Californians don't understand energy efficiency

Traffic is infuriating. I have 14 traffic lights between home and work, in the space of only 3 miles. That's around 5
lights per mile. It's so wasteful, pure stop and go driving. Most of the roads are many lanes wide, which was a knee-jerk reaction to traffic that wastes vast amounts of space and in the end makes everything worse. As an added bonus, those giant roads become impassible to pedestrians and totally unpleasant for bicyclists. A three mile walk would be fine, a three mile bike ride should be a piece of cake, and a three mile drive would be nothing under normal circumstances, but not here. Here, all those options suck.

Then there's our public transportation. It's expensive, slow, and doesn't run often enough or late enough. The coverage isn't very good (except in San Francisco, but that's an exception). In order to get anywhere you usually have to make changes between multiple, totally unintegrated networks and pay for another ticket each time.

So under those circumstances, everybody has a car and drives. In recent years, people bought tons of hybrids, which are stupid in their own ways and don't help congestion at all. But with traffic being so bad, the big tech companies added shuttle service as a perk. Which is great for you if you have a great job working for one of them. If not, you don't get this. The shuttles are probably "greener" than those employees all driving their own cars to work, but the reality is that we've created multiple, redundant, overlapping, privatized transportation systems while letting public transportation languish.

If I were in charge, I'd:
- drop all surface streets back to one lane in each direction, no medians
- remove all traffic lights and stop signs, placing a roundabout at every intersection
- make public transportation 100% free with no passes or tickets
- invest hugely in new routes/stops and extend hours of operation for public transportation

So that's transportation. But the people here find other novel ways to squander energy resources. This is from an email conversation back in fall 2008:

"""
Last night was one of the first crisp, fall-like days of the season.
It felt good outside, a nice change of pace from the monotony. As I
walk past that main strip of Castro street, sure enough the sidewalk
heaters are out and people are outside under them.

It's dark and cool outside, so you use lights to make it bright and
gas to make it warm. So what's the point of being outside?
"""

People from the rest of the country are plenty
wasteful and produce lots of trash, but nowhere else have I ever seen
people systematically heat the outdoors, water the pavement, and wash
the sidewalks with a hose.

I'd ban those outdoor heaters as well.