BREAKING: Obama Says Building Sprawl Stops Now!
From Green Car Congress:
Responding to a question from a city councilwoman about transportation and infrastructure in the stimulus bill during a town hall forum in Ft. Myers, Florida, President Obama said that the days of just building sprawl are over.
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From a transcript provided by Transportation for America:
Not only do we need to rebuild our roads, our bridges, our ports, our levies, our dams, but we also have to plan for the future. This is the same example of turning crisis into opportunity…Now, look, this is America. We always had the best infrastructure. We were always willing to invest in the future. Governor Crist mentioned Abraham Lincoln. In the middle of the Civil War, in the midst of all this danger and peril, what did he do? He helped move the intercontinental railroad. He helped start land grant colleges. He understood that even when you’re in the middle of crisis, you’ve got to keep your eye on the future. So transportation is not just fixing our old transportation systems but its also imaging new transportation systems.
That’s why I’d like to see high speed rail where it can be constructed. That’s why I would like to invest in mass transit because potentially that’s energy efficient and I think people are alot more open now to thinking regionally in terms of how we plan our transportation infrastructure. The days where we’re just building sprawl forever, those days are over. I think that Republicans, Democrats, everybody recognizes that that’s not a smart way to build communities. So we should be using this money to help spur this kind of innovative thinking when it comes to transportation. That will make a big difference.
You will live where we say, in the way that we say, how we say. Now shut up and sit down you have no freedom here.
This is more mindless nanny-stateism.
@Jo,
Hey man first off I did not mean this as a blame the Dems. I firmly believe every politician in America is to blame for the problem. America is so fixated with fixing blame instead of fixing problems it is ridiculous.
Governor Crist might want to take a little closer look at the history he is invoking.
http://www.landgrant.org/forfeiture.html
I want to live in detached house with a fenced yard. If it takes “sprawl” to get that, I accept that. I do not want to live in an apartment, condo, or “dense housing”, or “urban infill” where I have to smell and listen to my neighbors all day and night. Especially when those neighbors are likely of a lower social class and less cultured than I am.
What if we don’t want to live in cities? Are we to be relocated for the greater good?
I’m supposed to go live in an over-crowded city because you believe the greenhouse theory is valid?
We have sprawl because of the law of supply and demand. Suburbs outside the city core became feasible when automobiles became affordable - in the great economic expansion of the 1920s. A house in the suburbs was the consciously chosen goal of most of the inhabitants of the city core. The Rich already had houses in the country. The working class wanted them to.
“Ending sprawl” has more than a whiff of “collectivizing the kulaks” about it. Those who wanted to experiment with human nature made the 20th century the bloodiest 100 years in recorded human history.
I tremble for my country…
People don’t drive their cars because they enjoy commuting. People drive their cars because they want to go when they want to go, not when an uninterested person’s schedule permits them. Mass transit is for cattle. Ask anyone who was unable to get to work or to class or to the store a week before Christmas during NYC’s transit strike a few years ago.
No one wants to live in a city because it’s unsafe, old, and dirty, a monument to apathy disguised as social progress. This situation persists because of unbreakable city machines which exist to leech wealth and distribute it to designated constituencies. Everything is taxed, everything is spent, every city is broke. It’s a perversion of American liberty that would make Jefferson laugh and Hamilton say “Dude, that is NOT what I meant.”
You can scold the suburbanites all you want, but until the city ceases to be a place for the overclass and the underclass, the middle class won’t live there.
But didn’t the Transcontinental Railroad encourge “sprawl?”
Sprawl isn’t going to be much of a concern for at least the next couple of years. Except for government-driven projects, who’s going to start new construction in this economy?