Transportation For America » Campaign responds to David Brooks’ “National Mobility Project”

Campaign responds to David Brooks’ “National Mobility Project”

November 17, 2008
By Stephen Lee Davis

Two weeks ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks joined the chorus of those lamenting the sorry state of our nation’s infrastructure and yearning for investment in that arena as an economic stimulus.

While the bulk of his column detailed his skepticism regarding the positive effects that bailouts or stimulus packages have on the short-term economy, he praises the value of investing in infrastructure as a way to aid the nation over the long-term by investing in useful, tangible projects that can help us remain economically competitive and get us where we need to go.

The problem lies mostly in his 1950′s thoughts about where transportation investments should be targeted. Transportation For America communications director David Goldberg shared his praise and critique with The New York Times, who published his letter here. Read it in full below:

David Brooks is spot-on with his call for major investment in transportation infrastructure, both for near-term economic stimulus and for a sustainable recovery. His recommendations of what to build are outdated, however.

As he notes, a way to put people to work would be to repair and maintain our existing highways, bridges and transit systems. But building new highways was the project for an earlier era, the 1950s, when gas was cheap and President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Interstate System.

Today we urgently need to build the infrastructure for a clean-energy economy and reduced dependency on oil. Soaring gas prices made our vulnerability clear: Americans flocked to public transportation or took to their bicycles only to find the transit systems underfinanced and the roads dangerous and inhospitable. Half of our urban-dwelling citizens found they had no transit at all.

If we’re going to go into debt to build for the future, we must do so to complete our transportation network with high-speed rail, modern public transit, streets that support safe biking and walking, and, yes, well-maintained highways.