On May 20th, PBS aired a documentary on the transportation infrastructure in the US. It highlighted the cities of Denver, Portland, and New York City. I was very impressed with the video, which can be found here. The documentary focused more on the mind set of transportation and less on the technical aspects. One of the questions of the documentary was, how do you combat sprawl? (Although I would have liked to see more on while sprawl is bad for us). In Denver, the city decided to build a highway or "belt-way" around the city. This helped lead Denver to be, at one point, the third most congested city in America with many days deemed too polluted to be outside. Portland chose a different route. Instead of building an expressway through town, they decided to put the money towards transit including light rail and biking. Now Portland is one of the most attractive places to live in the U.S.
All in all, I highly recommend watching it.
Couple notes:
-Oregon Iron Works is building the first street car in America in over many decades
-I believe Denver is slowing turning itself around with investments in light rail
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