What we value

 If things work out, I hope to have a few good years left as an urban planner. Continuing to work at it remains more fulfilling than, say, trying to learn to play golf. I’m afraid, though, that I’m beginning to be known as a bit of an old curmudgeon. I’ve even developed a rep as hating the latest fad in my profession: vehicular roundabouts. May I set the record straight?

I don’t hate them. I think they work well. I think they meet their purpose in an excellent fashion. They are fine devices for moving traffic, if that’s the reason that urban planners were placed on Earth.

So, what’s the rub?

 I’m just tired of our spending so much public money to feed the insatiable demands of the automobile. If history tells us one thing, it’s that the demands of the automobile can never be met, nor can that monster ever be satiated. Someday we will know that. Drive slowly and sneak a look next time you cross over Interstate 40. What you’ll see now is the scene of a variety of cars sandwiched in between miles of 18-wheelers, resembling long trains with rubber wheels on concrete tracks.

What you’ll see in maybe five more years is a parking lot stretching from Wilmington, North Carolina to Barstow, California. Our state highway department will then tell us that it needs several trillions of dollars to fix the problem. Oh, and they won’t have a cent left for those kids I see sometimes walking several miles in the summer heat to their first job at a fast-food franchise.

I’m hoping our cities will decide to spend more on their people and less on cars. I don’t really care if someone gets their car from point A to point B faster. What I care about is how fast we can get that kid in dirty diapers off the front porch of that shack in the Arkansas Delta and into an education, a decent home, and a life with a future. He’s waiting for us to help, while his mother is inside earning enough for the next meal or the next hit of methamphetamine, whichever she needs first. Our fundamentalist “Christian” friends say, “Hey, no problem. He’s born now so all is well. Don’t worry, be happy, and just hope he doesn’t decide to be gay.”

Yesterday I visited the site of a memorial to a beloved niece whom I hired for her first job as a grant writer and grant administrator. After a long career, and a losing bout with cancer, she received, posthumously, a monument for procuring a grant to help a city build a splash pad for its youth. It stands as a fitting and well-deserved honor.

What she should receive a monument for, although she won’t, is for the many hot summer evenings she spent in small, frame, often unpainted, churches in the Arkansas Delta, one of the most neglected sections of our country. She’d be meeting, in the stifling heat and the hordes of mosquitoes with a group of poverty-stricken brothers and sisters trying to secure safe drinking water for their families, just drinking water is all.

It’s all a matter of priorities. Our priorities. It reminds me of a call I received in the late 1990s. I was enjoying a limited, but not particularly lucrative, success as a planning consultant. A friend, an attorney with whom I had done some work, was the caller. He had left his job in Little Rock and moved to Northwest Arkansas, a region richly blessed by the whims of modern history.

“You need to move up here,” he said. “There’s money to be made.”

I supposed that there was, but said, “No, I’ll stay down here.”

“Why? Don’t you want to be where the action is happening?”

I thought for a moment. “No,” I said again.

“Why?” he said again.

“Oh,” I said, “I think the Galilean would have me stay where the action isn’t happening.”

The Libertarian Roundabout