I like cars. I bought my first car, a black and gold Mustang Cobra, when I was 15, not even able to legally drive it. Leaning on my parents for room and board, education, health care -- everything but my car -- I was able to make the payments with only what I earned clerking in a pet store. In 1978, I bought my first new car -- a glossy RX-7 so fresh off the boat that it had Japanese words grease-penciled onto the windshield. I still have that car stored in a shed back in Kentucky, from which I pull it out maybe once a year to tool around a sunny afternoon. When it's washed, you can make out the words "Just Married" on the rear glass twenty-eight years after the shoe polish was applied.
I've driven autocross, road rallies, TSD rallies, and SCCA races. I've been to southern dirt tracks where midget racers (that's a type of car, not driver) skid around the tiny oval throwing dirt into the faces of screaming fans. I've hauled butt along Montana in the pre-speed limit days, flogging a rental Toyota well into triple digits on the long stretch east of Billings. Of the blogs I read every day, at least two of them include the word "auto." I love cars.
That makes it hard for me to say that the worst decision this nation ever made wasn't the boneheaded blunder into Iraq, it was the way we built our nation around the car after World War II.
Like most really catastrophic results, we started with good intentions. The country was so vast, so open, so inviting. For a country smarting after years of economic depression followed by the sacrifice and privation of war, the countryside called like a siren promising permanent vacation. We created that "American dream" of a private home, a car in the garage, a patch of grass to call your own. We (and we were far from alone on this point) made the car more than a way to get from point A to point B; we turned it into an expression of our dream selves. Our cars were as big, confident, and strong as we wanted to be.
At the start of those days, it quite famously took weeks just to get from one coast to the other by driving, so we undertook (you know, for national security reasons) the greatest engineering program ever tackled by any nation on Earth -- crisscrossing the United States with a network of broad highways. It was a bold project. It was huge experiment. It was possibly the silliest thing that any people ever did to themselves.
Fifty years after we starting the concrete flowing, we have 47,000 miles of Interstate highway. 47,000 miles of mountains sliced in half, small towns either bypassed or bisected, and intersections so devoid of character that a stop in Gillette, Wyoming is indistinguishable from a stop in Greenville, South Carolina. Those miles are only the main arteries of this concrete and asphalt circulatory system. They're supported by 76,000 more of miles of federal highways, and enough state and local routes to drive to moon and back. Ten times.
The one time investment to create all these highways might actually seem a bargain. After all, the interstate system up through 1990 had only cost a bit over a hundred billion -- barely enough for a few months in Iraq. But of course, we've spent that amount several times over in the last decade, and roads aren't a one time investment. Each of those miles takes annual maintenance that's about 1/10th its original cost. We've now reached the point where what we actually raise in "user fees" (including all gas taxes both federal and state) is only about half of what we spend on highways each year, and quite a bit less than what it would take to only maintain the current system.
Somewhere in the last five decades, the construction of highways stopped being about bringing people out to see the glory of our landscapes and the varied cultures of our nation. Every landscape is now striped by lines of concrete and blocked by walls of franchise stores. Farmland is buried under subdivisions so nondescript that every lane in the complex has the same name. Every culture is obliterated, replaced by an undifferentiated generic America.
Worst of all, we've accepted the idea that spreading concrete is an intrinsic responsibility of government. When counting the responsibilities of those in Washington (or the state capitol), roads are often mentioned right after defending the nation. Why was the last federal highway bill so plump? Because the primary way in which politicians bring home pork to their constituents is in miles of concrete. Governors and congressmen stick their names on signs beside highway projects so you'll know who funded this new bypass, bridge, or expansion. There's barely a stretch of highway not tagged with the name of some former legislator.
Nothing gets a politician moving so quickly as a request for more blacktop. And Developers know that too. They count on it. They can toss a hundred houses down where they please, and know that any complaint of slow traffic will bring on a rain of government-sponsored steamrollers ready to help. We may not be able to fix health care or poverty, but we sure can lay some roads, and we keep doing it in spite of all the evidence that we're only making worse the very problems our expanded roads were supposed to solve.
Let me put it bluntly: if we can't change that way of thinking, we might as well hang it up. No new technology we can develop will help us if we can't stop mainlining asphalt. The next time a politician brags about a new highway project for your area, remember what he's really sending you: a white elephant, one that will need care and feeding forever.
So here are some proposals for you on Earth Day, proposals that in this country are likely to be considered as radical as any of the social issues that divide us left and right.
- Get rid of the Federal Highway Administration. Republicans are always looking for a way to cut the size of federal government and give more power to the states. So here you go. Get the federal government out of the highway business. Send half of the money raised by user fees back to the states to use as they will. And if they chose to not spend it on highways... good for them. The first time someone complains about needing a better road and a politician answers "Tough. You're the one who moved to a subdivision fifty miles out of town and three miles down a country lane," I will cheer.
- Spend the other half of those user fees on reversing this mess. Spend it on repairing our neglected passenger rail systems, and for expanding rail service (if you haven't read apsmith's series of Energize America rail diaries, you've missed something both important and enjoyable). Spend it on programs that encourage telecommuting. Spend it on programs that benefit higher density living.
- Save a good chunk of this funding for states, counties, and cities who put in strict zoning and disallow construction away from existing highways. Give a bonus to those who actually tear out existing highway lanes or dedicate them to mass transportation.
Now, go outside and enjoy what remains of Earth Day.
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