would take an hour or two.
>> Just like it does now.
>
> But it requires that both your house and your job be close to a trainline,
> which is highly capital-intensive to build, and very inflexable to change.
>
> This results in a physical economy that is equally inflexable.

No, it just requires that railway lines be built through
dense urban areas, just like they used to be, along with
networks of streetcars to feed people to and from the
commuter rail hubs which in turn feed commuters to and from
the long-haul railway backbone.

The real problem is the real estate bubble that's made it
prohibitively expensive to buy up the land for new rights of
way, and that has encouraged people to buy the biggest
houses on the largest patch of land they can possibly afford
as some kind of speculative investment.

Railway tracks aren't significantly more expensive to build
than large freeways. But certain social choices that were
made over the past century have locked us into a car-based
model of development, much as the development of
agriculture 12K years ago was a one-way process (you can't
go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle from farming unless
you're willing to downsize your population: you can't go
back from a car/suburban ribbbon development model to a
railroad/urban model without ditching not just the cars but
the suburbs and all the capital tied up in them).


-- Charlie

.

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