The Future is What We Make It

I learned three things from a recent Boulder Daily Camera. Traffic congestion is projected to triple by 2035. The City of Superior is going to spend up to $500,000 to take control of roads in a private development that has only paid $122,000 in property taxes over the last ten years. And nobody came to a meeting on cutting bus service that was scheduled when nobody could come.

Passivity in the face of the future is a part of all of these stories.

While I was in Korea, the South Korean government spent millions of dollars to improve transportation predictions. They discovered two things: people are crazy and you can't predict the future. We have no idea how much congestion there is going to be in the future. If keeping spending money on cars instead of people, we could end up solving our transportation problems in the same way that Detroit has. People may decide that they simply don't want to live here anymore.

I would rather we solved congestion by dramatically increasing access to transit, walkable neighborhoods, and bike paths. We could then use what we save on road repair to pay our teachers.

Which brings us to the decision by the Board of Trustees of Superior to maintain streets that were originally  private at taxpayers expense. The focus of the article is on a gate at the development's entrance, but the trustees were really deciding whether or not to bail out a private development. This is one of many cases where a private development was built by a private developer. Historically in Boulder County, developers got permits for developments by promising that these new roads would never be a burden on taxpayers.

The choice to accept responsibility for private roads is exactly that, a choice.

It was also a choice when RTD decided to do very little publicity for their public meetings for the August service changes. Longmont is scheduled to lose all their school bus routes, and the meeting was scheduled when parents cannot attend (3:30pm). In addition, there was very little publicity. The notice on website was not on the front page, you have to know how to find it. There were not even signs on all the buses that are going to have schedule changes, at least not the ones in my neighborhood.

Every public meeting is an opportunity for RTD to develop public support for transit. In fact, it is an opportunity for everyone who supports transit to join together.

No one knows what the future will bring, only that it will come from our actions now. If we fund buses and trains we will have a very different future than if we keep spending money on cars. And if we spend money on people over all of those things, we will have another future altogether.