All of the major metropolitan areas and geographic features show up as a result.

Growing up in Columbia, we had neighborhood tot lots, with communal swings and slides and on-property playgrounds were discouraged if not banned by architectural covenants. Those tot lots were pikers by the community playground standards I see today in some parts of the Twin Cities, though down our street is again essentially a tot lot built on a parcel adjacent to the freeway (probably from land surplussed after freeway construction). Few houses in our neighborhood have the play equipment Vanderbilt decries. When lots are small, people need common space. When lots are large, this can be internalized to their own property. This is of course the fundamentally the same as the third space argument of Ray Oldenham's The Great Good Place, where cities with smaller housing units have more common "third spaces", while when people have larger houses, they have less need (and perhaps less opportunity) to get out.

From the Strib comments Roadguy Blog Archive � Gas taxes: Ads at the pump? A federal holiday?

The sensible readers of the Strib have spoken, the gas tax holiday is a bad idea, of 17 responses, 0 were in favor and most against.

"Now, with nationwide gasoline prices having passed the inflation-adjusted record of $3.40 a gallon set back in 1981, the U.S. Energy Information Administration is predicting that gasoline consumption will actually fall 0.3% this year. That would be the first annual decline since 1991. "

It leads to the thought, just as we wasted time with Gin and TV, we also waste enormous resources while traveling that could be more productive (both personally and socially) in many other ways. Car radios, Ipods, cell phones, in-car computers help, but only go so far if we are still required to drive. (or are confined as a passenger in a system requiring frequent transfers or without adequate space). This is one reason why the DARPA urban challenge is potentially so important (in terms of leading to a fundamental change in how society operates), affecting how we spend 90 minutes a day.

While now in Japan, the social implications of this are interesting. Can't people figure this out just by observing the environment themselves though?

These rules implement the law that requires Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards of 35 mpg by 2020.

Historically CAFE standards seem to correlate with progress in fuel efficiency, rising from 12.9 MPG for new cars in 1974, though the present standard has been unchanged since the early 1980s and as a consequence, with the shift from passenger cars to light trucks, the combined fleet fuel economy has dropped slightly from a peak in 1987 of 26 mpg to about 25 mpg presently.

See Automobile and Light Truck Fuel Economy: The CAFE Standards for more background information and discussion as of 2006. See especially Figure 1.

For some historical reason CAFE standards were the provenance of NHTSA, the safety agency. (probably because the agency regulated vehicles).

I suspect the CAFE standard could be raised higher, which would push technology faster, and more toward battery-based and hybrid systems. It is too bad the market can't do this on its own, (i.e. why don't people buy their own fuel efficient vehicles rather than relying on govt. standards and forced cross-subsidies by automakers between gas guzzlers and gas sippers) and this is a very inefficient way of internalizing externalities, but it is apparently politically easier to regulate automakers than to raise gas taxes.

One more reason Clinton should not be President. Think about it this way, imagine there were a road utility, which was a separate non-profit (but also non-loss) organization that managed roads, and received revenue from users, revenue which could only be spent on roads. We wouldn't let politicians take away its revenue because some other price went up.

Perhaps this is the model we should consider to help depoliticize road management.