Letters to David Brooks: Yes to Infrastructure, No to Highways
On Friday, Times columnist David Brooks joined the chorus calling for more transportation investment, which came as something of a surprise given his conservative pedigree. But Brooks has always had a soft spot for the exurbs, and his proposed "National Mobility Project" was predictably premised on the idea that transportation projects should accommodate sprawl:
Workplaces have decentralized. Commuting patterns are no longer radial, from suburban residences to central cities. Now they are complex weaves across broad megaregions. Yet the infrastructure system hasn't adapted.
The Times published five letters in response, including this one from Transportation for America's David Goldberg:
Read more...David Brooks is spot-on with his call for major investment in transportation infrastructure, both for near-term economic stimulus and for a sustainable recovery. His recommendations of what to build are outdated, however.
As he notes, a way to put people to work would be to repair and maintain our existing highways, bridges and transit systems. But building new highways was the project for an earlier era, the 1950s, when gas was cheap and President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Interstate System.
Today we urgently need to build the infrastructure for a clean-energy economy and reduced dependency on oil. Soaring gas prices made our vulnerability clear: Americans flocked to public transportation or took to their bicycles only to find the transit systems underfinanced and the roads dangerous and inhospitable. Half of our urban-dwelling citizens found they had no transit at all.
If we're going to go into debt to build for the future, we must do so to complete our transportation network with high-speed rail, modern public transit, streets that support safe biking and walking, and, yes, well-maintained highways.










