permaculture

[steveread@free.fr]

 The average car/van driver in the UK would do a total number of 399
trips of all lengths in 2004. The distribution of distances among
these trips was:

- Under 1 mile ...........  27 trips
- 1 to under 2 miles .....  67 trips
- 2 to under 5 miles ..... 132 trips
- 5 to under 10 miles ....  84 trips
- 10 to under 25 miles ...  63 trips
- 25 to under 50 miles ...  17 trips
- 50 to under 100 miles ..   7 trips
- 100 miles and over .....   3 trips

This means that of 399 trips (=100%), 389 trips (=97.49%) were under
50 miles, while only 10 trips (=2.51%) were over 50 miles.

And this is simple brute data which does't highlight why the trips were made.

The Debate about transport seems too often to polarise between catastrophists
and conversionists. The former maintaining and often basing their personal
paradigm on the imminent collapse of "the world order" as fossils run out. The
latter that we can have a virtually business as usual approach by switching 
to a
variety of alternatives.

For me my Permaculture these day's is all about the search for Quality and
Elegance. I DO NOT want the current system to suddenly slide into post-peak
social chaos, I've got children and better things to do during my 
"retirement".
Neither do I want an "eco" business as usual with the same command and control
systems, the same pressure groups, the same Merchant paradigm.

For me I hate driving, its dangerous, boring, time consuming and at the end of
the day any reasonable analysis shows that the lack of a good local community
infrastructure is the cause of 99% of my journey's.

I'm not even counting the carbon and environmental burden of the transport
infrastructure. The local community just paid for the roads near here to be
re-tarmac'd, so now everyone drives even faster, putting me and my children in
even greater danger.

It's always this Transition bit thats tricky isn't it? We probably all have
braod agreements on the sort of societies/communities we'd like to see, its 
the
getting from here to there thats a big Design challenge.

Politically one can also see a transport based dis-enfranchisement of the
population, with our heirarchical "family" structured political systems having
their thrones a long way away from most of the governed, just the same as in
medieval times

I contend frequently that a modrn political system would be a dispersed,
interconnected flatland with your personal local governing/organising centre 
no
more than 2 hours walk away. Yes, yes I know there's the web and web based
voting but again it comes down to Quality, there's a huge qualitative 
difference
between being there and standing up to be counted and a fairly detached 
perhaps
anonymous web vote.

Now I've got to go and change the front brakes on my car, 2 tyres to change 
too
so thats quite a lot of aramids, copper, cadmium, lead, antimony and zinc that
I've spread across the environment.

SteveR