Are Highways the "Only Thing"???
(unpublished)
As I waited to cross Missoula's North Orange Street this morning on my daily walk to work, I couldn't help remembering the words of Marvin Dye, head of Montana's Transportation Department. Last fall, at Senator Baucus' Missoula transportation hearing, Dye said "Montana's highways aren't everything. They're the only thing." Odd, the things that pop into one's head while standing on a street corner waiting for a break in traffic.
But as I stood there at 7:45am watching car after car coming off Interstate 90, it seemed that Mr. Dye was right in a way that he probably didn't intend. Our highways are becoming the "only thing" in Montana.
They're fast replacing things like community, as we encapsulate and atomize our lives, leaving home every morning for the 40-, 50-, or 60-minute drive to work. Who has time to get involved in community if we spend up to 2 hours or more a day driving back and forth? And which community should we care about? The one where we live? The one where we work? Or, a telling point here, the ones we drive through on our way to work? For a growing number of Montanans, the answer is, sadly, none of the above.
Our focus on highways as "the only thing" is also replacing our sense of place. It should come as no surprise that big box stores like Wal-mart and Costco, with their vast appetites for parking acreage and their powerful abilities to kill small locally-owned businesses, locate on or near our highways. They need to serve big areas and the highways bring them the customers they must have. In the process, we Montanans may well lose important things like our downtowns and other human-scale places.
A few months ago, I stopped in Dillon on the way home from Idaho. I could have stayed at a motel out on the strip but, instead, I stayed at a wonderful 1897 hotel right in the heart of town. After checking in, I walked around, buying a couple of things at the downtown IGA, stopping for a browse at the historic city library, looking in shop windows up and down the street, and finally settling down for a nice dinner at a local Chinese restaurant. Downtown Dillon is a great place to walk around. But make no mistake about this: our single-minded focus on highways combined with our current land use practices will never ever create another place like Downtown Dillon-or Bozeman, or Hamilton, or Havre, or Kalispell, or Miles City, or any other of the great towns and cities we have in our state. It will only give us more places like Missoula's 93 Strip or 10th Avenue South in Great Falls. Ugly places devoted to the car and nothing else.
Our view of highways as "the only thing" also eliminates transportation choice for many Montanans. After all, only a die-hard like me would try to walk a mile and a half to work in the face of more and more traffic. At some point, most of us will give up and put away our walking shoes or our bicycles and drive everywhere. We take to our cars for short trips, not necessarily because we want to, but out of simple self-preservation. We just don't want ourselves or our kids to get killed by someone speeding down the arterial while talking on a celphone.
Standing there waiting for that elusive chance to cross North Orange, I also remembered something Senator Baucus said at the same transportation hearing. To make a point in support of more money for highways, he quoted Hillary Clinton: "Montana's not just rural, it's mega-rural." True enough, I suppose, in some places. Whatever "mega-rural" is, I'm sure I've seen it during my travels around the state. But as car after car went by on North Orange this morning, taking one person each to work, Montana didn't seem so rural to me. Certainly not "mega-rural." Montana is fast becoming "mega-suburban." At least in places like Missoula, Bozeman, Kalispell, and Hamilton, with our double digit growth. We're replacing our ranches and wild lands with 20-acre ranchettes; we're replacing our cities and towns with franchise food joints and big box strips; we're replacing many of the things we love most about Montana with the things we hate most about California and Florida.
Do we need to build and maintain highways? Of course. Are highways important to Montana? Absolutely. Can we do without them? No. But are they the "only thing?" Not by a long shot. Our Senior Senator and the head of our Transportation Department need to remember that highways are powerful tools-tools that can be used for good or for ill . As we've seen in many places, they can easily destroy that which they're supposed to serve.
In the next week or so, Senator Baucus will introduce his new transportation
bill, STARS 2000. The sketchy information I've seen suggests it will be
aimed largely at highway building, giving significantly more power to state
transportation departments, and greatly reducing our national commitment
to air quality. It looks like citizens and local governments won't get any
more of a voice than we have now, which isn't too much. Is this the kind
of law that will take us where we want to go in the 21st Century? Good question.
But I, for one, want a bill that makes sure we can still walk around places
like Downtown Dillon and can still see more than a few bits of open space
between the big box stores. Oh, and it'd be great if I could get across
North Orange Street, too.