Jan

23

shovel ready?

Filed Under Alaskan Way Viaduct, Community, Environment, From A to Green, Innovation, Neighborhoods, Parks, Pedestrians, Spokane St. Viaduct project, Streets For People, Transit, Transportation, Zoning | 3 Comments

Is anyone else sick of hearing the phrase ‘shovel ready’ in reference to stimulating the economy and rehabilitating our infrastructure? Most projects that are truly shovel ready (drawings, check. permits, check. fire up the bulldozer!) aren’t what will truly aid the regeneration of 21st century cities. They are very likely to be things like road widenings and interchanges that fuel sprawl and shred urban fabric. Some estimates suggest that three quarters of infrastructure stimulus funding will be for roads. The other quarter will be used to buy the silence of all us bike, tree, transit, urbanism, art, ped, waterfront, etc. advocates. We’ll all get in line and try to get a few good things done with the crumbs from the stimulus table, but can’t we HOPE for more?

Republicans are already rallying around giving more money to rich people instead because even the shovel ready projects can’t get started until 2010. I saw a CNN interviewer chew out a mayor that requested money for parks and trails in his city’s stimulus package. She asked him if he was ashamed of himself since everyone knows those aren’t ‘real’ infrastructure projects like roads and bridges. Frankly, i’d rather leave our economy a little less stimulated than waste the resources of many generations on the shovel ready road projects cluttering the shelves our our state highway departments.

Eighty years ago the united states stimulated itself out of a depression, but also made civic art of our public works. will a random-ass extra lane to redmond be viewed as such eighty years from now? And don’t forget that after this splurge funding of all types, perhaps for decades, will be diminished to pay for this bump. Whether we get it right or wrong now, we’ll be paying for it for a long time to come. So it is time for all urban and environmental minded folks to remind our politicians that great projects in this day and age-reconnecting seattle to a healthy puget sound, mass transit and mobility options, vibrant neighborhoods, and a robust network of green infrastructure-are complex in a good way. They will need talented artists, NGOs, designers, engineers, lawyers (yes, even them), inventors, community organizers, legislators, and developers to make sure the bulldozers and shovels are headed in the right direction on the right projects. If we want to strengthen the economic and environmental foundations of cities for the long-term, we don’t want to waste this opportunity on what happened to be shovel ready in the panic of 2008. we need pencil ready, people ready, carbon ready, future ready!

I’d be interested in your thoughts on how we can shift the messaging on this subject.