Contrary to your article, it turns out we need to start alienating
drivers as a design plan, so that we are helping everyone understand
our changing energy needs.

Drivers outside the downtown core are preferred over buses on our
roads everyday. Changing these attitudes in city planning there,
which has the most growth, would also do much to improve transit
opinion. Time to balance out entitlements, otherwise it cannot work.

In the background, oil production worldwide is at a steady 85 million
barrels a day and not rising. We are in plateau, and once this starts
to decline prices for gas will not fall ever again. Albeit a US
recession mixed with the Third World abandoning the oil market will
buy drivers more time. Whatever the timeline is, it’s clear that now
is the time to plan ahead for a reduced oil-based transportation
future.

That plan has to find a means of giving drivers an option other than
driving. We are no where close to the efforts in the 80s and 90s of
Spain that Metrolinx idolizes so much. It’s going to be decades too
late and instead we will have to manage in time the entirely different
problem of demand destruction.

Included in this plan has to be a bubble-bursting realization to
drivers that they will need to make other arrangements as gas
increases in price, and that oil companies are themselves not solely
responsible for the costs.

As long as we remain clueless to the reality of geology, so will our
plans reflect it. Alienating drivers would in fact be a good start in
shifting, explaining, and discussing how we are to survive these
global changes.

Best Regards,

Walter