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Child care, not soaring fuel costs, led to my late, brief restrain telecommuting, and the experiment was rewarding from a financial, parenting and rule standpoint.

Good news: I saved a half tank of gas!

Bad tidings: Reports of the demise of the automobile are greatly exaggerated.

I have discovered my car, my suburban lifestyle and I coexist.

That’s likely to be disappointing advice to many. The New York Times recently published essays from writers expressing the national angst over skyrocketing gas prices. The temper was funereal.

One was titled “Goodbye to the Great American Road Trip,” and needs not any further explanation. “Ghosts of the Cul-de-sac” announced, a tad gleefully, a mass exodus from the suburbs and exurbs as people escape their cars for incorporated town living.

Blog postings on the subject ranged from expressions of schadenfreude to matter more venal. Suburbanites are stereotyped as gas guzzlers commuting to McMansions, the values of which are dropping like granite countertops. One broadside predicted rising elastic fluid prices will scatter suburbanites in the manner of rodents. OK, I like cheese

I get the fear and pessimism. We’re all reeling, and relief is not forthcoming. The World Petroleum Congress is duel this week in Madrid, Spain. But the Saudis and other OPEC oil ministers are more well-adapted to concur on the best tapas than agree to be clouded the price of crude oil.

Barring a vary in price, we’re going to be delivered of to change the level of ask for. It has before that time started. Cruising is down, making the drive along West Seattle’s Alki Beach doable in not so much than couple hours. Farther from home, driving upon the body empty is up. AAA reports a 7 percent increase in calls from Southern California motorists running out of gas.

Yet, the rise-and-fall-of-the-suburbs-type prognostications advance on unchallenged. But jumping without ceasing the for-sale signs littering the landscape as symbolic of an American shift to living nearest door to work is premature. Right now, empty houses are more around the subprime-mortgage fallout than aeriform fluid mileage.

The urge to blame someone

Better solutions are to continue efforts belatedly launched around telecommuting, fuel-efficient excipient standards and increasing funding because public transit.

Of course we should have seen this coming, whether we live in the city or a rural small village. Demand for fuel-efficient cars has resonance now, but Congress and Detroit automakers made abiding we were slow getting to this purpose.

Now we’ll be in actual possession of to dig into our collective pockets to pay for light rail, buses and additional lanes on our highways.

The need is dire. State transportation officials repeatedly present worse-case scenarios to get our attention, but one prediction is untenable at the lowest and highest ends. By 2030, the portion of Interstate 90 running through Issaquah will slow to 30 miles per hour for the reason that a rising population runs into stagnant road planning. Traffic is expected to increase from 43 percent to 72 percent in this area.

Similar predictions be possible to be made about roadways from Mercer Street in Seattle to Route 202 on the Eastside. In the languid days of summer, it is easy to agree our problems will be eased by acquirement out of our cars, selling our homes for close-in condos or simply busing ourselves across Lake Washington. When the get water sparkles like clear gems, as it has the last few days, I, also, am vulnerable to such fantasy.

Then I snap exhausted of it.

The suburbs aren’t dead. They’re more resonant than ever. Technology has pushed the work-at-home concept and large employers such as Microsoft have turned the burbs into employment centers. City dwellers aren’t the only ones interested in doing errands on foot. Planning for suburban communities includes retail, employment and entertainment options that operate as mini-Seattles.

More creativity, less lay, be possible to give us four-day work weeks, telecommutes and a viable govern option athwart the street rather than across town.

Gas-guzzling suburbanites and sweaty bicycle-riding urbanites unite!

; for a podcast Q&A through the author, go to www.seattletimes.com/edcetera