petrol (gas) is $6.80 for a US gallon here in the UK so you are lucky.

sv

Yeah, Americans can't complain about the price of oil, honestly.  In Europe we pay a lot more.  But that's just the way it is, I'm not saying you're evil or anything.  Sometimes I find not having a car, or anything transportation other than my own legs, to be a great opportunity, to get fit, see the world at a slower pace.... However, I do appreciate that you have a bit of a predicament in Las Vegas, and that walking out into the desert might not be a great idea.

  That "Grand Canyon of the East" looks quite spectacular really.  I think it is a lot nicer than anywhere I sling.

Sling Badger-

HECK YEAH IM GOIN!

and we still gotta get together to sling. ive been uber busy with school ect. and making a new bola, sling, stone headed axe and attempting flint knapping. ill try to post pics when i got time

Statistics show that apparently, the average American uses their car for around 95% of all trips out of the home.  60% of trips in Britain are conducted by car.  And I would say that you are right - perhaps, in many ways, it is an unfair comparison.  Holland, Willeke's tolerant home, is classified as 85% "built up".  America, by comparison, is only 2%.  It's easy to put in good public transport when people live in neat little clusters.  I'm 25 minutes away from Southampton by bus, and about 40 minutes from Winchester, on the same bus route.  I can get the train in under an hour and half to London (on a good day), or Birmingham, our second city, in around 2 hours, maybe a little longer.  And I can be in Leeds in about 5 hours - and that's all the way at the other end of the country.  And places like Sheffield in the north of England is following a continental pattern - it has brand new, energy efficient, environmentally friendly trams crisscrossing the entire city, that anyone can use for £2, for the entire day, anywhere.  It's a lovely idea.  You can be from the train station to the Sheffield Arena in about 15 minutes.

when you are living alone, without the need for alot of food, it is possible to take a backpack and carry your groceries on the bike in relative ease.  but for real shopping, or large purchases( say, a pool table or a few peices of ten foot pipe, for example) it is really nessesary to drive a car.  but, there are alternatives to this as well, such as a children's cab that drags behind the bike.

cars are important, but not really effective in a lot of cases. 

think about this; people take the time to drive their cars however many miles to the gym, just so that they can walk and ride to nowhere on tredmills and fake bikes.  think about the wasted energy there.  that energy could just as well, if not better, be spent walking to the store or other places.

I've heard people say that in America, it is no longer possible to walk to places, even if you want to.  It's a shame.
  I think that there are two places in the world where electric cars would be ideal.  One is France.  The majority of French energy production is in nuclear power plants - clean, environmentally friendly (in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, anyway), and so using an electric car would not be like having an electric car in Britain, where gas is the main fuel, or in America, where oil is.
  The other place is China.  Chinese people have not been scattered across the country in the same way as people in other countries have done.  They still live in family based communities, and the families have in many cases been in approximately the same place from about a thousand or more years.  They don't need to travel far.  They don't own many cars already, so there would be nothing to compare electric cars to, and if the Hu Jintao was not lying recently when he said China needed to clean up its environment, then it would be fairly easy to get solar, wind, tidal, and of course, hydro (Yangzi dam) power plants up and running that would minimise CO2 emissions and help in every other way.

  Of course, no one ever pays attention to talk like this - it's a shame, and our children could be suffering from cancer and all kinds of other diseases every other year in the future just because of this.

Solution:  Hybrid!  No, seriously.  There's a new hybrid that can go around 250 mpg, apparently.  And petition your governor or senator or whoever, and try to get a nice, new Maglev built.

Quote:
Yeah, general electric cars with plug ins and recharging centres (instead of petrol stations) are in theory a good idea, but they don't actually prevent the usage of fossil fuels - unless, of course, the electricity provided in your area is renewable and so on.  Plugging a hybrid into a socket also makes sense, but remember that every time you use the brakes, the battery gets charged by the friction.  Same principle with a Maglev train.  Maglev is a short way of saying "magnetic levitation" or some such, and basically, it uses magnets to utterly take out friction on the track except when braking.  The electromagnets on the train are used to power the train forward.  For the first half of the journey, the train is accelerating and using its energy.  The second half consists almost entirely of slowing the train down, the brakes charging the battery again.  Currently, they are in use in Asia mostly, and the next step is to use them not as conventional, overground trains, but underground trains, where the tunnels could be created as vacuums, to control friction on the train to around zero.  In theory, the train would reach speeds of 800 kmh or so.  Minimal environmental impact, ridiculous speed - think how quickly it would take to be in LA from New York, or London to Moscow or Beijing or even Tokyo! - completely cool, modern, awesome transport system.  The current speeds are about 310 kmh - they say you could travel from Paris to Rome in 2 hours.  At the moment, mostly the trains are not in use, but in a few years, all trains could be like that.  Imagine.
  As for house heating: solar can be used to heat the house, but that's obviously a bit crap in winter.  Biomass (wood, basically) is also pretty good, but it is labour intensive if you want it to remain eco-friendly, because realistically, you'd have to cut it yourself.  Anyway, I'd like to see some of these cool, eco developments in action.  Everywhere, preferably.  Think about the revolution if everyone used maglev trains and electric cars to travel about.  Or maybe they could use their feet!