Excellent point made by a letter writer in the Journal Sentinel recently. Make transit an integral, pleasant part of infrastructure, and people will quickly incorporate it into their daily routines. We're about 12 years behind on this.
Habit-forming transit
Philosopher A.N. Whitehead's rule of thumb: "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
Applied to our ecologically threatened lives, this rule of thumb means that an effective green strategy has got to be one that doesn't require anyone ever to think green. Green has got to be built into the infrastructure that shapes our daily routines.
Roads and rails are just such routine-shapers and therefore deserve our full attention and wisest decisions. As we assess their impacts, we can see that a widened road encourages car-centered habits; mass transit encourages greener routines. Forecasting the long-term future, I contend that the road to ecological hell is paved with wide swaths of concrete - not with intentions of any sort.
William Washabaugh
UWM Professor of Anthropology
Milwaukee
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