vtsnowedin wrote:I don't follow you there KJ. Before 1950 every major US city was served by and centered around railroads. As they built the interstate highway system the layout might vary from the old rail line between cities but every major junction had a railway junction within a couple of miles of it to serve the same city the railroad was serving. As the highways won out many of the old rail lines have been abandoned and the tracks sold for scrap but the ROWs still exist and often have fiber optic communication lines buried along them. I know of no city that was started after 1950 so what we have is railroad serviceable even if the suburbs have sprawled far into the hills in the last seventy years.
What happened after 1950 was the suburbs grew up around the cities. The inner cities were abandonned to the poor, and began to decay. Today we have the Upper Middle Class and the Middle Class living distributed away from city centers. The shopping centers and medical and professional services they need are also distributed. The suburban lifestyle came about because in this vast and relatively underpopulated country, land was relatively cheap.
The great enablers of this distributed suburban lifestyle were ICE vehicles and cheap petroleum fuels. Now that fuel is not so cheap, and understanding that it will steadily get more expensive in the coming decades, it is a popular thing to do around here to cry Doom! Doom! Doom! and to disparage perfectly usable tech that will allow such a lifestyle to continue.
The beginning of the suburban lifestyle was arguably Ford's Model T and all it's myriad competitors. Stop for one moment and compare that Model T to a modern EV - not a $100K Tesla, but an under $35K BEV - last count, there were 8 of those for sale from various manufacturers in 2018. Take the 2018 Nissan Leaf as an example. It has 151 miles of electric-only range and a base price below $30K. Decent performance with 147hp and 236ft-lbs of torque. Comfortable interior with a heater and A/C and power reclining seats, power steering and power brakes.
Quite simply, the Nissan Leaf blows away the Ford Model T in terms of relative cost, performance, range, and comfort. There is no doubt - none at all - that the American suburban lifestyle can be sustained comfortably in an era of expensive petroleum based fuels, using today's BEV technology. Those of us who like the suburbs and don't like cities have available and affordable alternatives is the message.
YES, it is possible to make an argument that you will get more value from buying an ICE vehicle today when fuel is $3/gallon. But I'm not planning on buying another ICE vehicle, only a BEV. I also plan to have solar panels, a wind turbine, or both wherever I end up living, to keep my residence warm in the Winter and cool in the Summer, and to "fuel" my vehicle. I will after all, be a older person on a fixed income, it's only prudent.
I personally don't plan to move anywhere near a train of any sort. If access to mass transit makes real estate more expensive - and that does seem to be happening now in overcrowded Silicon Valley - then I want to live less expensively away from the train. After all, the trains and busses don't go where I need to go, they are just not convenient compared to owning a BEV. If my advancing age means that I am restricted from owning a highway-capable vehicle such as a Tesla or Nissan Leaf, then I'll own an under-25mph NEV.
Again, I just don't see Doom around the corner with the end of oil. Not for me, and really not for my grandkids. They might end up living in a world where BEVs are the norm, only the rich can afford ICE vehicles, and they spend a quarter of their incomes on food (i.e. 4X what we spend today in the USA) because of expensive fuels, but that's not anywhere near to Doom.
It will be a pity when all those people in the Third World perish, and expensive energy will eat into the First World lifestyles noticeably - but I just do not see any form of Doom as likely.