Are there lessons to learn from Hurricane Sandy?

If your morning commute is a walk across the farmyard to do the chores, you've probably found morbid satisfaction in watching New York commuters spending hours, creeping along bumper-to-bumper to try to get to work in their cars instead of using an inoperable train or subway.

Officials have lifted restrictions to allow cabs to pick up more than one fare, and cars are supposed to have a minimum of three occupants to drive into Manhattan, but authorities are having trouble enforcing the rule.

Looking at the aerial photos of the traffic gridlock, it seemed that New Yorkers could take a cue from third-world countries where two-wheelers and three-wheelers squeeze far more commuters in the same space.

Perhaps the Indian company that sells a tiny city car, the Tata Nano, for $2,500 and reportedly plans a U.S. introduction in a couple of years, will find a market among New York commuters who are not ready to take a bicycle or motorcycle.

It's also easy for us to criticize those who build homes on beaches or lowlands susceptible to flooding, but that might be easier to understand if we lived in that crowded, expensive housing market.

But like New Orleans, the issue of whether homes should be rebuilt in flood-prone areas is worth an open discussion before public resources are devoted to the rebuilding effort.

And, while the U.S. is tied together in one massive power grid system, storms like Hurricane Sandy should cause us to take a new look at our own "shelter-in-place" plans and the desirability of home generators or solar or wind systems, and homes built to the highest insulation standards.