Revolutionary Road
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WITH the unemployment rate at 10.2 percent and job creation creeping along despite increased spending on infrastructure, we should look with new eyes at a resource we’ve failed to take full advantage of: the Interstate highway system.
Much of President Obama’s stimulus package has gone to maintaining our roads, and rightly so. But as we invest in the highways that accelerated suburban sprawl and deepened our addiction to oil, we should use the opportunity to invent new uses for the almost 47,000-mile long Interstate system.
Consider it a kind of adaptive reuse: the old foundry reborn as a luxury loft building, the abandoned industrial bakery transformed into a chic urban mall. It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to see beyond the traffic and the exhaust fumes. But if we expand the highway system’s uses in anticipation of a time when we are no longer dependent on the internal combustion engine, we may also appreciate the beauty in its graceful overpasses, lofty bridges and complex cloverleaf interchanges.
The most obvious use for the Interstate’s corridors is rail transportation. If we are going to spend billions rehabbing the highways, shouldn’t we, at the same time, invest in adjacent rail lines like the 800-mile high-speed rail system voters approved last year in California.
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