I suppost after reading enough about Peak Oil and solutions to it one gets an impression of what would be necessary and what would not. I'll make some points and I'd encourage others to comment. This is just a dialogue I seem to have with myself now that I look at everything with Peak Oil in mind. Some of it sounds crazy compared to my line of thinking even 1 year ago and each would have quite a different answer then. Such as:

all buildings above 7 stories abandoned or cut down to size as a form of resource mining.

what is a hospital going to look like? How many do we need?

wholesale replacement of cars and trucks with bicycles trains and barges. Where can we get horses?

swaths of suburban areas cut up and replaced with walkable stores and healthcare offices. Replace houses sitting on still usable farmland.

A return of local farms selling directly to customers.

Alternative energy used to power water, sewage systems, cell and Internet given highest priority.

ban..er legislate technologies beyond a waste energy threshold per item (ie: incandescent light bulbs, Hummers) while also mandating increasing efficiencies. Start ending all energy subsidies.

Encourage energy conservation as common as recycling in the public mind as an action of responsibility.

Cutoff/demolish the southwest corner of a house into windows for passive solar heating. Start lighting buildings with sunlight, point windows in the general direction. Toss out the '60s housing development plans to be replaced with car-less communities.

force reduction in the carrying capacity of the city. When is a city full?

how many items that you need can be replaced or recycled only within 100 km? None? Some? What items would be ideal for local production?

Hey,

Ran across this link in my wanderings, Canadian no less... http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/

When I was in Osaka I noted with a bit of surprise that Japan and India do extensive training still with abacus. It's a free course! But in Toronto probably not ;) Certainly the needs for a cheap calculator would be an effective tool/planning proposal anywhere.

Hey,

I was reading "Ten U.S. Cities Best Prepared for an Oil Crisis" from www.sustainlane.com and although interesting since the US has so many large cities, we have only about 10 large cities in Canada anyway! We're more a regional collection of towns. The effects on cities as well as smaller communities would need to be researched a bit more in our case.

Are there any articles that you know of that have done a Canadian version, and if not would it be difficult to create our own? I think it might be helpful to see where local issues and regional issues collide during peak oil, not just transportation, then for us to focus on those issues within our communities. To what degree will we be affected? Where and how, exactly? This will help our neighbourhoods realize their vulnerabilities on a wider range of issues.

I know that this is the Toronto Outpost, but which Toronto?

From a strickly transportation effect of oil peak, what does our city look like?

For a walkable orientated community you can't beat downtown Toronto. Sure we don't talk to each other now, but when the lights went out during the blackout of 2003 everyone got to know each other, for a little while at least. That was a lot of fun surprisingly. Without a car how can the GTA people make personal connections? Without population density how will they get things done easily without feeling isolated? There will probably be an abandonment of the Uptown GTA.