DON'T GIVE THE JARRETT REGENCY ANY IDEAS.

Strong Towns contributor Jay Stange grapples with the post-corona school bus driver shortage (note First Student recruiting at Corn Fest) with a reflection on the long and winding road (that leads to your cul-de-sac) that led to the situation.

Many of our cities’ transportation systems and land-use frameworks are fragile: auto centric and spread out. If you want to know how car dependent our places are, just imagine—as Josh McCarty of Urban3 once suggested to me—what would happen if tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. all the gasoline in the world disappeared.

For now, these school bus shortages are a real-world, non-hypothetical example of the problem we face in North America. In a second year of these bus driver shortages, the tone is getting shriller. The answers are not easy and expose the fragility of our post-WWII Suburban Experiment, which relies on cheap oil and massive spending on infrastructure in a Growth Ponzi Scheme that just keeps making it all worse.

No doubt the doddering ficus would mumble something about that "beautiful transition" and praise Gaia for doing what his cancellation of pipeline permits and oil leases couldn't.  Never mind that it was government decisions that brought us to this pass in the first place.  "Some of that exurban expansion was strictly emergent, and some of it was at the urging of Wise Experts. Similarly, emergence played a big role in the exodus from the cities, but expertise gave us urban renewal."

School consolidation, which is one of several reasons why walking to school is no longer a possibility, occurred for a variety of reasons.

What interests me as the shortage is ongoing, is to recognize, as [Daniel Herriges] writes, that “we didn't have to be here. We've spent decades closing neighborhood schools, consolidating schools in unwalkable locations, and making our communities more dangerous places for kids to walk and bike, all while public transportation became less frequent and less available.”

School consolidation might have taken place in the hopes of having a critical mass of students and taxpayers to properly equip and staff the chemistry class, or that might have been to field a competitive football team.  A school site in each new subdivision plat used to be standard procedure.  For a while the youngsters (and there are plenty) in the subdivisions containing Cold Spring Shops headquarters and the distressed sale properties to the west were on school buses to the former Malta high school, which became an elementary school when the two districts combined.  I lose track of who goes where these days.  These days, there are residents who object to the construction of elementary schools nearby.  Might soft-on-delinquency suspension policies turn elementary schools into nuisance facilities, and the corona tyranny contributing to the driver shortages simply heightened the contradictions, in the Trotskyist sense?

That transition away from the streetcar suburbs was a long time in coming, and the transition back will take a long time.  Meanwhile, all that emphasis on converting motorists into electric car drivers does nothing to change commuting patterns, and when you're stuck in traffic, those batteries will be ticking down and you might have to shut off the radio or CD player to conserve power.

Where is the latter-day electric traction merchant to suggest that a car line that is also a corridor for the electric mains might be the most effective way to provide commuting options by day with the additional power to charge up all those electric cars overnight?