John Norquist, of the Congress for the New Urbanism, on the current rush of state DOTs to Obama’s transport stimulus trough, looking for money to build the same-old status-quo sprawl-subsidizing highway projects:

In case anyone is paying attention, it was just six months ago that skyrocketing gasoline prices were exposing basic flaws in the prevailing transportation and development models that leave more and more Americans with no choice but to use cars to get everywhere. Given the auto-dependent infrastructure America is building for them, and the spread-out communities that result, too many families have no choice but to take food off their tables or clothes off their backs in order to put gas in their tanks.

President Obama understands this problem. His campaign policy paper stated rather eloquently that the amount of fuel we use is “directly related to our land-use decisions and development patterns, much of which have been organized around the principle of cheap gasoline.” He called for moving beyond “our simple fixation of investing so many of our transportation dollars in serving drivers” and instead making it easier for us to walk, bicycle and access transportation alternatives.”

Unfortunately, with few exceptions, state transportation bureaucracies are cueing up projects from the same old concrete-lovers cookbook.

Read the rest of John’s column at CNU.org. Recently, I I wrote a few words about the transport stimulus talk as well. I hope that some form of actual change will come along and put these wasteful highway projects on the shelf in favor of transit, and pedestrian-and-transit-friendly city street projects like converting freeways to avenues and the like. James Oberstar of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is promising a much better balanced transpo bill for the new year, apart from the stimulus, but it’d be nice if the stimulus isn’t burned up in a cloud of car exhaust first.