In the Chronicle
David Kaplan asks 15 Houstonians to “offer ideas that would either benefit Houston or get the U.S. economy rolling again.” Some transportation-related responses, including mine:
JAMES D. CALAWAY, CEO of Calaway Interests and former president of the Center for Houston’s Future:
One of America’s greatest opportunities is to transform itself from a society dependent on dirty fossil fuels into one dominated by clean, renewable electricity.
Nowhere is the opportunity for change greater than in the transportation sector. We currently price fuel to support low miles- per- gallon vehicles, and have failed to account for, and allocate the cost of protecting the supply lines and the environment from global warming. We must now take the bold steps required to factor these costs into the price of fuel.
The best way is through a substantial fuels tax that attempts to reflect those costs in a gallon of gasoline.
LARS LERUP, dean, school of architecture, Rice University:
Typically, radical rethinking and technical innovation take more than seven years to reach market.
Many unnecessary delays are caused by turf wars and politics. But not so in times of crisis. Recall the impressive cooperation between our mayor and the county judge in the aftermath of Ike.
Suddenly all paths are cleared. But when the crisis is over, all is back to normal: The city and county at loggerheads refusing to acknowledge their mutual dependency.
And how about the global crisis? President-elect Obama hires a distinguished scientist as energy secretary. Will Congress forgo politics, and open the Pandora’s box of the energy question and submit nuclear and biofuels to an objective evaluation while stopping to blame the oil companies?
Will the nation be able to create what Peter Galison, the Harvard historian of science, calls a trading -zone an arena of intense creativity and renewed ambition? Here the public good is at the center, and scientists are not steered by the Nobel Prize and politicians by re-election, but by the great American Experiment that spawned the westward move, the melting pot, and the space program.
CHRISTOF SPIELER, director of technology and innovation, Morris Architects:
The most important thing we can do right now is build the bones of the denser city we are already becoming.
Houston was the energy capital of the 20th century because its port, its railroads, and its downtown brought together speculators, engineers, and roughnecks. It can be the energy capital of the 21st, too, but only if people want to live here and companies want to locate here. Today, that means creating denser, walkable, interesting, energy-efficient urban places. To do that, we have to build the right infrastructure.
Building roads to nowhere may create jobs in the short term. But building complete streets, effective transit, and good public places is also an investment in our future economic strength.