This is taken from the book “Thinking Points” by George Lakoff
The way we move shapes almost everything about our nation.
Our dependence on cars pollutes the environment, harms our personal health, restricts social and economic mobility, and chains us to foreign oil. With one multifaceted change over the course of many years, a “transit-for-all” initiative can help slay all the beasts. Simply put, the idea is to take $70 billion a year that currently goes to subsidizing cheap oil--the essential ingredient of our car cultur--and shift it toward building and promoting public transit systems. Additional funding could come from over $250 billion a year that is currently spent on building and maintaining the highway infrastructure.
Transit-for-all means expanding and improving public transportation at the local, regional, and federal levels. It means investing in bus and light rail in urban areas to create clean, convenient, reliable, and accessible webs of transportation. It means making our city cores more bike and pedestrian friendly. It means expanding commuter rail, to connect urban and suburban centers typically served by car transportation. It means investing in high-speed rail, to move people, goods, and services from city to city. Moving within urban cores and connecting urban and suburban hubs, these webs would extend to all auto-dense areas.
Transit-for-all is about values. Improving public transportation is about giving all Americans the freedom of equal access to social and economic opportunities that enhance our quality of life. Investing in alternative transportation is using the common wealth for the common good. It is an expansion of freedom, creating more diverse transportation.
Transit-for-all is a progressive strategic initiative to advance many of our goals at once.
It’s and economic issue. It would increase mobility of goods and labor. It would revitalize neglected neighborhoods. And it would spur growth and attract development.
It’s a labor issue. It would create many jobs--construction workers, engineers, bus drivers, rail operators, administrators, ticker vendors. Many of these jobs are sustainable union jobs. An increase of union jobs empowers labor to negotiate better contracts and helps develop better conditions for workers throughout the community.
It’s an environmental issue. By now the relationship between fossil fuels and the environment is well understood and accepted. Burning oil releases into the atmosphere greenhouses gases that destabilize the climate. Mass transit reduces society’s dependence on oil and helps remediate some of the dangers of global warming.
It’s a public health issue. Our air quality is abysmal and getting worse. The dirty exhaust from cars is driving an air pollution crisis that increases health hazards and claims tens of thousands of American lives, not to mention millions of dollars, every year. And no one needs to be reminded of the physical, emotional, and economic damage of six million annual auto accidents. Better public transportation helps us transition out of this dirty and dangerous technology. In doing so, it could rescue millions of Americans from debilitating health problems and even death, and save the public from bearing the burden of preventable medical expenses.
It’s a national security issue. Kicking our oil habit not only benefits human and environmental health, it secures our nation. Greater energy autonomy frees us from our dangerous dependence on a volatile region.
With a transit-for-all initiative, laborers, economists, environmentalists, and security buffs could walk under the same banner. An investment in freedom, health, the economy, and national security.
It is time for progressives to start thinking strategically. The most effective long-term strategies start with the most common-place activities: eating, traveling to work, and working in a business. Home is where we live. Start there.
After I read this, not agreeing with the term of being progressive, I found I agree with most of what was put forth here. I hope our representatives look at this for more thought towards our future and how they form the futures’ budgets for our transportation needs.
