By Neal Peirce For Release Sunday, May 23, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — The nation’s top 100 metropolitan areas are home to 66 percent of Americans, and they’re adding people almost twice as fast as the rest of the country. Our lead corporations and most highly skilled workforces are focused in them. Metros are clearly key to the country’s fate in this fiercely competitive global century.
But can individual metropolitan regions “get their act together” to educate their growing immigrant populations and expanding ranks of the poor — their workforce of the future? As their “baby boomers” turn 65 by the millions, how can they be supported in totally auto-dependent suburbs? If metro sprawl recommences with economic recovery, what happens to America’s need to cut carbon emissions and wean itself from foreign oil?
Those are among key issues raised in the Brookings Institution’s new report — “State of Metropolitan America – On the Front Lines of Demographic Transformation.”
Metro-wide cohesion has never been easy: our regions have developed as a broken patchwork of dozens, sometimes hundreds of individual municipalities and even more school districts. We rarely agree to big-scale mergers.
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By Edward T. McMahon For Release Sunday, May 23, 2010
Citiwire.net
America has an infrastructure problem: crowded highways, leaking pipes, collapsing bridges, and aging transit systems. Lots of people have been talking about the infrastructure problem, although given the deep and ongoing state and federal budget crisis we haven’t really done much about it.
Sure the Obama administration recently directed $8.5 billion to high speed rail and billions more for “shovel ready” projects in the stimulus bill, but considering that the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates that the nation faces a $2.2 trillion infrastructure backlog, this is just a drop in the bucket.
Infrastructure will lay the foundation for America’s future prosperity but our elected leaders have failed to level with the American people about how the country is falling behind our global competitors or explaining the true costs of making required upgrades and building new systems.” Leveling with the American people” is just one of the key recommendations of Infrastructure 2010: Investment Imperative, the fourth in a series of annual reports produced by the Urban Land Institute and Ernst and Young on U.S. and global infrastructure trends.
Mass transit is just one area where the rhetoric doesn’t meet the reality. While the U.S. has provided “seed funding” for high speed rail in a few important travel corridors, China has leaped far ahead of the US and other countries, including Japan and France and is now the world leader in high speed rail. After years of investment in new highways, China is now investing billions in a cutting edge network of train and subways designed to boost exports and revolutionize the flow of people and goods. By 2012, China will have over 5,000 miles of high speed rail and is currently building 60 new subway lines in more than 20 cities. Next year when a new Shanghai to Beijing high speed line opens (a year ahead of schedule) the journey between China’s two most important cities will be reduced to just 4 hours for a 600 mile trip.
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