While Tom Whipple tries to predict the future of personal transportation:

Cars - Redux

The very nature of the car will likely evolve to a smaller more utilitarian device to compensate for declining incomes and high gas prices. Consumer perceptions about what constitutes a desirable car that grew up in last 50 years will no longer matter. Various forms of government intervention into the automobile and oil industries - ranging from tax policies to ownership — will have a major influence in the evolution of cars during the coming decades. In Europe, 30 years of high liquid fuel taxes have resulted in a civilization that uses about half the oil per capita that we use in America. There are already calls in the U.S. for much higher, possibly varying, gasoline taxes to stem roller coaster gasoline prices.

… Richard Heinberg wonders if we will have anywhere to go:

Slo Mo Splat

Everything we thought we knew about the economy is suddenly wrong. Regarding China, we are accustomed to hearing of a new power plant being constructed each week, of energy consumption growing at a rate of 10 percent per year or more, of hordes of farmers from the western provinces rushing to the coastal cities to get manufacturing jobs so they can buy refrigerators and cars. The current reality: Chinese factories are now closing by the thousands, workers are rioting and leaving the coastal cities to return to their farms, energy consumption is actually declining.

In the US, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) are falling dramatically for the first time since records have been kept. During past recessions or gas price spikes, people bought smaller cars or drove slower; now they’re just not driving. Explanation? The use of public transit is up, but so is unemployment: people without jobs don’t commute to work. And deliveries of raw materials and finished goods are way down, so trucks are driving less, too. Gasoline and diesel consumption is down. Nobody’s buying cars—large OR small—and as a result GM, Ford, and Chrysler are on deathwatch (even the Japanese automakers are reeling). Retail businesses are closing so fast that it’s tough to keep track of who’s still open and who isn’t.

I suspect that once authorities bow to necessity, we’ll see the same variety of cheap and casual transportation we see in the third world.

Edwin Abbot wrote Flatland, a wonderful mathematical and geometrical fantasy, in 1884. I read it as a child, and while I enjoyed it all, I have always remembered Pointland, a realm limited to a single point. Below, the Sphere “points” out the Monarch of Pointland out to our hero, A Square:

“Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality; for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing. Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy. Now listen.”

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They call me SENATOR Burris!

They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!