bus systems

Steve Hiniker, Executive Director of the land use and environmental group 1000 Friends of Wisconsin, has summed up in the Sunday Journal Sentinel Crossroads section our state's need for more rational public spending on transit, local roads and parks.

While we are getting ready to pour $2 billion into I-94 south to Illinois from Milwaukee, with another massive expansion and rebuilding also scheduled for the Zoo Interchange west of Milwaukee, the county parks have gone to hell, the bus system is collapsing and potholes can't get filled fast enough.

And you watch: a huge share of federal stimulus money will not get allocated to sustainable, green and long-term job creation in this region. It will be gifted to the road-builders for major highway projects that continue to pull the economy farther from its center, adding sprawl costs and making Milwaukee's minority poor less likely to reach jobs in the out counties.

It will not be used as a one-time down payment for a better future for the region.

The fundamental policy problem in southeastern Wisconsin is an out-dated regional land use plan that is driving highway expansion, water diversion and sprawl.

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I'm guessing that Congress will fashion some sort of financial package for the US auto industry, but before the deal is struck, it would be helpful to generations of Americans less aware of history to have two GM-related items put on the record.

The first was GM's sabotage of its 1960's electric car. As the auto company pleads for taxpayer dollars in the billions to help it stay afloat in a period highlighted by its launch of the electric Chevrolet Volt, let's have GM acknowledge and explain why it killed off its own electric car nearly a half-century ago.

And let's have the House of Representatives reproduce the findings of the late Wright Patman, a Democrat from Texas, who was among those who documented the conspiracy among GM, Firestone and Standard Oil to destroy urban electric rail transit systems in favor of buses that ran on rubber tires and combustion engines.

I remember when the trolley tracks were ripped out of the streets in my hometown of Washington, DC in favor of buses.

I cannot say if Milwaukee's electric trolley systems were specifically part of the GM-Firestone-Standard Oil cabal, but it's well known that the city had both intra-city rail and numerous high-speed interurban trains west to Oconomowoc and south to Chicago that could hit 120 m.p.h.

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