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Back on Tracks
Phillip Longman, Washington Monthly
A nineteenth-century technology could be the solution to our twenty-first-century problems.
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… [D]espite this astounding potential, virtually no one in Washington is talking about investing any of that $1 trillion in freight rail capacity. Instead, almost all the talk out of the Obama camp and Congress has been about spending for roads and highway bridges, projects made necessary in large measure by America’s overreliance on pavement-smashing, traffic-snarling, fossil-fuel-guzzling trucks for the bulk of its domestic freight transport.
This could be an epic mistake. Just as the Interstate Highway System changed, for better and for worse, the economy and the landscape of America, so too will the investment decisions Washington is about to make. The choice of infrastructure projects is de facto industrial policy; it’s also de facto energy, land use, housing, and environmental policy, with implications for nearly every aspect of American life going far into the future. On the doorstep of an era of infrastructure spending unparalleled in the past half century, we need to conceive of a transportation future in which each mode of transport is put to its most sensible use, deployed collaboratively instead of competitively.
Phillip Longman is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
(January/February 2009)
Writes Steve Benen of Political Animal (Washington Monthly blog):
… a must-read piece in the upcoming issue of the Washington Monthly, highlighting the kind of benefits that would come with a focus on freight rail — allowing trains to carry most of the cargo now being shipped by the long haul trucks that clog and tear up our interstates — leading to less road congestion, fewer traffic fatalities, reduced road repair bills and significantly less emissions and energy use.
A Bicycle Evangelist With the Wind Now at His Back
Cornelia Dean, New York Times
… [Oregon Representative Earl] Blumenauer, a passionate advocate of cycling as a remedy for everything from climate change to obesity, represents most of Portland in Congress, where he is the founder and proprietor of the 180 (plus or minus)-member Congressional Bicycle Caucus. Long regarded in some quarters as quixotic, the caucus has come into its own as hard times, climate concerns, gyrating gas prices and worries about fitness turn people away from their cars and toward their bikes.
“We have been flogging this bicycle thing for 20 years,” said Mr. Blumenauer, a Democrat. “All of a sudden it’s hot.”
But Mr. Blumenauer’s goals are larger than putting Americans on two wheels. He seeks to create what he calls a more sustainable society, including wiser use of energy, farming that improves the land rather than degrades it, an end to taxpayer subsidies for unwise development — and a transportation infrastructure that looks beyond the car.
For him, the global financial collapse is “perhaps the best opportunity we will ever see” to build environmental sustainability into the nation’s infrastructure, with urban streetcar systems, bike and pedestrian paths, more efficient energy transmission and conversion of the federal government’s 600,000-vehicle fleet to use alternate fuels.
(12 January 2009)
Jimmy Carter’s bike stolen from Carter Center
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If you see our nation’s 39th president hoofing around the center that bears his name, feel sorry for the guy. Someone snatched his bike.
Jimmy Carter’s bicycle was stolen earlier this month from the Carter Center in Atlanta. The bad guy(s) also made off with former first lady Rosalynn Carter’s cruiser, too.
… “They’ve probably been sold for a $10 rock of crack,” fumed Peter Wicker. He’s the owner of Outback Bikes, a cycle dealer in Little Five Points and Hamilton Mill. He gave the first couple the bikes in November 2007. He was prompted, Wicker said, by a sense of duty.
The Carters, he learned, like to two-wheel around Freedom Parkway when they aren’t doing something important. Earlier in 2007, the center sent the couple’s old bikes in for maintenance. He cast a learned look at the battered cycles and declared they weren’t much better than rolling junk. His wife, Cate Rockett, suggested that he give them something more befitting a duo who has built houses for Habitat for Humanity and consistently urges us to conserve energy. And there is that Nobel Peace Prize.
He listened to his wife. Wicker gave the Carters fancy machines manufactured by Specialized, a bike company that rolls out good stuff.
(12 January 2009)
