Submitted by Greenwich resident Richard May in response to Chris Murphy’s office regarding a scheduled “Transportation Town Hall” for Feb 28th at the Norwalk Public Library Auditorium.
Dear Senator Murphy,
Having served on the POCD Transportation Committee for the Town of Greenwich a few years ago, I am well aware of how entrenched people’s opinions are regarding transportation and our country’s decaying “infrastructure.”
Based on my own experiences – and a considerable amount of time researching other solutions – I have sadly concluded that our “transportation” policies (State, Local and Federal) are built to facilitate the automobile rather than people.
In fact, I now believe that the more money we throw at facilitating automobile transportation, the greater will be the congestion and a deterioration in the quality of life of our citizens. There is no greater example of this than the U.S. government “saving” the automobile industry and letting Detroit (the “Motor City”) fall into bankruptcy and effectively deprive the City’s residents of essential services. Shameful!
While many towns and cities around the United States are adopting sane transportation and planning policies like Smart Streets and Form-based coding, it doesn’t go nearly far enough in my estimation. In fact, one of the few organizations that I know that has a “common sense” approach to transportation and planning is Strong Towns. I would encourage you to see Chuck Marohn’s 15-minute Ted Talk on how the U.S. transportation “experiment” has gone awry.
Sadly, I will not be able to attend Senator Murphy’s Town Hall meeting in Norwalk, but I am hopeful that all government leaders begin to think differently about the way we manage our transportation resources. In fact, I would favor a 20-year freeze on building “new” roads until the existing ones are fixed (read, properly maintained) or closed.
We are simply wasting the taxpayers money if we continue to throw “new” money at a road and highway infrastructure that no longer serves the needs of our citizens.
Kind regards,
Richard W. May, Greenwich