Roads Schmoads
by Tony Chavira
>Although I'm about to question the legitimacy of fleshing out our road and highway system again, let me begin this blog post with something cool I saw on the design concept site Yanko Design:If that isn't the future of road maintenance, I don't know what is.
And really, I don't know what is. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was on The Daily Show this week and spoke about how much money his agency had to spend on infrastructure and Jon Stewart's immediate first response was "oh, building highways, bridges and tunnels!" Because everyone knows that repaving our highways, bridges and tunnels are what the Department of Transportation should be spending all of its money on (although there's sarcasm in that statement, there isn't as much as there should be unfortunately). Here, watch it for yourself, semi-captive audience:
Despite whatever the title of this article in The Examiner is trying to proclaim, Jon and Ray really didn't "discuss" transportation issues at all. Jon Stewart fawned over Ray LaHood's interest in putting people "back to work" and Ray LaHood announced the advent of a high-speed rail system to those who actually watch the Daily Show for their news. Moral of the story: work = roads. And maybe high-speed rail too. But the interconnected transportation elements that pull a city together (buses, light rail, bike paths, street cars, etc.) were left in the dust.
Maybe I'm being a little hard on the Daily Show. I guess these localized modes of tranportation are more area-specific sorts of things, where interstate highways and high-speed rails really do fall into the gamut of federal government control. Much like the way that the EPA "regulates" car emissions, but leaves every other form of transit emission regulation to state and local agencies (although that's another blog post or article entirely).
I just feel that Secretary LaHood had a window of opportunity (even a small one) to really explain how transportation fits into our cities to a receptive audience and a host that's gung-ho for his cause. But instead he stuck to what was tried and true. Not that "tried and true" are bad, but in the end the approach might be the wrong one.
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