Auto Oil Construction Cartels Corrupt Public Commons

Abstract: This examination of transportation infrastructure and urban design reveals deeply unfulfilled potential for a better quality of life.

Make a list of the organizations that are involved in controlling your life through the use of machines (automobiles, heating and cooling systems, lighting, appliances, televisions, stereos, computers, manufacturing equipment), energy sources (oil, gasoline, natural gas, electricity and other fuels and energy sources), and the transportation systems (roads, parking lots, airplanes, power lines, radio waves). Understand the complete pathways and production systems for these machines, energy sources and transportation systems. Imagine all at once, in your mind's eye, all of the connections that it took to make and operate a car, for instance, the mining for resources, the engineering, the manufacturing, the operating expenses in energy, as well as the environmental destruction caused by the creation, operation, maintainance and recycling of this machine and all of it's required infrastructure.

Understand the implications of bad engineering and policies for widely used machines and energy resources on the destruction of social benefits, destruction of the environment. There is so much lost potential in human quality of life because of this bad engineering and policy. People need more general education about energy expenses in their daily routines. Urban planning based on seemingly limitless energy sources is not sustainable in the current dwindling energy supply reality. Global oil depletion is forcing us radically change our lifestyles. The age of heavy machinery is at its end. Traveling light is the new paradigm. Green urban planning lets us simply walk to our neighborhood social-commerce-arts center. Mass transit increases build community, replacing the isolation and energy waste of single-occupant vehicles. Jobs abound in the transformation of our world to the new relocalized communities. The age of centralization, huge shopping malls, suburban sprawl, worker commuting, parking lots, and other auto-centric designs, is over. This was all spawned by urban planning policies that benefited the profiteering of oil, automobile, and road construction industries. It was an interesting experiment, but not really worth the trouble.

How many hours does a typical driver stare at the road in front of them? Perhaps talking on a cell phone? Listening to a radio program. Most cars on the road these days have three empty seats and one lone occupant, the driver. 75% of the carrying capacity of the car is wasted. Perhaps the car has been oversized 4 times as large as it needs to be for most trips. This benefits the auto, oil and road industries far more than the millions of drivers (most of us). There a certain machismo mentality pervading these industries, but the end result is utterly boring. Our lives could be spent enjoying great food, arts, and leisure with our highest technologies, but the overhead of individualized transportation between it the actual activity is just too large in proportion to the actual benefits.

It's a global tragedy that cars have not evolved as fast as computers. In the computer world, memory, disc space, and operating speeds have increase manyfold over the past few decades. And the introduction of the Internet Web has increased our access to understanding and designing our world manyfold. And with these tools we come to learn the webs of corruption and influence that destroy our world with exploitation, enslavement, monotony, greed, propaganda, lies, extremism, sexism and other forms of bigotry, religious fundamentalism, corruption, and so much more. The web opens the world to the mind, simply as an implementation of an open discussion forum for understanding reality. Only as we use the tools will we get the benefits of the tools. The 'we' here is quite flexible, but all are invited to participate in the design of our life on this sacred, only planet, Earth. We have quite a number of influential but ignorant leaders in all fields, who would benefit from a more holistic approach and work to understand the implications of ecological karma in design.

While we have all been born into this world of roads and cars, it doesn't take much historical research or imagination to see ways of living that skip over the myriad transportation expenses entirely by redesigning local communities. Where are the common spaces in our neighborhoods? The performance spaces, libraries, art galleries, dining and dance halls, religious spaces? Are they within WALKING distance? Think about how nice it will be. We control our communities as much as we are actively involved.

The dependencies on external sources of energy and food are the weakest components in our quality of life. Does amount of energy expended importing goods consume our daily routine?

With the destruction of national democracies through continuing corruption of media information, corruption of voting, corporate influence, and lack of a broadly educated, critically thinking people, communities will have to detach from the larger infrastructures and resource dependencies and reform local policies that fit the bio-region and regional culture. Corruption in large government and corporate organizations has the ultimate effect of destroying the public trust. Does the top of the pyramid float? How does one dismantle the pyramid-based structures? Perhaps by increasing diversity and reforming ecologically. Pyramids are created by focusing energy upward to smaller layers. The disparaties in wealth are perhaps caused by the monopoly of currency. Design your own local currency and trading network and take control of your life. The model of plants is brilliant, efficient and beautiful in their ability to enjoy the sun, earth and rain and create awesome beauty in their ecological communities. The currency is pollen, nectar, fruit, berries, roots, leaves, all working in symbiotic relationships in their respective ecosystems. Is what we have created so abstracted and distanced from the design of natural ecosystems that we have created our own self-enslaving infrastructures and activities? Is the design of our lifestyle infrastructure essentially a kind of totalitarian dictator?

It is not worth the massive destruction of the biosphere Earth and quality of life to continue with bad design and corruption.

People can be categorized by their relationship to infrastructure such as in automobile-based society:

• Some think they profit or benefit from automobiles.
• Some are enslaved by automobiles due to their lifestyle logistics.
• Some people do not need automobiles due to their lifestyle logistics.
• Some are not aware of their relationship to automobiles.
• Most people suffer from the negative effects of automobiles.
• Some people design and maintain the automobile infrastructure that enslaves others.