Highways are Rivers

The current oil crisis has cities all over the country thinking about mass transit. But some of our basic transportation problems won't be solved by quick solutions. Not that streetcars are cheap, but they're a lot cheaper than solving the underlying problem: our transportation infrastructure is built around cars. And highways are rivers: they can't be crossed, except by expensive bridges.

Urban transportation projects, starting in the fifties, focused on the automobile above all other forms of transit. Specifically, on how to quickly and efficiently move cars from the suburbs into city centers.

Poor neighborhoods tended to get in the way. David Hilfiker points out in his book Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen:

As a network of superhighways meant to link the country together was blasted through cities, poor black areas were, not surprisingly, the first choices for disruption. Either an area would be razed and its former inhabitants removed, or a highway would be placed so as to create a physical boundary between the black ghetto and other areas of the city, further isolating its inhabitants (p. 8).

If we're really going to break our addiction to oil (as President Bush calls it), we're going to need to redesign our urban infrastructure, a multi-decade project.

Sorry, Al Gore, while your plan for energy independence is grand, energy independence can only be achieved by efficient consumption (not just generation), which in turn requires a fundamental rethinking of urban planning. We're in this for the long haul, no pun intended.