In thinking about how the United States goes about planning for its future transportation needs, there are a lot of questions that are raised. How do we pay for the infrastructure improvements that are needed to bring our country’s bridges, roads, airports, and public transportation systems up to standard? What should be our top priorities? Should the personal automobile (and thus the Interstate Highway system) continue to be our primary mode of transportation? Or must our transit portfolio diversify, with other modes of transportation such as high speed rail, commuter trains, and bus service thrown into in the mix?
These are some of the questions that I will discuss with a series of transportation and land use planners in the coming days on my trip to New York and Boston to check out graduate programs in urban planning. I’m visiting with professors from Harvard, MIT, Tufts, and New York University primarily to discuss my interest in their urban planning programs, but also to participate in this policy discussion with experts in the field. I suspect there will be no lack of opinions and insight to these questions. Talking with each of them personally can help me gain a better understanding of how we can go about answering these questions and get a better sense for how each program prepares its students to do the same.
This is going to be a multi-part series in which I explore all of the above questions (and more).
The following is a partial list of planners to meet, along with some thoughts on what to talk about with each of them:
Professor Jose Gomez-Ibanez (Harvard University) - research interests in: transportation, infrastructure, urban economic development, infrastructure privatization and regulation.
- Transportation Revenue Options: How do we address the Highway Trust Fund’s increasing deficit? Of the three options that were highlighted in your discussion in May (VMT tax, Federal gas tax increase, congestion pricing), which one shows the most promise and why? We have an economy that is slowly recovering from a recession, do you think any of these options are politically viable in the near future?
- Privatization: NJ Governor Christ Christie just ended what was to be the country’s largest infrastructure project: the Access to the Region’s Core (ARC) tunnel connecting New Jersey to Manhattan. His decision has sparked a heated debate: what is more important – short-term deficits or long-term infrastructure investment? Do you think privatization can help to resolve this debate, and do you think the private sector has a role in large-scale infrastructure projects on the magnitude of ARC?
Professor Mitchell Moss (New York University) – research interests in: economic development, telecommunications, New York City government
- Stimulus Funding: You once wrote that Federal regulations are often too costly and add too much time to public works projects, and that funding provided by the Federal stimulus should come without the burdensome regulations. Now that the stimulus is well under way and the majority of the funding has been allocated, do you think it was effective? How could it be improved?
- Urban Renewal: Cities that were once- booming in the Midwest and the Rust Belt have undergone decades of depopulation and decline (most famously Detroit). How do these cities reinvent themselves? At what point must they “die?” Does it seem at all counter-intuitive for a city planner to plan for a city’s death?
Mark Chase (Tufts University) – research interests in: sustainable transportation systems, car parking reform, public private partnerships
- High Speed Rail: The Obama Administration has put a lot of stock into the development of high speed rail. What do you think the future of high speed rail is in the United States? Will it take off, and is it an example of an affordable and sustainable mode of transportation?
