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"In the meantime, we need to reinvent our rulemaking processes. Currently we make laws and regulations like oysters make pearls, except instead of starting with a tiny grain of sand and covering it with precious nacre, we start with a tiny pearl of sensible principles and cover it with layer upon layer of sand, grit, and detritus. This makes for ugly pearls, and lousy legislation."
If you look at communities that are really successful and have rich, complex street grids with transit -- or even without transit, but they have street grids -- there’s much more efficiency in the use of pavement. You can go the direction you want to go, you don't have to go out of the way and come back.
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The feds don’t even do the requirements directly -- in the federal highway program they reference the AASHTO Green Book. These are rules, they're just not stated as rules… On the interstate system you can’t have a lane that’s less than 12 feet wide, so that actually is a rule there. You have all these metrics that make everything bigger -- turning radii and ramps, the length of ramps -- all these things designed to have the vehicles move faster without having to slow down when they get off the freeway, that sort of thing.
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So what are the metrics? The metrics would be intersection density, block size -- you would reward intersection density. And the feds can do that, they can say that states could draw federal money and add to the density of a street network, creating more mobility that way.
And the metric we use is 150 intersections per square mile, which wouldn’t just be like Manhattan or Philadelphia. In Wausau, Wisconsin, which is the home of the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Dave Obey, we counted 158 intersections per square mile. That’s counting alleys. You look at all these places that have high intersection density and they're very likely to be valuable settings for jobs and real estate, and they're also very good for distributing local traffic
If mark-to-market accounting is to blame for the current financial crisis, then the National Weather Service is to blame for Hurricane Katrina; if it hadn’t told us the hurricane hit New Orleans, the city would never have flooded.
in list: Economic Crisis
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