The Great Streetcar Con Game

In a perfect world, the oil would never run out. It would be limitless and our infrastructure would allow us to continue living the Disneyfied(tm) world of tomorrow forever. We'd still have beehive hairdos for the women, and if you wait long enough your thin tie will come back into style. In a perfect world nothing changes. We don't live there.

In the best of all possible worlds, we'd have the foresight to build renewable electric transportation, like streetcars that go everywhere we want to go with cars, often enough that we're never waiting more than 15 minutes, and all our shopping and housing needs are met with this convenient and reliable answer to city living. Wouldn't that be great?

This is particularly important as we ease out of the Oil Age and into the age of 2-Wheeled transit. While its nice and charming to think about streetcars and light rail and electric vehicles the facts are these:

1. There is ONE (1) Streetcar maker in the USA, at Oregon Ironworks in Oregon. Their staff of 13 is not capable of producing all the needed streetcars for every American city and town a few weeks before some OPEC tragedy causes a panic shortage. This is a growth business, obviously, but that only happens if all those cities and towns start buying them NOW and they won't fund anything until its too late, like after the Panic. 
2. Almost every American has a bicycle, and the rest can get one. 
3. The trouble with bicycling is the difference in speed between a bicycle and a car is sufficiently great that most drivers consider bicycles pedestrians. This remains true until cars get into 25 mph zones, where the bicycle is almost the same speed and suddenly the cyclist becomes visible to the driver as part of the traffic flow. Its like magic. What it is, is perception. This is one of the better arguments for upgrading to a scooter, since a scooter is fast enough to be perceived as traffic by drivers rather than a pedestrian with wheels.
4. The average work commute is 30 miles. This is too far to bicycle. I'm sorry, but the average American just can't do that and still be fit to work all day, much less bicycle home afterwards. It's not going to happen. 
5. A scooter can do that distance easily, even with only 49ccs of bweeting noise, blue smoke, and pollution. If it means you keep your job, you don't care about the environment. The Environment doesn't put a roof over your head and food on your plate. Your job does that. You can't have a job if you can't get there. Everyone else is doing the same thing so there's smoke and noise whether you're causing some of it or not.
6. Giving up the job you LIKE (the one you probably have now) for the job you can physically reach post-oil will be a terrible personal tragedy and likely increase the Misery Index for the nation. 
7. The gap between the end of plentiful oil (now) and post oil (post Panic event) will be a great opportunity for scooter sales and bicycle parts and repairs. This panic will likely last for weeks or months, since hoarding and rationing are just going to keep forcing people to scooters and bicycles as their basic personal transportation. 
8. This will be especially tough on mothers of young children since they're used to the convenience of passenger vehicles and switching to sidecars or bike trailers will be very tough for them to adjust to. Picture the school run with bicycle trailers instead of SUVs and station wagons. Say goodbye to inefficient yellow school buses. We don't have the diesel for that.
9. The modern concept of Safety is useless in the face of a post-energy survival situation. We all become like Vietnam, a mix of rich people in cars (evil grinning grammas with tinted windows) running over poor people on bicycles and scooters. That's reality in the real world outside the rich First World nations. They call it the "road tax" and its paid in blood. The sooner we accept this, the sooner we can adapt and overcome. 

Eventually these sorts of light vehicles will become common because they solve the major issues of transportation while using minimal fuel. Its all about power to weight ratio, which is often the opposite of safety. Too bad. Suck it up. The Nerf(tm) world cost too much and it doesn't work. The real world has splinters and boo-boos.