It's about damned time we started talking about a topic that should've been Job One about forty years ago. How this nation gets from Point A to Point B has, it seems, always been taken for granted, from Indian paths over the Midland Trail to Interstate Highways over the Great Divide.
We took significant steps with the U.S. highway system and then the Interstate system. Both, however, were founded on the idea of limitless fuel for limitless consumption. We all know that doesn't work anymore. Even with the Interstates modeled on the Autobahn, we quickly found ourselves overrun by the economy of scale and exponentialism. More cars, more trucks, more highways for more cars and more trucks and more highways for . . . You get the idea.
The pending economic disaster that is the Big 3 has finally gotten us to consider the future of travel. Mercifully, people are starting to take rail travel seriously. The airlines have gone a long way toward helping this discussion along, thanks to miserable service, seats built for midgets and some of the lousiest single-serving peanuts ever offered to a credulous, cramped flying public. Coupled with sprawl, traffic and timeliness, the airlines have done a magnificent job of pointing out just how nice it would be to have rapid rail, light rail and more civil transportation.
We've also finally started talking, on a national basis, about our cars, our beloved cars. Literally nothing in America in the last hundred years defines us as much as our cars. We give them pet names (Inge was my Porsche's name, in the days of my youth, from "Young Frankenstein;" the truck is "Bertha"), baby them ("He never drives it. He just rubs it with a diaper" -Cameron in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off), drive them like dogs, cuss them (fill in your own story here), argue the relative merits of the brands ("Ain't an American car built before 1969 that cain't . . . ") and generally treat them better than we do some members of our own family (and, in some cases, justifiably so; family can be hell). We even have massive, thread-winding flame-scorched posts here on DU in which otherwise rational DU'ers turn apoplectic over the question of whether one has a duty to buy an America automobile.
We've engaged on the debate over electric cars. Bio-diesel. Legitimate questions have been raised. How much of a benefit is an electric car you plug into your wall at night like your cellphone, that merely exchanges foreign crude for more blown up mountains in Appalachia? What's the carbon difference? Can there be a carbon-neutral automobile? If so, is anyone even THINKING about building it? What about the batteries? Who among us has a few grand to plop down every few years to replace the battery in an electric car? Video camera batteries are a big enough pain at $50. Will the cost savings in gasoline offset the battery cost? Remember when people talked glowingly of ethanol? Oops. Not such a good idea after all, when ethanol creates a corporate imperative to grow GenMod corn that drives up the price for edible corn.
We've talked a little bit, but not as much, about how we got here. Congress passes transportation bills. Some heroic senators and house members have steadfastly watched on the walls to keep AmTrak alive against the day when it was most needed. When last I rode AmTrak in 2007, they were running at or near capacity and yet still had to take dog's breakfast in deference to freight haulers and had sleeper cars that were less comfortable than an AMC Gremlin on bad road.
It appears to me that, at least here on DU, we're coming to a consensus. It appears we're ready for rail, both light and rapid. It appears we've given a lot of thought to how we get from Urban Point A to Urban Point B.
Just as the music happens between the notes as well as on them, where I'd like to have your thought is in the spaces in between. What do we do about the places such transportation infrastructure is unlikely to go, under the best of circumstances, in the next fifty years? Being a West Virginian, I live in a place where rail simply isn't profitable or, in many places, even practicable. I live in a place where the nearest grocery is six miles away, one-way, over what we call here "a hill" (many of you would call it a "mountain.") The climate doesn't lend itself to year'round walking. The road between here and the grocery store, or the pharmacy, or the doctor, or the school is choked with coal trucks. Only a suicidal maniac would try it on shanks' mares or a bicycle and there's still a little cross at the mouth of our road where the motorcyclist got splattered Spring-before-last by the lady who didn't see motorcycles.
How do we fill these kinds of gaps? Just because gasoline has dropped in price doesn't mean that the price will stay there. We've seen that movie. On DVD. At home, because movie tickets are so damned expensive. As we transition away from gasoline, the price will rise more steeply based upon the cost of production versus the reduction in demand. How do we make sure that those who still have to rely on it can do so? How do we diminish that reliance without putting at even greater risk the most vulnerable in our society? Where do we make up the tax revenues that states like West Virginia impose regressively upon its citizenry because of its slavish fear of and devotion to coal and all the wonders it brings to Good Little Politicians?
You can get off the train and walk from the station at First and Main to your home, your appointment, your grocers at 5th and Main. What do you do when the nearest station is, at best, ten miles away and even if there WAS a cab you couldn't afford it? How do you reach the hollers off the beaten path where so many of my brother and sister Appalachians have lived for as much as 300 years, most of those far more sustainably than the rest of America? How do we craft a transportation philosophy that values rural living instead of continuing the unsustainable push of rural peoples into what many of us consider a congested, claustrophobic urban nightmare?
I look forward to your input and, if you've read this far, would appreciate you keeping this discussion kicked and recommended so as to maximize the brain power we can bring to the inquiry.
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