Cars are bankrupting Salem -- not just a downtown thing

       
http://www.planetizen.com/node/68574

Great post that helps explain why cars are bankrupting Salem, and it's got very little to do with the downtown core area where all the friction occurs over car storage.  The expanding periphery -- sprawl -- is an exponentially rising cost; the more we pave, the more things are pushed apart, requiring even more paving over a larger area.  

In other words, we're in the terminal phase of the Red Queen problem from Alice in Wonderland -- we have to run faster and faster just to stay in place.  We've built a city where cars come first, ahead of people, and it's bankrupting us.  We're cutting public goods like libraries to find the money to service our auto sprawl development pattern, which is devouring our budget.  And the more we sprawl, the more the sprawl lobby demands even more paving, which further devours the budget for actually providing services people might want (because the costs of serving low density sprawl development gets factored into everything from water and sewer networks to police, fire, streetlights, etc.)

It's time to stop.  

We need to institute a hard cap on paved surface in Salem, and concentrate our limited funds on maintaining and preserving what we have, and making it more usable to everyone -- the young, the old, the handicapped, and the poor -- starting by rebuilding our embarrassment of a pitiful part-time public transit system.

Not one more foot of paving in Salem until we are done restoring the transit system to a standard appropriate for a capital city in an environmentally aware state in a first-world country and making every existing road and street in Salem safe and welcoming for pedestrians and bicyclists aged 8 to 80+.

It's time to admit that we have a drinking problem -- we've been drinking the sprawl lobby's Kool-Aid (tm) for so long that we're seeing more of the actual and figurative bodies pile up around us, as we keep not seeing the decomposing blue whale plopped right in front of us:  our addiction to making cars the centerpieces of our civic life instead of people.