Joel Kotkin reminds us that the 1970's gas crunch did nothing but help the suburbs grow:
Perhaps the best way to test the thesis of higher energy prices constricting suburbia is to look at the experience of the 1970s. In that decade, Americans faced an even steeper price rise than that anticipated by almost anyone today. Worse, we were hopelessly unprepared for it, and far more jobs, particularly high-paying ones, were located in the urban core.
So what happened? People reacted, but not by jumping on mass transit in big numbers. In fact, transit use continued to decline from 6.4 percent of commuters to 5.3 percent between 1970 and 1980.
Nor did people move en masse to traditional older cities. In fact, the 1970s proved to be the only decade in the 20th century that overall urban population declined. Suburbanization proceeded apace, with jobs and people heading out to the hinterlands.
and
The impacts of telecommuting -- the only form of commuting outside of driving alone to go up over the past two decades -- on energy consumption could be profound. If you take New York, which accounts for more than a third of mass-transit commuters in the country, out of the picture, telecommuters already outnumber transit commuters.
The socialist transportation .. we mean public transportation isn't the wave of the future.But,then how could it be when most of the job growth is in the suburbs.
