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Page 47

Transportation, especially urban transportation, is ulti-

mately a local problem, not a national one.

Ironically, past federal involvement in transportation

created many of the problems that ISTEA purports to solve,

including congested urban freeways unregulated by tolls or

congestion fees.

The only way out of the current dilemma is for the

federal government to take itself out of the transportation

planning and funding process.  It is time to repeal the

federal gasoline tax and reduce the U.S. Department of

Transportation's jurisdiction to areas of strictly inter-

state concern that cannot be managed by the states alone.

That is to say, it is time to repeal ISTEA.

Notes

1.  See, for example, Ed Carson, "Road Hogs: Will Congress

Cut Back the Transit Pork?" Reason, May 1997, pp. 49­51.

2.  Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, "The Second

Coming of the American Small Town," Wilson Quarterly 16, no.

1 (Winter 1992): 19-48.

3.  James Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and

Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape (New York: Simon &

Schuster, 1993).

4.  Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New

York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 25.

5.  On urban renewal, see, for example, Jane Jacobs, The

Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage,

1963); and E. Fuller Torrey, Nowhere to Go: The Tragic

Odyssey of the Homeless Mentally Ill (New York: Harper &

Row, 1988).

6.  Peter Katz, The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of

Community (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994).

7.

Garreau, Edge City, p. 239.

8.

Public Law 102-240 (1991).

9.  Memorandum from Mike Burton, Metro's executive director,

to the Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation on

South/North LRT Proposal, Portland, December 11, 1996.