The sign said, “Bay Bridge – 13 miles – 83 minutes.”
That’s an average speed of less than 10 miles per hour. Whatever happened to our modern high-speed highway network?
Important parts of the network are overloaded. We are experiencing the hideous consequences of our existing transportation and energy policies. We should not accept the dysfunction as “normal.”
The roads are overloaded with vehicles, but could accommodate more people. Most of the cars in that 13-mile traffic jam carried only one or two occupants. Every engine was running even when the cars were stationary – achieving ZERO miles per gallon. All those cars discharged greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, without going anywhere.
Abundance of cheap gasoline is not the solution to the traffic jam. Building new highways is also a non-solution. We have learned over the past 50 years that increasing the fuel supply and providing more roads just create more traffic and more pollution.
Instead, we need to rethink our transportation system. We need to provide alternatives to private cars, and encourage people to utilize them. We need more folks to ride trains and buses. That means improving infrastructure to support less polluting means of transportation, and developing economic incentives to use them.
We need leaders who will look forward and guide us into a sustainable, energy-efficient future. In the current presidential election, only Kamala Harris is capable of providing this leadership.
Reese Bull resides in Mount Solon.
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