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Originally Posted by Snugglebear  When you live in a rural area, driving everywhere is the only option. There's no magic monorails to ride and the bus system sucks. |
This is true, but there are some solutions to it. The most obvious one would be for more people to move back into the city and tackling the problems there. Employees could work more from a computer at home instead of sitting in front of a computer at work. There could be a fixed tax deduction for people who can't get public transportation to work. Or the bus companies could find a new market and offer morning transfers between suburbs and/or to the city - or people could privately organize to carpool together.
The goal doesn't have to be to eliminate driving, just to reduce it somewhat - or to encourage the use of more efficient cars. I'm going to bet that most people who drive SUVs on a daily basis drive exclusively on well maintained roads - nothing a Prius couldn't handle just as easily.
This is all less a question of what people want to do and more one about what people will eventually be required to do. I don't see a real alternative happening before the price of gas forces the change. Though those electric cars that get up to 100 miles on a charge are very interesting - shouldn't be that difficult to let people recharge them in the parking garage.
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Have any overpopulation scares or predictions actually come anywhere close to true?
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Nope. I don't know about the US, but it's also something used by some fringe anti-immigration groups here. The idea, that there's not enough space/resources to take in more people without everything going to hell.
The argument completely ignores that more people just create more demand, which in turn means more economic activity and hence more jobs. Economic growth has to come from somewhere and it just requires a growing number of people.