Mark Anderson Wrote: "The focus of activity should be on mitigating the problems of cars, mostly that of pollution and safety. Safety (for those not in cars at least) will be most enhanced by separating cars from neighborhoods, which means more lanes of highway. That should help get many cars out of the neighborhoods. When the highways are in gridlock, drivers take to neighborhood streets."
I would argue that the problems associated with cars go far beyond just safety and pollution, especially for inner city areas like Minneapolis. Automobile users don't begin to pay the costs associated with their road use. There are direct costs such as property, sales and income taxes that used to pay for streets and road. There are also huge indirect costs such as lost tax revenue from areas that were converted from tax paying property to public roadways and decreased property values in areas adjacent to high volume roadways. These costs for regional transportation roadways are not borne equally by all either. The most heavily used roads - the "attractive corridors", as MNDOT calls them, are all in the central city neighborhoods. The calls for increasing their capacity come from people who, by and large, don't live in the city and won't have to suffer the indirect costs of taking even more land off the tax rolls. Realistically, I agree that cars are here to stay but that doesn't mean that the transportation system we've built in the past 50 years is what will work well in the next 50 years. We need to think about what life will be like when the metro area has double the population it does now and even more than double the number of cars. Jim Young Seward _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
