Norman Mineta, Transportation Secretary, retires

From Neal Peirce's*** column, "That's right: 23 lanes of traffic," as printed in the Seattle Times:

Lacking any other noteworthy legacy, outgoing Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta may be best remembered for his proposals to relieve transportation congestion by encouraging private investment in mega-road projects. The idea has merit: In some locations, private investment in toll roads can — with appropriate local deliberation — make sense.

But Mineta amazingly omitted both freight-railroad improvements and potential passenger-rail improvement in the expansive congestion-relief initiative for America he unveiled last month.

The danger of his formula is a wave of steamrolled, behind-the-scenes road-building deals that ignore the many opportunities for commuter and city rail expansion that clearly do reduce congestion.
Norman Mineta opens the NASDAQ exchange, May 23, 2006. He visited the nation's financial capital to encourage more U.S. firms to invest in road building projects. Photo: US Department of Transportation.

For Exhibit A of the perils, check what's happening in fast-growing Atlanta. First, there's the sheer immensity of what the Georgia Department of Transportation favors. Top example: a widening of I-75 in fast-growing, suburban Cobb County, as it heads into the city, to include an incredible mile-long section of no less than 23 lanes.

Another possibility at play in current Atlanta road debates: to double-deck I-285, which cuts across the north side of the region — a project critics say could trigger "a lifetime of delays in construction alone." Still another: a major truck-only toll road, being pushed by a consortium of construction firms and Goldman-Sachs, the global finance firm.

To push such expansive road-building projects front and center, Georgia state agencies set up a "congestion mitigation" process to determine which projects are most pressing. The state's road-happy Department of Transportation**** played a dominant role, pushing through a definition of congestion focused almost exclusively on sheer throughput of vehicles.

Almost obliterated in the process: the years-long work of the Atlanta Regional Commission to create a balanced transportation network, including a "Livable Centers Initiative" to steer future growth to existing population centers. The process allowed communities to compete for a share of transportation funding based on increased population density, revitalized town centers and remapped street and pedestrian networks that would assure fewer new roads and less air pollution..
_____
And we won't even talk about Amtrak, and the current administration's efforts to kill it off. Laura Blumenfeld's Post column on Norman Mineta focused on how he dreams of being a pirate.

*** The Washington Post Writers Group syndicates Neal Peirce's column, but the Washington Post does not carry his column, although more than a decade ago, they used to run the column from time to time (so did the Baltimore Sun).

**** The Georgia Department of Transportation used to define sidewalks not in terms of pedestrians, but in terms of cars, dubbing sidewalks "accident recovery zones" for errant cars.

Index Keywords: transportation