Jay, good find! I'm with you on this one. And I got your humorous nudge about population reduction, as with Hawkcreek's item about curling up & dying. Look folks, "one size fits all" is an obsolete way of thinking. Sure you won't get people in Buffalo New York riding scooters to work in blizzards. So What?
Take one commuter who switches to a scooter for 9 months out of the year, and drives a car for 3 months (winter). Assume the car gets 20 mpg and the scooter gets 110 mpg. One scooter-month of fuel is 18% of one car-month of fuel. Nine scooter-months = 1.62 car-months of fuel. Add that to the three winter car-months, and you have 4.62 car-months of fuel per year. That's 38.5% of the fuel consumption of using the car all year, or a 61.5% reduction for that one commuter.
Now assume 30% of commuters do this. Now you have 30% x 61.5% = 18.4%. Overall, for the entire population of commuters, an 18.4% reduction in fuel consumption. Round that up to 20% to make an easily remembered round number. Sure, it's not the magic bullet. But it's a piece of an overall solution.
Now also assume you can take 10% of commuters off the road entirely, via telecommuting, and another 10% switch over to public transport, and now you have another 20% reduction. So now with scooters, telecommuting, and public transport we have 40% fuel reduction in commuting. What I see in the household garage of the near future is, a hybrid station wagon, a couple of hybrid scooters, and some bicycles. And a family that's a lot more aware of its transportation choices.
What's also necessary for any of this to work is to stop building sprawl that calls for long travel distances for commonplace tasks such as grocery shopping. Sprawl is an artifact of "done-it-before" investment policies, which in turn are rooted in the phenomenal success of "Levittown" style developments after WW2. The idea that people "prefer" living in sprawl is as preposterous as the idea that people "prefer" their Model T Fords in black only.
People "choose" to live in sprawl so long as the market does not offer competing alternatives. Wherever and whenever that competition arises, demand rapidly outstrips supply. Look up "neo-traditional town planning," or go to
www.dpz.com (Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., the leading firm in this field; there are many more, two of whom are clients of mine). Case in point: "Village Homes" in Davis CA, based on neo-traditional planning concepts; originally the banks were highly skeptical; but the entire development sold lightning-fast and property values rose much faster and higher compared to those of sprawl-developments. The same case obtains for other instances of this type.
Now that I think of it, another piece of the puzzle is the question of dollars staying-put in local economies. When consumer dollars are spent in locally-owned stores, the owners reinvest locally. When consumer dollars are spent in WalMart, those dollars are literally transferred every single night back to the head office in (....where?... a search of their website Investor Relations page doesn't seem to say!): those dollars don't stay in the community, the profits don't get reinvested locally.
In fact, in California, the state i.e. the taxpayers, subsidize WalMart to the tune of $2,000 per employee per year: WalMart pay is so sh*tty that its employees need various forms of public assistance just to meet basic family needs. So that's more money being sucked out of your local population and transferred to "wherever WalMart comes from."
Bottom line is that chain stores suck money out of local economies, and WalMart is only one case in point. To make an area economically viable, you have got to have constant reinvestment of profits locally, and high turnover of dollars within the local population.
Last case in point: In the Oakland California ghetto, the average dollar changes hands twice before leaving town. In wealthy Marin County, the average dollar changes hands twelve times before leaving town. Every time a dollar changes hands it does work, it helps people create wealth. The longer it stays, the more wealth it creates along the way. The point of this being, what's good for energy policy is also good economics: local means greater efficiency, local means reinvestment, local means greater turnover of dollars, greater creation of wealth.
So here's a piece of a possible future: nuclear, wind, and solar power, hybrid and electric scooters in use most of the year, a short trip to the store for fresh groceries, local ownership, and real prosperity. All it takes is the will to make it so.