Is the Great American Asphalt machine (celebrated by our colleague Jane Holtz Kay in Asphalt Nation) about to get derailed — or given multi-billions for massive expansion?
Fresh reports from Pennsylvania and Virginia offer vividly contrasting visions. Latest from Harrisburg is that the state’s DOT has chopped $5 billion in bridge and highway projects from its planning list. Gov. Ed Rendell’s transportation director refers to the state’s tightening fiscal condition and then adds what’s been unsayable in most states up to now — some road projects may be bad ideas because of their impact on the landscape.
Landscape? Yes! A number of Pennsylvania’s eliminated road “improvements” are in Chester County, in Bucks County and other areas of the exquisite, rolling landscape of southeastern Pennsylvania where I spent many years of my boyhood. Fewer of the roads will be now be widened into countryside-devouring sprawl routes. Notably, on some roads with frequently clogged intersections, the Pennsylvania transportation consultants are thinking out of the box, discussing for example European-style roundabouts.
For stark contrast, check Virginia. State and federal officials are thinking out of the box in quite different fashion, pushing a plan to add a second four-lane road, exclusively for trucks, to the state’s 325-mile stretch of Interstate 81, a major north-south road (and now NAFTA highway) along an American natural treasure — the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley.
Traffic on I-81 doubled from 25,000 vehicles in 1990 to 53,000 in 2002 and is projected to double again in the next 20 years. Fatal crashes, triggered by commingling of cars and trucks, are on the increase. So Virginia is a perfect place to start fulfilling the vision of U.S. House Transportation Chairman Don Young (Republican-Alaska) to build a national network of truck highways, initial price $1.6 billion — because, says Young, “we can’t compete globally because we can’t move trucks on time.”
Yet I-81′s new truck lanes, critics fear, would “industrialize” vast stretches of Virginia landscape, turning the Shenandoah Valley’s fabled blue sky, for example, from blue to gray. And one has to wonder — “Why not trains?”– the argument I made myself in a recent column.
It would be great to see the presidential campaign focus on vital transportation issues like these, touching as they do on our economic future, our environment and quality of life, democratic planning and choice. But don’t count on it.