I have every intention of eventually putting my transportation research to good use here at Cheekyness. February marks six years of me being an active transportation advocate, and as you can imagine, a lot of reading can happen in six years. Unfortunately, transportation is a field where change comes slowly, so many of the issues we faced when I first walked into the BikeTexas office as an intern six years ago still exist. We've even managed to scrounge up a few new ones since then.
However! Lots of good articles have come my way in the last couple weeks, but in particular I'd like to point you to this one at Strong Towns, "
The Real Reason Your City Has No Money." Charles Marohn looks at the realities of the money needed just to maintain existing infrastructure in most US cities (spoiler: more than city officials can possibly hope to find this century), then says,
Humans are predisposed to highly value pleasure today and to deeply discount future pain, especially the more distant it is. It's easy today to rationalize that future expense, especially when you feel so assured that new growth will make those future people better off. This thinking is how you end up with two dollars of public infrastructure for every one dollar of private investment. This is how you spend yourself into bankruptcy.
Check it out. Then take a look through the rest of
Strong Towns' archives, too--there's a lot of great stuff in there.
2 comments:
Yup. The only way to stay balanced is to spend less than we bring in. Did somebody's parents forget to teach them that? (Only the majority of the world these days, eh?)
And this is 60 years of US policy. No wonder our roads are falling apart--what's incredible is that they haven't before now.
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