The Antiplanner hasn’t yet read all of the Department of Transportation’s strategic plan yet, but I’ve read the livable communities chapter. Though heavily footnoted, it is based on numerous minor and two major fallacies.
Among the many minor fallacies, the plan blames obesity on the lack of sidewalks forcing parents to give their children rides to work instead of letting them walk. This unquestioned assumption is not supported by reality.
Three years ago, the Antiplanner reviewed the regional transportation plans for the nation’s 70 largest metropolitan areas and found that 40 of them had some form of “smart-growth,” anti-auto policies built in. One that did not was for Omaha.
Omaha planners are eager to rectify that situation. Perhaps in response to Ray LaHood’s direction that all metro areas incorporate “livability” into their next round of long-range plans (which are revised every five years), Omaha’s new plan, which is now being prepared, has an unhealthy dose of this inane idea.
So far, the planners are merely at the PowerPoint stage. The most offensive part of their presentation is page two of this show, which says they want to “manage congestion.”
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood put your money where his mouth is when he dedicated well over 40 percent of the latest round of “Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery” (TIGER) stimulus funds to streetcars, pedestrianways, and other “livability” projects. The biggest grant was $47.67 million towards a 2.7-mile, $72 million streetcar line in Atlanta.
In all, the grants totaled about $584 million, of which $557 million went for actual construction and $27 million went for planning. Almost 85 percent of the planning money was for some form of a livability program (transit, pedestrianways, “complete streets,” multi-modal stations, etc.), while 40 percent of the construction funds went to livability, 24 percent to highways, and 36 percent to freight projects.
