At Clusterfuck Nation, Kunstler says:
Behold the landscape of Happy Motoring in its latest iteration in northern Virginia, that is, the Washington DC suburbs. It’s significant that the very seat of policy and governance in our country is the epicenter of cluelessness about the fate of our tragic car dependency. They just see endless new layers added onto the existing clusterfuck, and you can be sure that money will continue to be created for it — though it is suicidal for our society.
He posted this as the ‘eyesore of the month’. I’d say he’s got that exactly right. Ugly it is.
You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy. But you cannot have both.
Oh yeah — that’s my back yard! And you didn’t mention all the construction OR how lovely all the roads are in SO VA which is where all our money goes.
I would personally like to secede from the state and form North Virginia.
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Well at least Elye, you are spared our fate here in FL where there is a strip mall for each of us. They build it as soon as you arrive,, and usually on a corner where there the lovely live oaks used to be – the ones that attracted you to the area in the first place.
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That reminds me of a townhouse development near my first house here in NoVA. It was called “Hidden Oaks” — they’d cut them all down so they were very well hidden indeed.
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Yup. Exactly.
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Sadly, public transit outside of dense urban areas is no better than roads and cars – different but no better.
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Actually jonolan, it often does work when it’s a hybrid: feeder bus lines or train lines with just a car or two and with parking lots as destinations. When I was a kid in suburban CT, we all took buses everywhere. there were loads of them and it was not reserved for those who couldn’t afford cars. It was just waht you did. In Chicago, many of the communter train rails are in the median of highways. Car and train commuters can share parking lots – drive part way, park, get on the train for the rest of the trip..
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