The American Spectator

p> ON THE ROAD AGAIN br> Re: Eric Peters’s Boxed-In Beauties : /p>

Perhaps it would be more fun if we could all drive as fast as people in Europe can drive. I for one love beautiful fast cars. But when you look inside what most people are driving today, perhaps it doesn’t matter anymore. Personally I believe that the saddest sight of modern times is those parents who have bought the huge SUV with the DVD player on board, so their lumpen offspring can be carted through some of the most beautiful and enthralling countryside the world has ever produced, with their eyes glued to the same poo-fart-drop-your-pants trash they’d be glued to if they were sitting at home on their beds. Why bother to take your children anywhere if you’re going to lock them in a box of Same Old Same Old for the duration of the journey?

p>Yes, in Olden Times when cars held more people in the back seat, children were allowed in the front seat, and there was no “entertainment” on board except for the load of library books and the radio controlled by Mama, travel was more of a strain and one had to actually acknowledge the presence of siblings and learn to read a map so as to avoid asking “are we there yet?” more than twice an hour. But when we arrived at the Tourist Court, the Motel or the Cabins for the evening we knew we had made a journey and we knew where we were. Today’s kids might just as well be left locked in their bedrooms with the curtains drawn as carted down a featureless Interstate to a generic motel, having spent the whole day staring at a screen and deafening themselves in isolation with iPods. Not only do they not know where they have been or where they are, they don’t even know if anybody else was traveling with them. And it surely doesn’t matter to them how fast their parents got to drive. br> — Kate Shaw , Editor br> RFM Sports /p>

At the current rates, we will double the length of our highways in 363 years, but the population will double in 66 years. Governors and highway departments are obsessing over how to get more sales and property tax out of highway construction. These considerations are detrimental to mobility and safety. The idea that highway departments are suppose to be planning and designing for mass mobility of our real mass transit system, the car, seems to be ripped out of the engineering curriculum to make room for too much concern about the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act.

p>We need a financially sustainable balance between roads to new destinations, like new homes and roads to old destinations, like where we work. What must be done is to increase the capacity of the existing system. The car is worth the costs. How many people were evacuated from Mississippi or Louisiana on the trains?