One of the earliest health and anatomy lessons for many of us came from the traditional spiritual "Dem Bones," when as children we sang how "the toe bone's connected to the foot bone," the foot bone to the ankle, the shin, on up to the neck and head.
The lesson reflects the importance of connectivity. Without the knee bone, leg bone or even the tiniest of bones, the body's ability to work and move about as a whole suffers. We can apply this lesson today as we consider how we get places and how we create healthy, sustainable communities.
Long before he became president, Barack Obama
had a hankering for the TGV and other fast trains. "I am always jealous
about European trains," he told an audience during a visit to
Strasbourg last spring. "And I said to myself: why can't we have
high-speed rail?"
The House is set today to vote on a fiscal 2010 transportation
spending bill that would provide $4 billion for high-speed rail and lay
the groundwork for the creation of a national infrastructure bank.
H.R. 3288 (pdf) would provide a total of $75.8 billion for the Transportation Department, an $8.6 billion jump from fiscal 2009.
The first payments of $8 billion in financing for high-speed trains on lines such the Philadelphia-Pittsburgh corridor will be made by late summer, Vice President Biden said yesterday.
Biden met with state governors, including Gov. Rendell, at the White House yesterday to urge them to think boldly in planning for trains that could travel up to 150 m.p.h. He said funding from the federal economic stimulus package could "jump-start" a high-speed rail network to improve the nation's "terrible passenger rail system."
The
climate crisis won't be solved by changing light bulbs and inflating
your tires more, planting a tree and driving a little less. It's going
to require a truly fundamental shift in how we build our cities and
live in them.
WASHINGTON - The Obama administration is expected to unveil its plans on Thursday for accelerating development of high-speed rail, a concept that in the past has had mixed political support and little public funding.
"It will be broad and strategic," Karen Rae, acting head of the Federal Railroad Administration, told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday about the initiative described by officials as President Barack Obama's top transportation priority.
It was only a matter of time before the imminent failure of one or more U.S. auto makers pushed AIG and the financial crisis off the front pages, at least temporarily.
And now that it's here, and we have to listen to talk of "restructuring" and "automobiles of the future" for the next month or so, I urge you to keep in mind just one historical fact:
Have you seen this thing? This sexy macho bloated Hot Wheels fantasia dreamgasm of a car-like drunken child's funbot crayon sketch?
No? Because it appears to be a vehicle that at least some across the Big Autosphere are still secretly praying, despite the sudden overthrow of -- despite the deadly ultimatum for -- General Motors, might yet prove to be a savior.
As a dominant form of transportation, the automobile is dead. So is GM, which now stands for Gone Mad.
But the larger picture says that the financial crisis now enveloping
the world is grounded in the transition from the automobile---and the
fossils that fuel it---to a brave renewable world of reborn mass
transit and green power.
If GM lives in any form, it must be owned and operated by its workers and the public.
