Web Letters: Ticket to Ride

Forced automobile dependency is subsidized at the rate of hundreds of billions of dollars a year in the US.

Google "America's Autos On Welfare" for the facts.

It does not matter if private motor vehicles run on oil or a "green" energy source: Habitat is paved over, walkable communities are ruined, people are injured and killed, the one-third of Americans who cannot drive are stranded and the ones who can drive are stuck sitting in traffic.

Ben Adler rightly shows the missing green stimulus: visionary public transportation. That means investing in high-speed rail as well as in healthy, livable communities designed around walking, transit and bicycling.

The biggest obstacle: liberals' views on keeping gas artificially cheap and seeing the auto industry as the core of "good jobs" and a tax-deductible suburban house as a right.

Our transportation non-system is like our healthcare non-system: the most expensive in the world, with the least effectiveness. If we took the trillion dollars spent in just one year on cars in the US and spent it on high-speed rail and visionary local transit, we could transform the country: less time in transit, more land preserved, healthier communities, energy sustainability and international security.

Let us seize this moment and build a real green future. It can contain cars. But it must be a future without forced automobile dependency. That is the real green stimulus!

Robert Bernstein

Goleta, CA

It's an incredibly rich irony that The Nation is blaming "fiscal conservatives" and "the power of auto, oil and highway construction lobbies" for the demise of mass transit, when it was in fact the Progressive Era reformers themselves who were the most tireless opponents of the private mass transit companies of the early 1900s.

In fact, in the pages of this very magazine, in the April 24, 1920 edition, appeared an article entitled "The Lack of Houses: Remedies" in which the author essentially argued for everything that The Nation is arguing against today. Arthur Gleason wrote that "subways make a slum out of a suburb," and spoke very highly of the sort of limited density and segregated uses that are anathema to New Urbanists today.

I have an expanded commentary on this article on my own blog, where I also excerpt in more detail the very different position of The Nation back in 1920.

Stephen Smith

Washington, DC