An analyst for a Canadian bank recently made a few headlines with an alarming prediction that some dismissed as alarmist.

Jeff Rubin with CIBC looked at the crude oil market and forecast that by 2010 the average price of gasoline in America will reach $7 a gall-

Excuse me, I choked a little while typing that.

Let me try again. Within two years gas will reach $7 a gallon.

Most of us are still adjusting to $4.30 a gallon and to the $50 fill-up. What will $7 do to our budgets, our lifestyles, our psyches? Lucky for us, thinkers and planners are already considering such events and have come up with a few scenarios.

Rubin believes higher prices will not only cause us to drive less and junk low-mpg vehicles, but also will force the poor to give up their cars.

“By 2012, there should be some 10 million fewer vehicles on American roadways than there are today,” he wrote. (There are 240 million now.) By late next year, Americans will spend more on gas than on groceries.

Others think the use of mass transit will grow as people search for ways to buy less gasoline. Sound Transit is counting on a changed mind-set among voters to boost a bus-and-rail tax package in the fall.

Still others assert that $7 gas will kill the suburb – especially the latest ring that is farthest from jobs and services. That would reverse a trend that began right after World War II when home buyers started chasing cheap land – trading longer commutes for affordability.

Christopher Leinberger, a professor of urban planning and a fellow with the Brookings Institute, wrote in The Atlantic magazine that the subprime mortgage crisis and higher gas prices will transform the most recent car- dependent suburbs into “the next slum.”

And The Wall Street Journal, focusing on Sacramento, wrote about how cities are planning for more density by becoming more pedestrian friendly, more transit friendly.

“Expensive oil is going to transform the American culture as radically as cheap oil did,” one smart-growth advocate told the Journal.

If that is our future, then we’d better adjust our planning soon or we’ll have roads to nowhere, jammed buses and trains, and half-empty schools. We’ll also have urban housing prices even more unaffordable than they are now.

Some folks may move to shorten their commutes to work. But the death-of-the-suburb theory depends on there being places that hardly exist anymore – metro regions where most of the jobs are in the central core and people drive to them from suburbia.

In truth, jobs are as dispersed as homes. Unlike the postwar stereotype of the bedroom community, suburbs are getting more than their share of the jobs. We’re as likely to live in Puyallup and work in Redmond as we are to work in Seattle and live in Kent.

And many people live in the suburbs – both new suburbs and old – because they prefer it. They don’t feel comfortable in the city, don’t feel safe there, don’t trust the schools there. Even as city living has become more attractive to a certain demographic – mostly childless young adults and empty nesters – the suburbs continue to absorb more and more people.

It is unrealistic then to assume that all of the folks who live outside the urban cores will suddenly move. Perhaps our urban geography has become so complex that people will make other adjustments – more use of transit and fuel-efficient cars – before they’ll move. That’s what happened when OPEC put the squeeze on America, when we traded our Oldsmobile Delta 88s for Toyota Corollas.

Rather than think of just one or two urban cores – say, Seattle and Tacoma – we need to factor in a dozen across the Puget Sound area, all with residential, employment, educational and recreational opportunities.

Then all we’ll need is a transportation network that connects them in a way that gets us around without $100 fill-ups.

Peter Callaghan: 253-597-8657

peter.callaghan@thenewstribune.com

blogs.thenewstribune.com/politics