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TODAY Friday 7 November 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Inflexible Flyers

It is distasteful to say so, but the overwhelming majority of the American electorate thinks it's all right to spend public money on road travel but not all right to spend money on rail. We lavishly subsidize the private automobile -- generous mounds of money for roads, state troopers, emergency rooms, pollution abatement, military forces capable of assuring oil flow -- and then worry about socialism or something when it comes time to subsidize trains.

There have been a number of sobering manifestations of this tendency in the last week. In Washington, the people's representatives are said to be on the verge of a "compromise" national transportation bill, which would extend the life of the current statute six additional months while a consensus is formed about its replacement. The key element of the makeshift compromise is that federal transportation funds already appropriated but not yet spent by the states could be spent by the states over the next six months, no strings attached. The problem is that many of those unspent funds are in federal accounts that most of the state transportation officials consider meddlesome and sissyish -- congestion mitigation, transit, "enhancement" programs, the kind of stuff that enviros and urbanists fought hard to put in the legislation in the first place. The state guys are drooling at the prospect of a cement-pouring orgy. For updates on this doleful business, check in with the people at the Surface Transportation Policy Project's reauthorization watch.

The problem is that cement-pouring is a democratic impulse. The 1995 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey has just been released, and it's not colored green. Ninety percent of all person-miles traveled in this country are in private vehicles. Vehicle ownership is up, vehicle miles traveled are up, and the number of suburbanites is up -- all at rates well in excess of the rate of population growth. People like their cars. People need their cars, especially mothers who are in the commercial workplace in record numbers and still have to shoulder the burdens of family shopping and the care of kids and elderly parents. Travel to and from work is now only the third most frequent trip taken by the average American.

So are we surprised that on Tuesday Virginia voters got exercised about an automobile tax? Or that Mainers voted to widen their turnpike? Or that taxes to fund light-rail went down to thumping defeats in St. Louis and Denver? The only good news came out of the National Park Service, where earnest bureaucrats declared a no-car policy for Yosemite. Thank God they didn't have to put it up to a popular vote.

There are hopeful little counter-signs, looking maybe like crocuses poking heedlessly through the worst of a New England March. The decay of American downtowns has been arrested somewhat, and young professionals seem to like the idea of living near their work, at least until they have kids. More and more planners are looking to the (relatively) tough anti-sprawl zoning practices of metropolitan Portland. Some retirees are attracted to new kinds of villages that attempt to recreate the intimacy and walkability of old-style small towns. High-speed rail has been popular between New York and Washington, and probably could be a paying proposition between Boston and DC.

But most of the signs still go the other way, toward more cars traveling more miles. Like it or not, enviros and others concerned with taming air pollution and reducing greenhouse gases have got to pin their hopes -- and shape their policy prescriptions -- on efforts to reform, even revolutionize, the ways in which private automobiles move themselves around.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

Yes, land-use planning can help, and nobody knows more than Keith Bartholomew of 1000 Friends of Oregon. Keith and his 999 colleagues have served as the instigators of, and watchdogs over, the relatively benign growth-channeling laws of metropolitan Portland. Give a look.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

11/06: Meaningless Votes, Really
11/05: In Praise of SeaWeb
11/04: Reality Check
11/03: Green Loafing
10/31: Guilty Nationalist Pleasures
10/30: Europe Alone
10/29: Duck! (Again)
10/28: Civil Society and Conservation
10/27: Who Owns the National Forests?
10/24: Meanwhile, Back at the Infirmary...

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