Year after year, state and local governments propose billions of dollars’ worth of new and expanded highways that often do little to reduce congestion or address real transportation challenges, while diverting scarce funding from infrastructure repairs and key transportation priorities.
Record gas prices have hit many Americans hard – but when it comes to recouping the massive environmental, health and other costs imposed on society by America’s car dependency, what we pay at the pump doesn’t even scratch the surface.
Building systems that are designed from the start to be flexible, adaptable and reliant on empowered people can be an effective strategy to build up not only strong towns, but sustainable ones as well.
If we are ever going to address a problem as big as, for example, climate change, we need to relentlessly question the absurdity of the status quo, to go beyond considering ways to make our current systems and modes of development incrementally less bad or less unjust, and imagine how those systems can be transformed into something qualitatively better.
There are better ways to respond to surging gas prices than creating new incentives for car use – like ending our unhealthy and environmentally disastrous car dependency altogether.
Associate Director and Senior Policy Analyst, Frontier Group
Policy Analyst, Frontier Group
