If you live too far away from work (because you can't afford a house close enough) to take public transport (which is unreliable and dirty), what are you supposed to do?

1. City grows up at the intersection of natural trade routes.



2. People with cars and disposable income decide they don't like the congestion of the city and move out to the newly-built bedroom communities. The commute costs more than a monthly bus pass, but not by much. Urban cores are left to industry, offices, and laborers who can't afford to move out. Rush hour is born, as everyone from the suburbs heads into the city in the morning and out to their homes at night.



3. So many people have moved to the bedroom communities that retail and light industry springs up and suburbs are born. Rush hour gets worse as some of the people from eastern suburbs commute to jobs in the western suburbs and vice-versa. Ring roads are invented to alleviate rush hour, but instead get clogged with people from the eastern suburbs getting jobs in the now-accessible northern suburbs, and vice-versa, verse-vica, and etc. Those stuck in the urban core have fewer and fewer jobs to chose from, since public transportation to the suburbs is a non-starter: While there are jobs in the 'burbs, they're so dispersed you can't rely on having a bus stop nearby. Some of them move to public housing units, built on the fringes of the suburbs because the land is still cheaper than downtown.



4. People with cars and disposable income decide they don't like the congestion of the suburbs and move farther out. We don't need that farmland anyway -- gas and diesel are so cheap we can afford to import all our food from Mexico and California. (Is there still a difference? </snide>)



5. The urban core, decimated by three decades of shrinking population -- and the population that's left are the ones who couldn't afford to leave, so are net consumers of public funds -- becomes cheap. Yuppies start moving in and re-habbing the homes built by their great-grandparents' generation. The houses have "great bones", and are close to the remaining jobs. What's not to love? Part of the re-hab includes bars on the windows and security systems -- this is still a bad neighborhood, after all. They love it right up until they get pregnant, then decide they need a Lincoln Navigator and a yard. But the only place with a yard is 40 miles outside of town.

And my wife would not accept moving away from exemplery school systems into towns with lower quality school systems just to shorten my commute.

With the way Americans are getting laid off right and left every day, no one can plan on having one job downtown, followed by their next one being downtown also.

Things happen, and then they happen all over again.

We call it news and often put it on the front page. But news is always just an old story, recycled.

We write about the shortage of gas and oil and alternative fuels. We write about finding a new way to do away with gas-guzzling cars. It's the same stuff we were writing about in the '70s. Except now it's now, and now it's worse.

...

And now representatives of both political parties are braying the same song they brayed 30 years ago.

Thirty years ago.

In those 30 years, we have ignored alternative energy. We are still scrabbling for oil in the Middle East. No one from either party has freed us from oil. In the meantime, Brazil has figured out a way to run cars on fuel made from sugar cane. And we're left holding Splenda.

And now, it's Groundhog Day again. We have an oil crisis - again. The congressmen are talking about alternative fuels - AGAIN.

And nothing much is going to happen - AGAIN.