Two words: Holy fucking shit!

http://www.videosift.com/video/OK-Go-Rube-Goldberg-Machine-Version-of-This-Too-Shall-Pass

Following up on yesterday's post about the underwhelming (but still a relief) announcement of a replacement for Windsor's old train station. Lately I've been developing more and more enthusiasm for the scale-down, pro-public transit, anti-automobile movement and some of the thinking that goes into it. Actually living in Toronto is debatable for me, but one of the reasons I love taking the train to visit there is that it's such a rewarding place to get around on foot. I don't have to deal with traffic, parking, the cost of fuel, all that nonsense -- just walk out the door, or take the efficient TTC if I prefer. A big group of us were there last year and spent the night at Stewart's place right on Dundas. In the morning when we decided to go out for breakfast, we didn't have to get into several cars and meet at some strip mall -- we just walked to the greasy spoon a couple of blocks away. Why can't Windsor be more like that?

That said, some people just go right off the rails with this stuff. The futurist Stewart Brand has a rather weird article from a couple of months ago extolling the virtues of slums. Yes, slums. Why? Because they're so green and energy efficient, silly! As he points out: "The Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 ragpickers. Six thousand tons of rubbish are sorted every day." He goes on to promote this as a model for the energy-efficient city of the future. Boy, sign me up!

Brand believes that this kind of thing will lead to just about everyone living in self-sufficient cities, which grow their own food in intensive hydroponic greenhouses. Contrast this with James Howard Kunstler, who insists that most of us will be moving back to the countryside and small towns because energy scarcity will (a) make a lifestyle based on the kind of mass mobility we now enjoy impossible, and (b) force us to go back to labour-intensive farming based on low energy inputs and without massive petroleum-dependent fertilization.

I agree with Kunstler when he says that the era of cheap oil has already begun to come to an end. (Remember the high gas prices from a couple of years ago? Matt Taibbi wrote a fairly infamous article in Rolling Stone last year attacking Goldman Sachs, and one of his claims is that their financial speculations were behind the run-up in the price of petroleum. Paul Krugman disagrees and says it really is the fundamentals -- that is, with the continuing growth of China and India, the demand really had begun to exceed the supply. Call me crazy, but I'm with the Nobel Prize-winning economist on this one. And peak oil means that the supply can never really go up again, only down. That means that as the economy recovers, not only will fuel go back up in price and stay there, we may even begin to experience shortages. What's more, this will become the permanent condition from now on. Makes me glad I don't, say, commute to a job in Toronto from my home in Newmarket. Sorry, Deb.)

However, I think Kunstler underestimates people's taste for high-energy civilization, and the potential means of preserving something like what we have now, however short-sightedly. There may be a lot more mass transit and commuter trains in our future (fingers crossed!), along with a lot more people having to pay big mortgages on worthless houses (unfortunately). But there are a lot of alternative energy sources out there, and even if they're not as cheap as oil, I think people will still pay through the nose, or take out a second mortgage on the planet's future if necessary, if it means they get to keep watching their big-screen TVs.

So, Windsor's getting a new train station. I wish I were more enthused. It sounds very much like a stopgap. Sigh... Well, at least *something* will be replacing that dingy old coffin within our lifetimes. But I had hoped for much more.

According to the city's transportation master plan, Windsor's rail lines were supposed to be rationalized and the Walkerville line would have been freed up. It runs right by where I live in Central Windsor, and I had visions of something to help me get to Tecumseh Mall more easily. Maybe a pedestrian walk for biking, and even some kind of light rapid transit like a busway down the line. God knows this city needs better public transit.

But based on what "Laliberte" (he? she? The article doesn't identify this person properly) says, clearly someone has gotten sick of waiting. So from the sound of it, we're going to get a new stopgap train station that is being planned for a time horizon as long as two, three, maybe even as long as five years. I hope it ends up being a bigger improvement than it sounds.