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Stupidity is always tiresome, but especially so when it sabotages reasonable initiatives at the outset.

The U.S. began to reengineer the cities around mass automobile commuting after WWII. This isn’t the place to sort out all the plusses and minuses, but it’s fair to say that scale matters. A lot of the minuses become acute problems once cities cross a size threshold, which varies from place to place depending on local topography and the presence or absence of a compact downtown core. Arterial roads slashed through city and inner-ring suburban neighborhoods do vast damage that was underappreciated in the great heyday of highway building in the 1950’s-70’s. Remediating some of the damage is long overdue. Burdening sensible corrective actions with racialist gibberish is stupid and counterproductive.

What works in a city of 250-500,000 may not work in an urban conglomeration of 10 million or more (the size of my region, the DC-MD-VA-WV-PA Combined Statistical Area, which is the appropriate framework for transportation planning). Scale matters for infrastructure. That’s just as true for transportation planning as it is for sewage treatment.

Cities should work first and foremost for the people who actually live there. People should be able to walk conveniently and safely around their own neighborhoods. This includes being able to cross the street without have to jump in your car and drive to the nearest expressway crossing two miles away. If suburban commuters have to wait at more stoplights, that’s ok with me. If it’s not ok with them, they can live closer to their jobs or take the train.

I do not underestimate the ability of the current crowd to fumble even simple things, but a lot of what Mayor Pete is talking about (I think) is neighborhood reunification. That’s a good thing. How to do it depends on local conditions and not everything can be fixed, but there are opportunities to make significant improvements in many places. There is a lifecycle for roads as for everything else. When old infrastructure reaches the point that it needs to be comprehensively rebuilt, that’s the time to step in and reengineer some of the stupid mistakes of the 1960’s, which was chock-full of stupid mistakes. Our cities were gutted by bad planning. The modern ghettos centered on vast swaths of public housing disasters aren’t the natural order of things; they’re bad planning. Chronic traffic gridlock is the product of bad planning. Neighborhoods blighted by toxic commuter sewers are the product of bad planning. At least some of these things can be remediated.

Mayor Pete just needs to shut up about race and get on with sensible solutions to addressable problems. Race is a pointless distraction at this point. The political battle is between people who want to spend a fraction of our transportation dollars to mitigate the effects of commuter sewers and, on the other hand, the people who want to spend every available dollar on adding lanes to the existing interstates and pushing new arterial roads through other people’s neighborhoods to shave a few minutes from their 30 miles commutes.

I live in DC. If someone wants to live in Urbana, Haymarket, Stafford County, etc., that’s his business. But take the train. Don’t expect viable inner-ring and urban core jurisdictions to collaborate with the degradation of their own neighborhoods to accommodate extreme commuters who want to continue their addiction to the automobile commute. The state of Virginia is still scrambling to add lanes to I-95 and I-66, which is starting to look like the New Jersey Turnpike. Virginia would do better to take automobile lanes away from I-66 and use the right of way for commuter rail.