by John December
The State of Wisconsin has prepared a long-range transportation plan ("Connections 2030") that misses the mark in terms of a vibrant vision for the future or a solid plan for the present. This plan mistakenly makes an assumption that the future will be like the past and fails to adequately envision smart urban design that puts people in touch with what matters. Indeed, the plan emphasizes resource-intensive transportation rather than mobility. Instead of deploying and managing resources intelligently, this plan supports bad decisions of the past. The result is that residents of Wisconsin may be doomed to suffer increased energy and transit costs, lower productivity, reduced economic activity, a sinking cultural environment, and increased debt required to prop up 20th-century modes of energy-intensive transportation. An alternative vision would place people first, foremost, and at the center of a network of alternate forms of urban (and suburban) design and unleash the creative economy that mobility fosters.
The Wisconsin plan fails to see emerging trends
While the Wisconsin plan does state that it supports the "integrated multimodal transportation system that maximizes the safe and efficient movement of people and products throughout the state (DRAFT Executive Summary)," it is short on specifics and misses emerging trends. The plan seems to assume that the arrangements of the past century will continue unchanged into the future.
The plan fails to mention or recognize these trends:
- People are choosing not to buy cars. The automobile (internal combustion engine invented in the 19th century) is not selling well in the 21st century. As a recent news report stated, "New-vehicle sales in the United States fell 37 percent in January to one of the lowest levels in half a century," New York Times, February 3, 2009.
- Current work in urban planning is going decisively away from automobile-orientation to people-orientation. See "Urban planning's future: people, not cars: History suggests gas-powered transport cannot last," Arrol Gellner, Thursday, August 28, 2008, Inman News. The recent summit, "Expanding the Vision of Sustainable Mobility," at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California, February 17-19, 2009, www.artcenter.edu/summit, set forth a new vision of mobility and dynamic cities that the Wisconsin plan does not seem to grasp.
- As Richard Florida describes in "How the Crash Will Reshape America," The Atlantic, March 2009, the future of the United States may be very different than the past half-century. He looks at the housing bubble and economic crash of 2008, and he envisions for the future: "a lower rate of homeownership, and a more mobile population of renters.
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| photo by tray |
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