Event Horizon

Mired in debt, I wonder if the City of Sacramento will go through with their plans to renovate the north end of Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. this spring.

Along with Franklin Blvd., MLK is the other north-south street I bicycle along to get to work...along with a few thousand other Elk Grovian thru-commuters. Its 'renovation' is deemed a public works project.

It is indeed the public realm. But of course I take issue with 'roads and bridges' as the only assumed public realm we have, and also that somehow they're going to be our savior from this approaching CAT V economic shitstorm. Listen carefully through all this bailout horseshit and you'll hear that we're going to put all these hundreds of thousands of out-of-work Merikans back to work repairing our crumbling roads.

First of all, couple several million fewer vehicles produced each year with a significant decline in VMT, and these 'public works' projects will be utilized even less than now. But no matter -- we'll blindly continue roadbuilding in the face of oil depletion, global warming, public realm degradation, fewer miles traveled, etc...because it feels good. Same with the Sacramento airport expansion, another multi-billion public works project for an industry that can't survive looming $70+ oil and whose customers are increasingly choosing Top Ramen at home instead of lobster at the Vegas Bellagio.

The event horizon of California's black hole of debt was only expanded when voters agreed in 2006 to float $20 billion in bonds to 'ease' congestion with proposition 1B. More delusional thinking, folks. You can never, never! build more lanes to ease congestion. It has never worked and it never will work. Building more lanes only leads to more lanes of congestion. You know what will ease congestion? Less driving! Living patterns that aren't wholly dependent on motoring! How about those? Huh?

My disparate, random postings on energy, economic debt, and our suburban shitscapes all have a common thread -- we mortgaged everything we had and most everything we ever will have into building housal units, destined for slumification in unsustainable suburban living arrangements, accessible only by perpetually motoring vehicles powered by declining energy resources, stuffed to the rafters with cheap foreign manufactured shit that was never needed and paid for with money that never existed.