AL GORE:Liveability Agenda Excuse to Block Roads

Said Gore: “Today, we are proposing the single highest investment in public transit in history - $6.1 billion to help communities develop alternatives to building more clogged highways. We are also proposing a record $1.6 billion for state and local efforts to reduce air pollution and ease traffic congestion.”

Nowhere has extra transit spending been shown to be effective in reducing traffic congestion. We have not been “building clogged highways” in the VP’s slick phrase. Relative to the popularity of the auto/highway mode and the steady increase in trips we have been building rather few new highways at all which is why many of the ones built years ago have become clogged. And the lack of proper pricing on highways has both deprived us of revenues to expand them adequately and done nothing to provide incentives for some motorists to shift their trips out of the peak hours when the roads do indeed become clogged.

The “Livability” program has lots about “community empowerment” which means government funding for politically correct activist groups which will do supposedly enlightened stuff like stopping roads and proposing “alternative transportation” even though functionally, in the real world of Y2K America there are no alternatives to the multi-purpose services provided by roads. Let us shop by bicycle. Let us walk to the metro area ballpark. Let us browse for antiques after taking a ferry. Let the ambulance come by light rail. Let the guy who fixes the washing machine travel by bus. Let us abandon the car to commute to the edge city job via a shuttle where you wait for a train after which you wait for a bus that runs every hour. Furrrh-geddit! The “alternatives” to the auto are a fantasy.

What VP Gore calls a “Regional Connections initiative” is intended to “aid in the development of truly regional game plans for smarter growth,” he says. There’s $$$$$s in them game plans, he’s saying. Smart growth so-called in so far as it is anything tangible at all is growth without major highways.

In another passage Gore says: “We are proposing nearly $40 million to provide communities with easy-to-use information and technical assistance to develop strategies for smarter growth.” There’s more money to the guys who’ll be adding momentum to the anti-highways bandwagon. More $$$$s for his anti-auto/anti-road good guys.

VP Gore’s speech was full of castigation of present local government: “In too many places across America, the beauty of local vistas has been degraded by decades of ill-planned and ill-coordinated development. Plan well, and you have a community that nurtures commerce and private life. Plan badly, and you have what so many of us suffer from first-hand: gridlock, sprawl...”

If our cities and counties have engaged in “decades of ill-planned and ill-coordinated development” how suddenly is this to be changed into its positive opposite? Presumably by installing in power a new vanguard of the enlightened, those who march under the banner of Smart Growth.

And how smart are these people?

Says the VP in this same Livability speech: “A gallon of gas can be used up just driving to get a gallon of milk.”

Let’s think about that. The average American car does about 20mi/gal. Our VP tells us you can go 20mi to get a gallon of milk in modern America. S’pose you CAN go 20mi for a gallon of milk but how many Americas NEED to do that? Not many we’d wager. One in a thousand or in ten thousand? And if they did have to go 20mi because they lived unusually remotely from a 7-11 or general store or supermarket, we’d bet they usually do more than just buy a gallon of milk on such a trip. Wait! If you are Arnold Schwartznegger you can choose to own a $80k Humvee which makes 4mi/gal and perhaps you do live 4mi from the nearest little store that stocks milk. Indeed you CAN use a gallon of gas to fetch a gallon of milk. As they say at the White House: “It all depends on the meaning of CAN...”

But the Al Gores of this world, and those they address with this stuff aren’t into thinking about real problems or real solutions. Such spectacularly silly sentences indicate a thinking preoccupied with creating the appearance of cleverness, of having discovered an absurdity of modern existence, whether it exists in reality or not. It displays a cavalier disregard for the truth in the search for effect.