Can Conservatives Build Sidewalks?
This editorial ran in the Orlando Sentinel, March 24, 2005
Fred Leonhardt, in his editorial, “Great State of Wait,” demands
that the government fund more road-building to enhance business prosperity, “protect
our homeland, and preserve our American way of life.” While
he claims the mantle of conservativism, his desire to pave our way
out of gridlock reeks of socialism. Like the Stalinist planners of
a bygone era, Leonhardt wants government engineers to prop up a failed
utopia—a society designed exclusively for the auto.
Over the last 50 years Orlando, like other Florida cities, has evolved
into a sprawling mass of mediocrity because our “transportation
system” was reduced to an exercise in road building. This single-mindedness
has produced a straight jacket not a system. A system, according to
Webster, “is an interdependent group of items forming a unified
whole.” Unfortunately, the failure to design or even plan for
a transportation system beyond the auto has turned our communities
into the killing fields of America. Metropolitan Orlando suffers the
highest pedestrian death rate in the nation followed by Tampa, West
Palm, and Miami. Losing children, like the Velez sisters, on roads
engineered to traffic flow at the expense of human safety is a sad
reminder of our “family values.”
Conservatives extolling family values fail to mention that building
a world to SUV dimensions threatens a child’s well-being. When
kids cannot visit friends, a park, or the library without parental
chauffeurs they are deprived of the most elemental social experiences.
Moreover, as they turn inward to a fluorescent screen the desire to
pursue more vigorous activities wanes. It is small wonder that child
obesity has become an epidemic. Like many social problems it is the
product of addiction, in part, the lure of an auto-oriented lifestyle
that trades health and vitality for convenience and an illusion of
safety.
In Florida, thousands have followed highway expansion to nestle in
the safety of guarded, gated subdivisions. Yet for these homesteaders
on the periphery of metropolitan areas, there is a greater chance
of dying in a traffic “accident” than being murdered in
central Miami.
For Orlando and Florida to prosper, we must divorce ourselves from
a 1950s approach to transportation. Existential road rage does not
attract investors, quality of life does. Road building must proceed,
but it must be integrated into a system of light rail, commuter trains,
buses, bicycle paths, and sidewalks to insure pedestrian safety and
activity. In return, developers can profit from building more compact
neighborhoods, such as Baldwin Park, that provide safe access to parks,
schools, and shopping. Allowing citizens between 7 and 87 to navigate
their communities will reduce auto trips and lessen our dependence
on foreign oil. This will require getting out of car, but in return
we can embrace a safer, healthier, and more prosperous future.
Bruce Stephenson is a professor of Environmental Studies at
Rollins College
Phone work 407-646-1587
Home 407-898-5777
Information on Miami death rate: iAnd Frumkin, Frank, and Jackson
, Urban Sprawl and Public Health (Island Press, 2004) 121-122
This is also identified in recent Sentinel article on Florida Rural
Roads second most dangerous in the US .
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