Former Metro Chief: Roads are "Monstrous Ribbons of Asphalt and Aggregate"

August 22, 2008

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Mike Burton’s comments (tongue in cheek?) in the Zero (here) the other day put in stark words why we don’t have more roads and why moneys go to street cars, light rail and bike paths. The simple truth is that these guys hate roads. And cars. For us I mean. For them cars and SUV’s (see Earl “Bow Tie” Blumenauer driving his hybrid SUV nearby) are perfectly appropriate to use because they have important business to attend to. Us, not so much. They’d prefer us to be on government transportation going to and fro at the government’s timing.
In Burton’s piece about naming a street for Cesar Chavez (he doesn’t like it and much prefers a copse or statue named for the labor leader–hey, we agree on something!) he decries streets as “intrusive,” “obtrusive,” and “obnoxious.”

“…then we should look to something less intrusive and obnoxious than a street.”

“This oil and aggregate mixture is spread across the landscape, taking up thousands of acres in all directions. While the streets may take you home or to work, they are there mainly to convey cars and trucks which write a large carbon footprint on the place and planet.”

Of course streets also get you to work where you are productive. They also get your child to school, but no matter.
It’s also odd that a man who sits on a board for economic development and freight conveyance thinks so little of the ways that allow the growth of those things(streets, roads, highways and interstates).
But streets themselves are not the only target in his cross hairs. After all, a guy who hates streets hates the cars that drive on them, calling them,

“an embarrassing indication of crass American consumerism.”

If their actions didn’t speak loudly enough for you, now you have their abject disdain in black and white. I wonder if Burton first began mulling this piece as he drove in his late model Jaguar on one of those “monstrous ribbons of asphalt.”

Tell ’em where you saw it. Http://www.victoriataft.com