I tried to look this up for a discussion on a mailing list, but the information was very hard to google (it ended up being buried in a government‐published PDF linked from wikipedia).

Common arguments about oil include:

1. Oil is not, in fact, used primarily for transportation but for generation of energy for other purposes. Therefore, reducing automobile use will not significantly reduce oil use and,

2. A large amount of oil pumped is used for things other than creating energy, for instance, it is turned into plastic, so even if we weren’t using oil for energy we’d still need to pump a great deal of it.

According to government data (page 35 of that document), number 1 was true in 1973, 42.3% of oil pumped was used in transportation, with the rest used as energy for industry, “other sectors” (agriculture, etcetera) or for oil‐based products. but by 2003, fully 57.8% of oil pumped went into transportation.

The growing share of oil used in transportation came at the expense of oil used as an energy source in production sectors, and non‐energy uses remained about the same. All oil products, from pesticides to plastics to bike chain oil, consume only 6.6% of all oil pumped.

The “Other Sectors” category is comprised of ‘agriculture,’ ‘commercial and public service,’ ‘residential’ and ’non‐specified.“

So here is (link now dead–2010) an unfortunately not‐too‐detailed look at the technology behind the “high‐speed rail” being developed in Michigan and Illinois (former Amtrak president David Gunn, among others have argued that the 110mph trains should be called "higher‐speed" rather than diluting the term “high‐speed,” which in Europe only applies to trains traveling faster than 250kph, or about 155mph.)

Still, the system appears to be working on the test track in Michigan, which is impressive in itself, and it is cheap enough that it can be funded by states without a strong Federal commitment (which is not going to come in the near future). David Gunn has previously said that the way to rebuild the national railroad network is in small improvements in service and reliability: new sidings and flyovers, better signaling, new passenger carriages, and a better attitude from the freight railroads, rather than glitzy and expensive technological showcases like Acela. The excellent organization, Midwest High Speed Rail Association has a vision of what a Chicago‐centered 110mph "higher speed" rail network built on those principles would look like.

Move over David Brooks, there’s a new kid in town, and he appears to be so good at conveniently missing the point as to make the bobo author look like an amateur. I am, of course, talking about Joel Kotkin, who manages to do something our favorite conservative could never quite pull off: repeat himself in a novel way every article. He does this, simply enough, by glancing at the front page—thereby discovering the newest piece of evidence that New York is dead and the future lies in Phoenix (after his artful interpretation, of course). It should therefore come as no surprise that the London attacks spell, according to Mr Kotkin’s percipient pen, the end to everything that doesn’t involve an attached garage.

Western Europe has long defied economic growth models by remaining stubbornly poorer than the United States. In his 2002 paper Two Centuries of Economic Growth: Europe Chasing the American Frontier, Robert J. Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, attempts to explain the paradox. His conclusion questions our assumptions about wealth, the wisdom of American post‐World War II urban development policies, the GDP as an accurate measure of wealth, and the future viability of the American way of life.

It is fortunate for our world that Jane Jacobs found ideology so late in her life. It is quite plausible that, had she been so ideological at a younger age, she might have ruined her earlier, seminal works with the rigid assumptions, logical fallacies, and contrived evidence that that permeates Systems of Survival.

Edit 2020—I find it interesting that I didn’t think The Death and Life of Great American Cities was an ideological book. Certainly the ideology wasn’t as naked as it was in Systems of Survival but it was absolutely there. If there’s any lesson, it’s that Urban Planning of the 1960s needed the critique from Jacobs’ ideological position. It was dominated by a belief that centralized city planning and architecture could solve our problems. The problem with Systems of Survival wasn’t that Jane Jacobs changed, but that the world changed.