Peak Oil, Urban Sprawl and the Subprime market inferno

It is an interesting thought. Is there a connection between Peak Oil, Urban Sprawl and the current financial market upset? Well, the theory is this: Cheap housing close to work is hard to find. Therefore people accept long distance commuting as an acceptable sacrifice to have a nice home at the edge of a city. Many of these homes are bought by young couples, with questionable credit. So they use the subprime market to finance their investment. The couple is now heavily dependent on the car for almost everything they do. As the gas price goes up, the financial margin shrinks rapidly, and first to suffer are those already having a high degree of cost for their transportation.

It would be interesting to get some data on this if possible, hopefully there will be good analysis and research around soon as this mess unfolds.

A Picket in Santa Cruz

Yesterday I witnessed a local picket against the planning of spraying Santa Cruz with a substance to avoid an allegedly dangerous moth. "Well, that´s fine that these people speak up" I thought, and payed no more attention to this until later the same day.

Then it struck me. "Ok, so these people are getting all worked up about these *possible* dangers. In the same time, the exact same people will after the picket go back into their cars and start spraying the entire planet with something they *know* is very dangerous. And they will not only do a one-time dispersement of a couple of gallons of chemicals, this little picketing group of fifty will generate hundreds of tonnes of particles, CO2 and NOX."

I have nothing against people speaking up about possible risks of spraying dangerous substances. However, the issue above is just another example of how deeply rooted our view is on our own lifes that it is always someone else that is the culprit.

We need to get out of our cars. Really. And the first thing to do is not to rush into Podcars or other kinds of technology - that will come anyway. It is to just start walking, going by bike and make sure that we use fossil based transport only when it is really needed.

Welcome

I am looking forward to inform about my interesting and difficult work in the field of sustainable transportation. I will cover Podcars, Light Rail, High Speed Rail, Bicycles, Walking and of course cars - and all issues surrounding transportation such as energy, pollution, estetics, social & behaviroural problems etc.

I recently made a speach at the Uppsala Podcar City Conference, please see
here