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Population experts predict that California will add another 20 million people in the next 15 years or so, and they're going to want to live somewhere.

It's going to be increasingly difficult to build new single-family homes in California because of the no-growth movement out there. I believe that Gray Davis has already announced that California has built its last freeway, ever.

This should keep upward pressure on housing prices, although there certainly is some economic limit out there.

You've probably seen this before, but I thought the Thoureau Institute and its book 'The Vanishing Automobile' were quite interesting. They listed Houston as the epitome of a livable city - it acknowledged that most people wanted to drive, and sensibly accomodated them.

You live around there, don't you? Would you tend to agree?

He has a bunch of policy prescriptions at the end of his book, including variable road pricing based on demand. Personally, I think this would increase the cost of driving to too high levels, while giving our governments a boatload of cash to waste, neither of which I consider to be particularly desirable goals.

I think he was mostly spot on, but road pricing annoys me as a concept due to both low costs and privacy implications for the modern toll collection systems.

I certainly wouldn't consider Gray Davis the last word on any subject, for fairly obvious reasons, but I suspect he's correct, at least for Southern California. The reason is that I think it will be politically impossible to displace anyone from their homes.

Freeways into undeveloped regions are another matter entirely, of course.