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.
Sounds like another case of the Government making us do what we don’t want to do. If we preferred using public transporataion a market would exist and we would use it. If we didn’t want to live in the “sprawl”, we wouldn’t. Apparently, most of us like our yards and detached houses and driving when and where we like. He is proposing to implement what MOST people would rather not do.
Mass transit fails because it’s slower. It’s simply the nature of the beast. To get effective ridership, it has to make stops along the way. With private transportation, you can travel non-stop. Of course there are times when traffic is bad but overall travel times are faster. You want greater efficiency? Encourage businesses to allow for telecommuting and flex time.
So, let me get this straight, you guys LIKE the idea of FORCING people to live based on government planning? I wonder, is there ANY aspect of human existence that shouldn’t be regulated by the proper planning committee coming out of the Kremlin/White House?
So will illegal and illegal immigration also stop? Or will we be FORCED to live in overcrowded conditions? My grandson is the only one in his kindergarten class that speaks English as his first language. There would be significantly less sprawl if the US government had started enforcing the existing immigration laws 30 years ago.
The government intentionally creates a crisis, then it tries to fix it by punishing us. Welcome to the Obamanation.
Edward…
Despite what you may have heard, Barney Frank is not a Republican. Keep your shallow minded hate, filled politics out of this.
I thought that crack houses existed because people smoke crack and will whore themselves out to get it.
[...] III: Rather like a King, or a Dictator, Obama declares, “BUILDING SPRAWL STOPS NOW!”. So, aside from all the Federal Building projects in the Spending Bill - which will keep people in [...]
Edward,
Why do you think banks all of the sudden were willing to make loans to poorly qualified buyers?
B/c the government was backing the loans.
There was a perverse incentive for the bank to do something against its own long-term self-interest as a result of government initiatives designed to give poor people nice houses.
Jane,
Amtrak fails b/c it sucks, that’s true. It sucks b/c there’s no profit motive for either its owners or employees.
You can move your own family next-door to the crack house first and get everything cleaned up. I would appreciate it if you and your President would not try to force me and my family to join you.
Sprawl is a bad thing. Speaking as someone who owns suburban property, it is much better for me if the poor and middle-class are crammed into dense urban warrens and dependent on narrow bands of mass-transportation.
Nothing will raise the value of my property higher than protecting from it from degradation by hordes of my social inferiors. Just look at two places with strong growth restrictions today, Portland and San Francisco. Not a middle-class or lower type person seen except for those who ride mass transit in from out of town to work service jobs and then leave at night. It’s pretty sweet from where I am setting.
Stopping the sprawl will do the same for other cities but in reverse. The upper classes can live in suburbs segregated from those who toil. Hell, in most anti-sprawl wet dreams, the jam packed urban masses won’t even have cars! They’ll have to travel only where their betters want them too!
Unfortunately, America being the type of place it is, there is always the danger that individual freedom and choice will overwhelm the wisdom of centralized social planning. Perhaps Obama will change all that and ordinary people will live where and how they are told and learn to like it.
Yay! Obama’s gonna tell us all where to live!
All that freedom stuff was overrated anyway, wasn’t it?