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Stop Building Highways?


abdintp

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This is WAYYYY off topic, but I thought it was a big enough event in "urban news" in general to post here, and see what y'all think:

http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,[email protected],0.html

I realize it's in French, but I couldn't find any article on it in English, so I'm gonna try and translate it.

Title: Borloo anounces the END OF CONSTRUCTION of autoroutes (interstate highways) in France.

[skip first paragraph]

...In the document which is serving as a blueprint in the final round-table meeting [of the summit on future environmental policy in France], Jean-Louis Borloo (mister of ecology) has announced what should amount to a "paradigm" shift, such that "highways and planes will become last resort solutions" : "The change is here. We are looking at a radical change in [infrastructural] approach, putting behind us the days of constantly fixing [the autoroute system] and advancing to an age of construction of alternative transport options on a huge scale. The paradigm of today, where we accord the highest priority to road and highway infrastructure and where we develop different modes of transport without any link one to another, must give way to a new system of thinking. In this new system, we will use a logic of integrated and multimodal development, where the highway and the plane become last resort solutions... The development of highway capacity worldwide needs to cease, except in the case of eliminating points of congestion and problems of security. We also need to reduce the energy output of our vehicles. The goal we still hold [in France] is to reduce the emissions of today by 20% by the year 2020...

The point is, they're going to stop building highways. To me, this is entirely unconceivable. I realize it doesn't have a ton of bearing on Arkansas environmental policy or politics; I'm just curious what everyone thinks about this.

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I think Europe could handle it much more easily than the US. But I do see the point. There is problems to simply adding more roads or always widening them. Look at Arkansas, considering how small it is area wise we have a huge amount of highways the AHTD has to maintain. We have more miles of highways than many other states much larger than us, area wise and population wise. This is causing us a big problem now because we have so many miles of highway to maintain and that leaves even less funds for building new ones or widening ones that are really needed. Personally I'm a big proponent of public transportation. The bad thing is that much of the US, especially Arkansas isn't dense enough to support it very well. Even though we're getting more and more population in NWA, it seems very hard to get people out of their vehicles. Of course it also doesn't help that much of NWA is spread out and isn't very pedestrian friendly.

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