I Stumbled across Raise the Hammer's extensive list of postings about Peak Oil, and thought I would continue a thread that started there a few years ago.

In many of the posts, Ryan describes how land use is going to have to change dramatically in the face of $3-4 a litre gasoline.

It has been well documented how the days of suburbia are severely numbered, and yet the question remains - all of those houses are there - without a huge quantity of fossil fuels to power the machines needed to rip them all out, the land is useless for farming. So what to do? People aren't going to be willing to abandon their houses en masse and flee for the inner cities (which would soon become unlivable) or the countryside (where they would be trapped in one location by the price of gas).

That's when the discussion around our house turned to Rail. I'm from out west, and on the Prairies, rail has an almost mythical quality to it - people I grew up with had grandparents who had been homesteaders - the area was settled that recently.

After reading a report in one of the RTH blogs about how rail was 10 times as efficient at moving people or freight as road, it got me thinking about communities out west, and how they sprang up.

Basically, the railroad companies decided where the towns would be across much of the prairies by deciding to plop down small 'whistle stop' stations that were in areas where they could reach a reasonable number of customers (for the freight, mainly) within a one day wagon ride.

Now, I don't think we'll be back to horse and buggy any time soon, but the model may not be a bad one. Hamilton right now is looking at adding a GO transit stop en route to Niagara Falls. This would mean a whole new cluster of activity and spikes in property values right around James St. North. The gentrification that has already begun would start to seriously accelerate.

All this is to say that in the world of only driving your car for 'special occasions', people are probably not going to want to just stay in their communities all the time, as walkable as they may need to be. Maybe our kids will, or theirs, but we are too accustomed to the freedom of the open road.

Maybe if we can't afford that, we'll settle for the freedom of the rails.

At the same time people are going to need to have relatively affordable access to goods - whether it be food, or building materials, or other essential items for daily living ($2.49 plastic toothbrush holders from Wal Mart do not count). Stores and businesses located to small rail spur lines, or even close to existing rail stops (which may become mixed use rather quickly) will have a decided advantage.

Hamilton, with it's extensive network of inner city rail lines and spurs, and proximity to an even more cost effective mode of transporting goods (marine!) is ideally suited to capitalizing on the skyrocketing cost of diesel which pretty much everybody who has looked at the issue agrees will be here in the next 5-10 years.

So then why then is the new president of the Chamber of Commerce threatening to bulldog through the approval of the Aerotropolis? Does he not realize that kerosene (jet fuel) is going to be every more expensive than diesel?

Somebody needs to do their homework.