Automobile Trends

[Zelig]

Farmboy: Your post is long, so I'm just going to reply more or less in order instead of quoting the entire thing:

How often do you really need to do errands? I lump mine all into either Saturday or Sunday, if anything comes up during the week I just throw it into my note-taking software under "To Do".

And really, I see quite a lot of appeal of living in a rural area, particularly since I've been commuting to work via car in a city - I'd save a ton of time/money if I lived in a rural area.

Though it's kind of unrelated, I'd fully subsidize daycare, that should cover your costs of shuttling your kids around. FWIW, when my sibling and I were young enough to need daycare, my father pushed his farming (well, beekeeping) into evenings/weekends to stay home and take care of us during the day.

My various other unrelated impositions, if I were in charge, would be very unfriendly towards mega-corp factory farming, they'd have far more problems to deal with than just increased fuel costs.

Yeah.. what would happen is people wouldn't move. They wouldn't look for new work. They're too set in their ways.

Ok?

There would be a huge backlash and your project would fail. You need to keep people in mind when making decisions like these.

I'm an optimist, I give people the benefit of the doubt that they'll be as efficient and logical as I am.

 

[Farm Boy]

How often do you really need to do errands? I lump mine all into either Saturday or Sunday

Even if I do my shopping once a week, and never need to leave the house for anything, anything else at all, not even work, I'm still looking at about 5 times your allotted gas budget. I usually get between two weeks and a month out of a primary grocery run.

my father pushed his farming (well, beekeeping) into evenings/weekends to stay home and take care of us during the day.

Some parts of crop-farming can be pushed around. If you have good light somewhere you can do some of your maintenance in the evening, you can and already do some of it on the weekend. But during the times of year you need to be working the ground and the weather is right, you have no luxuries of time.

My various other unrelated impositions, if I were in charge, would be very unfriendly towards mega-corp factory farming, they'd have far more problems to deal with than just increased fuel costs.

That's grand. But if you simultaneously smash apart large agricultural operations while intentionally taxing the living standards of small operators backwards you just wind up with damned hard-strapped small operators. Which is probably not entirely inconvenient to think about if you assume it isn't going to affect you. But it's pretty darned annoying to think about when it does affect you and is being advocated by somebody who fits in the prior category. I am enjoying the discourse, but guilty admission, I'm having to fight the urge to respond with something entirely juvenile like "go fornicate yourself you self-righteous hippy!" Which I know isn't how you're approaching this so the sentiment would be wildly off-base.

 

[warpus]

Zelig, people aren't robots

 

[Borachio]

Steam wagon, 1771.

Internal combustion engine car, 1885

Electric car, 1888.

Bubble car, 1955.

I foresee cars getting rounder and more aerodynamically efficient.

edit: and possibly more shiny and red.

 

[Zelig]

Zelig, people aren't robots

Temporary inconvenience.

 

[Hygro]

SUVs are really pretty goddamn rare in Northern California nowadays. They were dwindling in the mid-2000s as gas prices started creeping up, but the housing crash in '08 combined with the advent of commercially acceptable electric cars (such as the Prius) were the final nail in the coffin for SUVs up here. You might see 1 SUV in 1-200 cars.

Maybe 1 in 8 (if even that few) but yeah it's been a huge turnaround since 1999-2003.