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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brian P. who wrote (16296)	3/23/2000 4:57:00 PM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 769667

Brian, I love cities, and am only in the suburbs because it is a bigger bang for the buck. But I have had numerous arguments with people on these threads, and those who are non-urban tend to be adamant and edgy about such things as high density. Plus, there is the unavoidable expense argument........

To: Brian P. who wrote (16296)	3/23/2000 5:12:00 PM
From: DMaA	Respond to of 769667

To date, Americans have been free to choose to live in high-density cities or low-density suburbs. A large majority chose the suburbs. It is clear to me that they won't recreate your 19th century ideal city voluntarily. And if you and your fellow dreamers intend to use coercion then I'm afraid I will have to fight you. Or maybe you have thought of another way. Would you care to discuss means and tactics to accomplish your goals?

To: Brian P. who wrote (16296)	3/23/2000 5:42:00 PM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Like to go back to the days when grand rail systems laced the nation? [Nope.]Want to reinstate the Big Red Cars, the railroads, the web of street-cars and buses, the many modes of movement crippled by preferential treatment given to the car?[No thank you.] Can you go home again?[Do I have to?] Back to the days when book-toting schoolchildren and package-laden parents had mobility without automobility?[mobility better than walking but several orders of magnitude less than we gained with advent of the car.] Can we resurrect and reinforce mass transit?[Why should we?]

To: Brian P. who wrote (16296)	3/23/2000 9:33:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

The only way to contain sprawl would be to destructively redefine the rights of private landowners. This would mean jettisoning the Constitution and that's just a start.There is unavoidable conflict between the most basic idea of civil liberty and the sort of planning and directive that would compress the middle class onto already-developed land. We can become inmates of an authoritarian state, or we can sprawl ourselves until all that's left is cities and bare rock. We need to decide which is less bad. ...Or we can find a technical fix. We've always done so in the past; without 20th century technology we'd have a world population holding itself below the billion mark by virtue of cyclic famine. It would be difficult to advance the idea that this technology is a bad thing. That is my big beef with most who identify with the environmentalist descriptor. Push hard enough, and there is a pretechnical agro-utopian at the core of most environmentalists. I reject this. Utopianism is maladaptive, a sort of involuntary abdication. Verily, brethren, I say unto thee: True environmentalism is found in a technically progressive society, not in a retrogressive one. Today's car has a hundredth of the ecological footprint of its ancestor 40 years ago. Air travel seat miles use less and less resources, as do instant meals. Or first-aid supplies. One day, we'll be able to build self-sustaining ecologically-closed cities that don't even grow food on dirt! Then, when technology has provided an incentive for humans to cluster and recede from restored wilderness - only then, by incentive and not disincentive, will today's headaches re cars, houses, etc. be marginalized. Imagine how awful New York City was a century ago with the streets choked with horse poo. I say, let's not go back there.