Conscious Choice: Public Policy and Transportation

July 1996 | News of the Earth

Public Policy and Transportation

by Mark Long

I know that it is difficult at times to keep one’s eyes from glazing over at the mere mention of the words "public policy" in conversation. Even a close juxtaposition of the separate words "public" and "policy" puts some of my friends to sleep. But the fact remains that the boring reality of committee hearings is where the proverbial political rubber meets the road; it should be taken seriously by all who claim to care about the state of the body politic and/or the environment. Transportation policy in particular ranks high on the list of topics of conversations that will quickly force friends from a room. Yet, it is arguable that this particular policy arena may in fact offer some of the most profound environmental and social repercussions of any on the local level.

The Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) has recently published a primer on transportation policy in the Chicago metropolitan area that enlivens what could easily be a treacherously boring issue. The Center estimates that roughly $650 billion will be spent on transportation in the Chicago metropolitan area over the next 25 years with as yet no coherent public policy agenda to guide those dollars in productive ways. Given that $26 billion was spent in 1990 with no measurable relief to transportation gridlock, there is little reason to hope that an additional $650 billion will offer much help. In fact, if the money is spent in the future as it was in the past, we can expect a worsening of the problems of roadway overcrowding, crumbling rail infrastructure, diminishing transit service, and irrelevant pedestrian bikeways designed for Sunday rides in the park rather than for alternative transportation.

The environmental problems of a car-centered culture are widely known. The image of millions of single passenger cars stacked bumper to bumper morning and night heading into and out of every city in America is burned into our collective consciousness. Cleaner burning engines have help mitigate the potential impact of ever-increasing per capita driving averages, but the growth in popularity of vans and pick-ups over the past few years has begun to erode the gains made in the previous decade. We must also take into account the impact of the increase in steel and plastic production as a result of auto manufacturing. Furthermore, cars and car culture are a primary threat to existing open lands. In fact, declining farm acreage over the past 15 years in the Midwest handed us a golden opportunity to reclaim wild prairie lands. We let opportunity slip through our fingers and degenerate into the suburban sprawl that attends our car culture.

The fact of the matter is that the implications of transportation policy reach far beyond the limits of environmental politics. Not only does the preference for highways over trains, suburbs over livable cities, and cars over buses mean that our per-capita fuel consumption will remain the highest in the world, that our contribution to the destruction of the ozone layer will remain the leading obstacle to salvaging a future, it also means that we are surrendering the battle over race relations in this country and giving up on repairing the remaining threads of civil society. By allowing a largely white, largely middle and upper-middle class bedroom community mentality to rule our transportation decisions we are implicitly accepting a further de facto racial and class segregation in which our cities become a repository for the poor and non-white "surplus" populations to be warehoused and unitized sporadically by a capitalism that increasingly produces nothing of material value within its borders.

The tensions between individual freedom, loosely defined through acts of consumption, and relationships of community are profoundly in evidence in the debates regarding urban/suburban transportation policy. In truth, that tension between individual freedom and social cohesion is a primary conundrum of modernity; the growth of capitalism and liberal democracy has generated a cult-like status in western culture for "freedom," however vaguely defined. Powerful economic forces in this country have turned the chimera of the "freedom of the road" into a seemingly vital component of our cultural articulation of the trope of freedom. However, this cult has come at the price of shattering our communities and our connectedness to the natural and social world around us. Ultimately, the freedom offered by the road is environmentally destructive, solipsistic, and mythological in that it relies on a complex social and economic interrelationship the trace of which is erased by the images found in automobile ads of the loner/hero heading off into the sunset.

Multiple traffic studies have demonstrated the social effects of an increase in car use on a community. Pedestrian-use patterns are altered radically as car traffic increases, forcing people from the front lawn to the front porch and eventually into the house and back yard. Consequently, the suburbs that we create as retreats have far too often become quilt-works of isolated domestic islands that provide few of the benefits of community their residents often claim they left the city to find.

We have behaved collectively like a spoiled child; after creating a mess in one part of the house we simply pick up and move to another room in order to avoid the mess just created but without changing our behavior. Like that child, we will eventually run out of room. Unlike that child, the effort of righting our wrongs will be painful, expensive, and—in the case of destroyed ecosystems and extinct species—impossible.

The disturbing political reality is that, regardless of the weighty public debates we have had on these and many other issues, the policy process is driven primarily by private development interests rather than the guiding light of the public interest based on a vigorous democratic discourse. The dollar amounts that CNTthrows around are real, but they are based on the amount of money spent on transportation totally, which includes private as well as public moneys. Again, this hints at the logistical problems progressives in this country face at nearly every turn. As a result many of our funding decisions are "privatized" in the sense that they are an amalgamation of millions of mundane daily choices made by people locked into the options available at any given moment. The difficulty in rational planning in such a system should be obvious. It is the problem faced by all industrial democracies when trying to mold and direct policy in a free market system.

Furthermore, the political institutions are skewed to favor development interests over the concerns of citizens. For example, the Chicago Area Transportation Study (CATS) is charged by federal law to coordinate transportation policy for the region. Yet, it is one of only three such metropolitan institutions in the country that does not operate independently as a regional governing body. Rather, it is run entirely by the Illinois Department of Transportation and serves the interest of the state and its elected officials rather than the interests of the citizens of the region that it is supposed to represent. Representation on CATS is awarded by institutional affiliation so that it is staffed heavily by representatives of transportation agencies and even includes representation for Continental Bus Line, a private corporation. The truth is that Continental Bus has the same representation on CATS (one vote) as the entire city of Chicago or all of the other regional municipalities combined. Furthermore, even the "public" representatives are actually government functionaries representing the interests of their departments and are—as in the case of the county representatives, who are mostly traffic engineers—largely trapped in the logic of the traditional priorities. There is no room for genuine public input in regional transportation policy.

The recommendations offered by CNT are simple, commonsensical and reasonable. Consequently they will not be adopted with out a fight. The Center suggests such "radical" policy options as:

• fully utilizing existing transportation facilities before constructing new ones,
• mitigating the pressure for ever greater sprawl by investing development funds in existing communities, and
• creating a democratically accountable regional transportation authority which can integrate and coordinate transportation policy over the entire region.

If followed, these options would go far in creating a viable, efficient, and environmentally and socially workable transportation system. In order to make these recommendations a reality, concerned citizens will have to make demands on elected officials. It is important that in the looming election season the environmental community make transportation policy an important campaign issue and that it work with people of color in the city and agricultural interests on the metro-periphery to create a powerful coalition that can counteract the combined power of developers dollars and a deeply rooted myth of the freedom of the road.

Local (Northern Illinois)
• Well it’s finally summer—which can only mean one thing here in Illinois: the National Forest Service is busy protecting downstate loggers as they follow through on illegal timber sales in the Shawnee National Forest. Once again Bell Smith Springs, a National Natural Landmark, is facing a 3,270 acre cut that threatens the vulnerable songbird population as well as biological integrity of the Prairie State’s only National Forest. Please call the Forest Service and let them know what you think about this outrage. You can reach them toll-free at 800-MY-WOODS, a direct line to the Forest Service supervisors office in Harrisburg, IL. Also, let your Senators and Congresspersons know that we are watching.

National
• Republican political hacks (pardon the redundancy) have strategically retreated in their battle to gut the Endangered Species Act. In the face of overwhelming public pressure they lifted the moratorium on ESA listings in the Omnibus Spending bill. Nearly 250 plant and animal species that were already proposed for listing were stalled by the moratorium. Pat yourself on the back if your voice was one of the many in the chorus that sent the elephants scurrying for cover.

• Here’s a news flash: Vice President Gore admits that the Salvage Timber Rider was a mistake. In an interview with the Portland Oregonian Gore admitted that the rider was the Administrations biggest environmental "mistake" and that outrage over the resulting public lands devastation was understandable. "It’s hard to argue with people who say it’s a horrible outcome." But argue this administration has, and it is only now buckling because the intense grass-roots pressure against the Logging without Laws rider has not abated and the administration is going to need all the votes it can muster in the vital west coast states (especially California, which many analysts believe holds the key to the November election).

International
• Life in Nigeria has surely gotten worse since the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the announcement by Shell Oil that it has sealed a large oil development contract with the outlaw regime. Alhaja Kudirat Abiola, the wife of jailed President-elect Chief Abiola, was recently killed under suspicious circumstances while she was on her way to visit her imprisoned husband. The regime has cracked down on union organizations, particularly the union covering the oil industry, by arresting and jailing activists and leaders without trail. Meanwhile, Clinton returned the U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria, sending General Abacha the message that we will not respond forcefully to business as usual in Nigeria.

• The Sierra Club has called for a unilateral boycott of Nigerian oil, which accounts for 90 percent of Nigeria’s foreign export earnings. The boycott against Shell Oil is gaining ground and, as if a rerun of the South Africa struggle of the eighties, the Nigerian government and Shell are lavishing gobs of money on U.S. public relations firms to shore up the image of the military junta. In a world where national borders are increasingly irrelevant, we must hold the Nigerian regime and Shell accountable for the environmental destruction of Ogoniland and the massive human rights violations necessary to maintain the corrupt, oil soaked, dictatorship.

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