As Gertrude Stein once said about her home town: There's no there there......

I was working on carpool lanes a few years back, when one of my new urbanist colleagues, was given an assignment to work on highway planning. At the very first meeting, she blurted out in front of one of the older Republican council members, that we had to stop people from driving because the car is destroying the planet...... I just looked down at my shoes in embarrassment and pretended I didn't hear it.

Well, after that meeting, the Councilman went to have a little meeting with her boss (and mine), and a few minutes later I got the invitation from my notoriously "passive aggressive" boss, to come into his office, and to close the door (always a terrifying prospect). When I came out, I had the assignment.

Our freeways are old, worn out, and overloaded. Our freeways actually can lose up to 50% of throughput (free flow optimal design capacity) under the severely congested conditions, and a failure to complete certain key components cause the need for much longer trips, creating more avoidable congestion, and costing us all time and money.

The few write ups I've seen about this so-called "infrastructure plan" so far have Trump largely ignoring our transportation infrastructure which is in terrible shape. Yes maintenance needs to be a higher priority, and we do need to pay more attention to sustainability and maintainability of the investments we make. But, as someone who is not shy about pissing off the foolish, even well meaning fools, we need to invest in road capacity, too.

The problem with a growing population (even slowly growing) and no significant new highway capacity added since the late 70's, is that we are approaching a continuous and costly state of near permanent gridlock, which also actually reduces the design capacity of our dilapidated highway system.

So we really do need more capacity for the "evil car", as well as a much more significant investment, where we are "built out", in alternative mode capacity. Unfortunately, other than those "platitudes" about "sustainability", there appears to be no real substance or resources behind any of this so-called "infrastructure plan" for doing much about our transportation infrastructure or our costly and worsening mobility issues.

From what I have seen, so far, in this so-called "infrastructure plan", regarding transit and railroad infrastructure needs is even worse. And, much of this hoopla is just a giant circle jerk going through the motions, since there are no real resources identified to actually do any of this "trillion dollar" plan.

So far this "infrastructure plan" is looking like a big PR stunt complete with smoke and mirrors to impress the naïve and the credulous, to check a box on the political "score card", and claim something has actually been "done". And, with Bud Schuster (the junior) retiring this year, there isn't much leadership left with the House Republicans on this issue, either.

While some of these "tree huggers" seem real happy about this so-called "infrastructure plan", since it won't fund any new evil highways for those evil cars, I doubt that many of them will actually stop driving their Prius, Tesla, or Leaf to the meeting, to protest the freeway........clogging our roads.....and complaining about the awful congestion they were stuck in getting there.

As Pogo noted: We have met the enemy a he is us........