On a future without cheap oil

The author of The Long Emergency opines here about the likely social and economic consequences of the depletion of the world's oil reserves. As do I, below:

Unfortunately for people in the US who would prefer to live without consuming huge quantities of oil and gasoline, it's practically impossible to do so, short of moving to a farming commune and reverting to a subsistence lifestyle. Outside of a very few urban core areas, there is practically no local public transportation, and workplaces, stores, and other vital points of contact between the individual and the society are spread so widely that for most people walking or even bicycling is not an option.

Driving to work is one of the key fuel-wasting American tendencies cited by folks like Kunstler, and the one that is least flexible in response to fuel prices. But there are at least three nearly insurmountable problems that prevent most people from living close to work as Kunstler and New Urban theorists suggest.

One, of course, is the "old-urbanist" insistence, echoed by many suburbanite NIMBYs, on segregating different property uses in widely-separated geographical areas. You can't walk to work if the zoning laws prohibit appropriate housing in the area near the workplace. Nor can you walk to the grocery store if the zoning laws prohibit retail establishments near the designated areas in which housing is permitted.

But even if zoning laws were instantaneously revoked, how is one supposed to live close to work when employers close, merge, layoff, and blithely relocate their physical locations at the drop of a CEO's country-club membership? The idea of renting corporate locations rather than owning them, so that the company can perpetually seek lower rents and hop-skip-and-jump around the country like a deadbeat debtor on the run from creditors, may look good to MBAs in the head office. But it makes it impossible for employees to make any long term plan to live close to where they work.

And what of those who are caught up in the US economy's continuing elimination of full time jobs, and must work two or three part time jobs to stay solvent? How likely is it that those multiple part-time jobs will be withing walking distance of each other, or within walking distance of an affordable place to live? And how likely is it that coordinating these multiple part time jobs will allow time for the leisurely and infrequent schedules of public transportation, if it even exists between the various locations involved?

The situation's much the same for intercity travel or travel to rural destinations. Air travel is wasteful of fuel as well as being unaffordably expensive, and Amtrak's lack of service is a perennial joke. To take one example, I couldn't travel between southeastern Michigan and Toronto by rail even if I were desperate to do so, because there is no such service.

I suppose these are just a few examples of the way in which our entire culture is fundamentally built on the concept of cheap and ubiquitous personal transportation.