It's the transportation, stupid!

On Friday, May 20, UWL will host the Active Transportation conference where people from around the region will discuss methods to encourage and accelerate effective strategies for engaging people in active modes of transportation. The more people who bicycle, walk, and take public transportation to work, school, errands, recreation, the few people will be driving. Since personal vehicle use contributes and large part of the United States' greenhouse gas emissions, whatever can be done to decrease personal driving will help reduce climate change causing emissions. Interested citizens can sign up for the afternoon sessions and an active transportation lunch.

The following day, May 21, the Wisconsin Bike Summit will be held at the Radisson in La Crosse. This day long event will cover many aspects of bicycling from economic benefits of having a bicycle friendly community and including bicycling in tourism planning, to infrastructure design, to vulnerable user laws, to encouraging bicycling among various segments of our society. Mayor Tim Kabat will speak at the conference opening and Prof. James Longhurst of UWL will be the luncheon keynote speaker.

Both these events point to the importance of non-personal-vehicle travel to health, economics, livable communities, and a sustainable planet.
A new book, Why We Drive: The past, present, and future of the automobile in the United States, uses comics, text, historic pictures, charts, and graphs to show how much we have been taken over by car culture. It was recommended during the planning of the recent anti-frac sand rally. The frac sand creates its own hazards and dangers to the health of people, animals, natural area, and *communities, but it is also the first step on the path to the dangerous practice of extracting fossil fuels for use in energy production and transportation. It is not easy to change this culture, especially when so many businesses and policies have been build up to sustain it, but we must change it and we have to do it now.

A great letter to the editor by Minnesota fractivist Donna Buckbee points out that fracking is related to how we "get here."

The question “How did we get here?" really needs to be about something more profound than our mode of transportation to a rally. We need to start asking, “How did we get so dependent on fossil fuels that we're willing to destroy the planet?”

While doing research in an online archive of old newspapers from Iowa's pioneer past, I came across this map of rail routes through Iowa. One could take a train from Decorah to any corner of the state in the, "comfortable DAY COACHES, magnificent PULLMAN PALACE PARLOR and SLEEPING CARS, elegant DINING CARS, ... [and] ... restful RECLINING CHAIR CARS." This is from 1876.

 Contrast this miracle of modern transportation (from 1876) with a recent effort to not drive to a conference in Madison. The conference was from about 10 a.m. to about 1 p.m. There is ONE bus that goes from La Crosse to Madison and it leaves in the afternoon and arrives in Madison at about 6:00 p.m. So, one would have to leave a day early and stay in Madison overnight. Fine. There's plenty to do in Madison including some mighty fine restaurants, so let's make a little trip out of it. But, oh oh, coming back ... there is ONE bus that goes from Madison to La Crosse and it leaves at 10:35 a.m. and arrives in La Crosse in the early afternoon. Hmmm. That's a SECOND night stay over in Madison. And the round trip ticket cost is more than twice the cost of gas for a car. Clearly, the bus is not going to cut it.

What about the train. We are fortunate to have an Amtrak line going through our city. Alas, Amtrak does not go to the capitol of our state. Your choices are take a train to Chicago and a bus to Madison - a five hour trip that costs about $70 one way OR take the train to Columbus, Wisconsin and a bus from there. But - yikes - the Amtrak pulls into Columbus at about 1:00 p.m. and the bus that goes from Columbus to Madison leaves Columbus at 12:40 p.m.

Meanwhile, in the tiny burg of Wehe-den-Hoorn, Netherlands, a village of fewer than 1,000 inhabitants, several buses per day will transport you to a regional transportation hub where you can connect to a very expansive web of trains and buses that will get you from there to the whole of Europe and beyond for a very reasonable fee and usually on time and in comfort.

You have to assume that even a fifth grader could come up with a better transportation system than we have here in Wisconsin where we are pretty much forced to drive personal vehicles over increasingly *crumbling roads to get anywhere. What if our lives, our planet, depended on changing this system?

It DOES!