Retrofit Suburbia?

Ok, we need to get the story straight. If renewable energy sources can provide electricity at a cost that is only slightly higher than what we pay now for cheap fossil supplied oil, and if most people have commutes that are within the range of electric car technology, then what sort of retrofitting is needed?

Because peak oil is not the only reason suburbs need to be retrofitted, just the more urgent one ?

Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

Re: Retrofit Suburbia Redux (none / 0)
Ok, we need to get the story straight. If renewable energy sources can provide electricity at a cost that is only slightly higher than what we pay now for cheap fossil supplied oil, and if most people have commutes that are within the range of electric car technology, then what sort of retrofitting is needed?

Understand that "continuing as we are now" is driving progressively longer distances per person per year, on average.

There are renewable energy sources that can provide electricity at a cost that is only slightly higher than what we pay now for cheap fossil supplied fuel. But there is not an unlimited amount of that electricity ... the flip side of indefinitely renewable is a given amount to harvest per year.

And if we devote all of the newly harvested renewable power to increased power consumption, then it is not available to replace increasingly expensive fossil fuels ... both increasingly expensive in terms of marginal production and User costs, and increasingly expensive in terms of recognizing ongoing negative externalities.

OTOH, especially in low gas tax countries where there have been the heaviest sprawl subsidies like the US and Australia, a program of completely replacing existing suburbia, tearing it all down and building new on a different model, presumes an abundance of natural resources.

Retrofitting suburbia is reorganizing space in suburbia so that suburban houses are moved closer to their own local central place, as farms in this part of the US that were settled before the days of the railroads were each relatively close to their own little hamlet, by seeding those local central places into the suburbs.

Obviously its going to work better with a heavy dose of bribe than with efforts at across the board mandates. Here, the leverage is provided by the fact that projects like trolley buses, tram/trains, light rail, Aerobus, are more capital intensive and have much more of their costs centralized into the operating concern, so that they are "expensive" to start-up even where they are cheaper overall than the current transport system.

That means that if Federal subsidies comes at the cost of requiring zoning amendments within 1/4 mile (400m) of designated transport stops and within 1/2 mile (800m) of designated major transport stops, there are going to be some takers for that money. From there, its a demonstration effect ... areas with higher public transport corridor usage have higher locally retained incomes and therefore strong local employment multipliers than areas with higher public/private car usage. Providing a way for developers to make more money in a rising fuel cost environment than the current system of mandating and subsidizing sprawl ensures the spread of the system nationwide.


Utsukushikereba sore de ii

They can't.  

The US is not putting up enough solar panels and windmills--I mean, it's not even close--to power the existing electrical infrastructure, let alone adding millions of electric cars.  

Indeed, if the cost of oil-heating exceeds the cost of electric space-heaters, we are looking forward to the Northeast grid going down this winter.  (I know the Midwest is separate from the NE grid,) but everywhere has the same deep problem:  Under privatization nobody wants to be responsible for transmission lines, and transmission capacity has not kept up with generation and usage.  

Electrical cars are certainly more efficient than internal combustion vehicles.  But that is relative.  In an absolute sense, they are not an efficient way to move people at all.  

The proposal here is a clustered amendment to single-use residential zoning ... and if it is single-lot multiple use at 4x single-residence density, then by proportion 20% higher density residence is 5% of existing property, to raise the property value of all the single-use residential property in the local area.

Of course, the hard part is to get it up and running somewhere ... established as an over-riding rule in some state (states, after all, can establish over-riding rules for local zoning) ... or as a string attached to some federal funding for some form of dedicated transport corridor. Once successful examples get established, then it becomes a cat-herding device ... that is to say, the way that you herd cats is by holding up a nice smelly piece of bologna.


Utsukushikereba sore de ii

The system of hook up fees for utilities, designed to "encourage development" at a time that development=suburbanization was axiomatic, combined substantial direct subsidy of infrastructure for things seen as "employment centers" like industrial and office parks, with implicit cross-subsidization from more dense to less dense development.

However, when that infrastructure has to be replaced after the sprawl development has been entrenched, there is less of the denser development that is more efficient in terms of utility networks to repeat the cross subsidy ... and the entrenched institutions for subsidizing green field sprawl development don't help very much for major maintenance or rehabilitation of existing infrastructure.

The transport grid is just one grid where pockets of higher density can reduce network costs per resident.


Utsukushikereba sore de ii