Urbanization of suburbia

[oakparkdude]

I think we're in a transition period and developers/consumers/municipalities are trying to figure out what is going to work going forward. We're probably going to have a fewer hits and more misses before we figure out the right paradigm.

[SJaye]

Originally Posted by chirack

I guess as a city dweller, I can’t understand why you would want to install a faux downtown in a burb. It would be better to just turn the space into something besides retail. I can understand some towns doing so, but if your town has a real downtown with metra stop why on earth would you try to build another? When I think of downtowns I don’t think of acres of parking. I think of small stores with sidewalks and sometimes parking lots next to them.

I also am a city dweler with better transit than the burbs and I don’t think anything outside of huge gas prices can do what oakparkdude thinks. Driving and shopping go hand in hand. Having a trunk makes it much easier to transport stuff home. Driving allows you to accomplish this task faster and allows you a wider range of stores to shop from. I live in an area where if you wanted to find nice office work clothes (pair of Dockers), you couldn’t walk to get to it. There are clothing shops but it is more urban ghetto ware, not work ware. You would have to drive or take the bus. Now there are grocery stores and restaurants that you can walk to in my area, but if I walk it will take 20+ mins. If I drive I can go to the store park and be back in 15 or less. It is really only the densest parts of the city where driving makes no sense at all.

Going to work or school on the other hand are the things that are easiest to do via walking or public transit. However the outer burbs are often pedestrian unfriendly to say the least. Investment in sidewalks would help a lot there. Frankly I can’ t understand why some of them lack sidewalks. I used to drive next to children standing on the side of a very busy road with cars going 40+miles an hour waiting for a school bus. Dangerous and makes no sense.

WOW- it is so rare that I see a post that makes multiple points that are not completely related all of which I agree with wholeheartedly.

I would also like to add that I think many of the posters on this forum are underestimating technology. People keep going off on how we are going to have to give up our car-driving lifestyles, and I am pretty convinced that a large majority of the people who tout peak oil theory, social irrisposibility and the like are actually rooting for the end of oil as a catalyst of some other kind of major change they want. The freedom vehicle ownership offers, the freedom to go where you want when you want to go there, should not be abandoned. People are already working on ways in which to run motor vehicles on other forms of fuel, and when oil actually runs out (which may not be for a lot longer than the peal oilists tout; hint, the first prediction of "the end of oil" was made in the year 1859, for sometime in the late 1870s/ early 1880s) vehicles that run on a different fuel source, as well as the infrastructure for them, will be built out of necessity.

[Lookout Kid]

Peak Oil theory isn't about running out of oil... It's about demand outpacing supply, which will drive up costs. Our entire economy, in one way or another, is based on cheap fossil fuels, and a major spike in prices could be catastrophic.