I too came here looking for a Snow Crash reference. Glad to see I am not disappointed. As soon as I saw the headline it was the most immediate thought in my mind.

Keep in mind, there are also those of us living in Pennsylvania for whom sidewalks are non-existant. Where I live, I can walk to restaurants as well as the local farm for beef or produce. I sometimes do my shopping on one of my Bicycles (along with my 2 yr. old daughter in her front mounted (behind the bars) seat. We take the standard roads and stay our legal metre/3 feet away from the white line on the shoulder (no one should ever ride on the shoulder, it is where the debris ends up.) We take our part of the lane and when done properly (within the law), it means that a vehicle cannot pass until it is safe to cross into the next lane (if available), or the oncoming lane (once safe), which is also within the rule of the law.

Back to the topic. I could see living in a city that happened to be better design (of which I've been to quite a few in Europe), but I don't see it happening as easily here with our fairly corrupt and wasteful government (moreso than others in this example). It is partially a culture change that is needed. I know that if I lived in London, I wouldn't own a vehicle. If I lived in Vancouver, I wouldn't necessarily need one. I grew up in Philadelphia but in the only post code that had a zero murder rate. I swiftly moved further away with each home. I don't mind being near a train line (I had one near my first house), nor near businesses (I have them near my current house), but what I do mind for the most part is not having a single home. My house has many similarities (minus forward slanting front façade) with Dutch homes. Narrow, deep and tall. A few of my neighbours home's are within an arms reach of the next. We have deep backyards (135m) with open areas in which the children can (and do) play. Yet our property comes within 3 metres of the street.

My personal take is this:

Keep the freedom to buy the automobiles one wishes to buy, but do it in the manner as in Malaysia, or Greece, etc. Charge by displacement and fuel type via tax at purchase time, and renew of licensing annually (the latter being more in line with most states). A car with a 1.4l or less petrol engine gets no additional tax, nor does a diesel with a 1.6l diesel... (diesel gaining a slightly larger displacement in each group). Whereas a car like 8.4l Dodge Viper would end up with a 100% tax on the price of the vehicle. It still says "yes, you can buy anything you want with the provision that you pay for the damage it may do environmentally". This would stop single drivers running around all the time in cars with big V8's and massive displacement unless they *REALLY* wanted to. I'm not against enthusiasts cars as I raced semi-pro in Rally and Hillclimb competition for the good part of a decade, but that also wasn't my primary vehicle. Good engineering can produce small displacement, high output (read: efficient power), (and yes even high torque) engines in light chassis formats.

Having everyone live in cities or in close proximity in a country where it isn't necessary makes no sense. And before anyone says "you can have a park in a city", or "telecommute",etc. I live in the country and have a 1500acre park with a nice sized lake within 2 stop signs from my home AND I have been working remotely for the past 4+ years (Software Engineer). We have such things in the country as well.

I used to be a big firefox user but then both Safari (followed by Chrome) became my browsers of preference for their stability and speed. I always go back to trying the newer versions of Firefox but generally fall back to Chrome at this point. Recently trying FF4 b9 lead to some very disappointing results. Crashing rather quickly on my dual-quad core MacPro w/24g ram. Chrome (as of version 6) never crashes on me, and Safari (as of version 5) doesn't either. Opera has on occasion and while I know that this is a beta, the time till crash in the several times I tried was under a minute from load. There seems to be a lot left to do and I hope they don't rush and release something as remotely close to this bug laden. Eric codedevl.blogspot.com