The car and the house eat up the vast bulk of income

There are two approaches to the question of making things more livable for children. The first is to create more and more play areas where traffic is present. Via street closings, reduced speed limits and such. The largely untried approach is to simply rid habitation areas of  automobiles. I think this latter approach will become more and more obvious as the cost of cars and of driving them rises. I assume that we are in for at least a decade of struggle around this issue.coupled with the matter pf maintaining home ownership within our sprawl environment.Both of these commitments - the car and the house - eat up the vast bulk of income and feed the most venal part of the economic establishment - the construction, automobile and oil industries. We could reduce our expenses considerably - or channel our money to more productive rewards - by conceiving of mile square areas which would be car free. These built on democratic pattern  language principles. Children would walk to school. Shopping could be done in kiosks connected to the world of goods and services. Delivery could be streamlined and improved to the point that society would essentially work door to door.

If we do not voluntarily initiate car-free models of social development, we will be forced to create them over the century as the costs of alternatives ascend. The result will be less appealing than if we think ahead and model them ASAP.

The same old same old is not a long term option. It will hold for a minimum of two generations. After that we  will be lost in a world where the one percent lives in gated isolation  It is urgent that Occupy folk and others begin to add car-free to their lexicon and ponder what sort of living this portends.

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes