A PAINFUL BUT NECESSARY SHIFT FROM OUR CAR CULTURE

A nice piece in today's Inky about the need to make the painful but necessary shift from our current car-dominated culture: "The American Car Culture is Running Out of Gas." Driving a car is not evil; but it is artificially cheap, to the extent that we are doing more of it than is economically, socially, and environmentally optimal.

Market forces have corrected some but not all of that under-pricedness, and hopefully social pressure and public policy will do the rest. Unless we in the general public care more about immediate comfort and our elected officials about their current jobs than the quality of life of our kids and grandkids, in terms of roads and bridges that aren't crumbling, air and water we don't get sick from, and communities that are rich with the human contact that humans need. Time will tell if we get this right; I sure we hope we do.