Urban Discoveries Baltimore

Regardless of what your experience with various web sites’ terms-of-service agreements has led you to believe, your opinion matters. In fact, that’s what our whole democratic republic is supposedly based on, etc. So there’s this group called Transportation for America that wants your virtual signature on their e-petition, and they’re making it really easy for you to sign on without doing a lot of thinking about it. Which is not to say you shouldn’t, because their cause is an admittedly valid one, as well as being applicable to your/our/their lives. Here’s the story. Do with it what you will.

The proposed act is called CLEAN-TEA HR-1329, and it has nothing to do with either sanitation or brewed herbal beverages. It does, however, have to do with preparing our country for an increasingly urban and energy-bashful century. The idea is this: get President Obama to direct/divert/sneak funds from his climate initiative–pending, right, hopefully?–specifically to the development of transportation solutions. Read: subways, railways, bicycle lanes, sidewalks, carpool incentives, teleportation. Why? Well, Transportation for America would have you know that if we’re going to fix any of the honking, doomsday-style issues we keep hearing about on the media dissemination devices, then we’ve got to fix the transportation problem. Reduce emissions, save money (long-term), cut down on our obligations to foreign sources of energy, create jobs, and make it easier to live in the places we live in–cities.

These are the goals of the proposal, which by the way stands for Clean Low-Emission Affordable New Transportation Efficiency Act. (Speaking of which, what does it say about our legislature’s attention span that every new bill has to have a torturous acronym which when broken down renders the actual intention of the program unintelligible?) All joking aside, these are meaningful and urgent aims. If they sound like things you’d like to endorse, then please click here and add your name to the list. You don’t even have to get up from your fainting couch to affect the future of transportation in our country.

What are your ideas about how we’ll be getting around five years from now, or fifty?

Posted in: Development News, TransportationNo Comments