Transportation For America » How to reduce our need for oil in the first place

How to reduce our need for oil in the first place

June 3, 2010
By Stephen Lee Davis

While certainly not the lone culprit for the tragic Gulf oil spill itself, our demand for oil is one reason we have thousands of holes poked in the earth’s crust in delicate places like the Gulf of Mexico. As we’ve pointed out before, 70 percent of the oil we consume goes directly into our transportation system to get us and our goods from A to B each day. One thing is certain: if we’re ever going to prevent disasters like this in the future and rid ourselves of our dependence on oil, we’re going to have to use less of the stuff.

But how can we do such a thing?

It can feel a little larger than us at times, so to that end, Grist’s Jonathan Hiskes wrote a great piece this week highlighting ten things we can do locally, without waiting on the federal government, to help reduce our oil use and put us on a path to lessening the demand.

His list of 10 includes things like making complete streets the norm, building near transit early and often, and letting the market lead on building walkable, transit-oriented places — things that consumers demand but often find out of their price range due to insufficient supply or are illegal to build in their town because of outdated zoning codes. Read his full list here.

Along those same lines, we thought this was a good cartoon worth sharing from M. Wuerker at Politico yesterday. Click through to see the full cartoon.

Filed under: Campaign Blog
Tags: cartoon, complete streets, oil, oil dependency, zoning

Royall

Isn’t the market the thing that scrapped the streetcars and gave us buses?
http://t4america.org/author/sdavis/ Stephen Lee Davis

Hardly.

Go back and read the history books, and it’s abundantly clear that (in many cases) the bus companies and automotive interests bought up the streetcar companies and ran them into the ground while also getting massive federal subsidies for buses, ensuring that the streetcars ran no longer. It was the farthest thing from a free market outcome, and some of the companies lost a lawsuit for doing it in Los Angeles, receiving merely a slap on the wrist in a federal court decision.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal