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How Many Americans?
By Steven A. Camarota
Tuesday, September 2, 2008; A15
When the Census Bureau released its new population projections last month, most of the media focused on the country's changing racial composition. But this was almost certainly not the most important finding. The projections show that the U.S. population will grow by 135 million in just 42 years -- a 44 percent increase. Such growth would have profound implications for our environment and quality of life. Most of the increase would be a direct result of one federal policy -- immigration. If we reduced the level of immigration, the projections would be much lower. The question we have to ask ourselves is: Do we want to be a much more densely settled country?
Native-born Americans have only about two children on average, which makes for a roughly stable population over time. But with an estimated 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants settling in the country each year, and about 900,000 births to these immigrants each year, immigration directly and indirectly accounts for at least three-fourths of U.S. population growth.
An increase of 135 million people by 2050 is equivalent to the entire populations of Mexico and Canada moving here. Assuming the same ratio of population to infrastructure that exists today, the United States would need to build and pay for 36,000 schools. We would need to develop enough land to accommodate 52 million new housing units, along with places for the people who lived in them to shop and work. We would also have to construct enough roads to handle 106 million more vehicles.
By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 25, 2008;
Page A02
NEW YORK -- The view from the lens of photographer Mark Weiss's camera is of a treacherous world of cab drivers weaving into bike lanes, of double-parked delivery vehicles, of car doors opening suddenly, of pedestrians wandering blindly and of narrow passageways between trucks. It is the world of the Manhattan bicycle commuter, which Weiss captures on a camera affixed to a bar on his single-gear bike.
City officials, hoping to make commutes like his less treacherous, have created a seven-block experiment of a bike lane on Ninth Avenue. Here, concrete dividers and a row of parked cars shield a bike lane from the street and its traffic. Low mini-traffic lights show when cyclists have the right of way. Bike commuters, messengers and delivery people peel down perfectly smooth paths.
"It would be nice if that were everywhere," said Weiss, 45.
The city is planning to create another protected lane on Eighth Avenue, part of an effort to encourage cycling in New York, where bike use has increased by 75 percent since 2000, to about 130,000 commuters a day. The city hopes to double current bicycle use by 2015 and to triple it by 2020.
"We've run out of room for driving in the city. We have to make it easier for people to get around by bikes," said Janette Sadik-Khan, the city's transportation commissioner, who herself bikes to work. She is installing covered bike racks that resemble bus shelters, distributing thousands of free helmets, and expanding a small network of bike lanes to 400 miles by next summer (out of 6,000 miles of city streets).
Bush Officials Criticized for Privatization
By Lyndsey Layton and Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 17, 2008; A01
...
"It's almost sort of un-American that we should be forced to sit and be stuck in traffic," said D.J. Gribbin, the department's general counsel and liaison to the White House, who worked closely with Duvall on the project.
For Gribbin, Duvall and Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, the goal is not just to combat congestion but to upend the traditional way transportation projects are funded in this country. They believe that tolls paid by motorists, not tax dollars, should be used to construct and maintain roads.
They and other political appointees have spent the latter part of President Bush's two terms laboring behind the scenes to shrink the federal role in road-building and public transportation. They have also sought to turn highways into commodities that can be sold or leased to private firms and used by motorists for a price. In Duvall and Gribbin's view, unleashing the private sector and introducing market forces could lead to innovation and more choices for the public, much as the breakup of AT&T transformed telecommunications.
...
William Millar, who heads the American Public Transportation Association, says he set up three appointments with Duvall to try to influence how the Urban Partnership money would be spent, but each was cancelled. "They just see no role for transit," Millar said.
Duvall, 35, is a fourth-generation Washingtonian whose father is a well-connected lawyer. He had no transportation experience when he was plucked from his job handling corporate mergers and acquisitions at Hogan & Hartson and was offered a political appointment at the DOT in 2002. "It was a friend of a friend of a friend sort of thing," he said
The Folly Of Higher Gas Taxes
By Mary E. Peters
Saturday, August 25, 2007; Page A15
America was stunned on Aug. 1 when the Interstate 35 West bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed in a tangle of vehicles, concrete and steel. My department is working closely with the National Transportation Safety Board to determine why the bridge failed, and in the aftermath of this tragedy, a necessary national conversation has begun concerning the state of the nation's bridges and highways and the financial model used to build, maintain and operate them.
Many, including The Post [" Paying the Price," editorial, Aug. 21], are taking this opportunity to call for gasoline tax increases and a larger federal presence in transportation investment decisions. For a variety of reasons, a response of this sort would exacerbate our transportation system failures, not alleviate them.
A far better question than whether gas taxes are high enough is what taxpayers get if we expand our dependence on the gasoline tax. The answer is almost certainly higher gas prices, more congestion and stagnating quality of life, which is why The Post's call for a substantial increase in the nation's gas tax is ill-advised.
Our system is failing because federal gasoline taxes are deposited into a centralized trust fund and allocated based on political will. Major spending decisions often have nothing to do with underlying economics, engineering realities or consumer needs. New programs and pet project earmarks have proliferated in recent years. The 2005 transportation funding bill, for example, included more than 6,000 politically driven earmarks reported to cost some $24 billion. That's a staggering figure. The true price however is unfortunately much higher because earmarks typically represent only a fraction of project costs.