Michael Lind of the New America Foundation thinks that plans for high-speed rail and renewable energy are expensive fantasies that liberals need to give up on as soon as possible.
Lind argues that high-speed rail improvements for commuters would be hugely expensive and would not yield the benefits as would improved highways for freight, and that we need to move to a largely nuclear future in the long term. Anything else is not being "reality based." He writes,
"High-speed rail is the transportation technology of the future -- and always will be...High-speed rail in America is perpetually discussed and never built. The...reason is that federal and state officials repeatedly have concluded that the costs of high-speed rail proposals outweigh the benefits. A train is a kind of expensive, pre-modern bus or truck caravan that can never change its route because it is fastened to the road. As nations grow more affluent, their people prefer the convenience of personal automobile transportation to the inflexibility of mass transit.
If fixed-rail mass transit is a transportation technology of the 19th century rather than of the 21st, what transportation investments make sense? Focusing on freight infrastructure improvements, [which will mean] that, among other things, we need to build more highway lanes and in some cases new highways for the trucks that will continue to carry most freight.
There is [also] no public support in the U.S. or any other industrial democracy for the combination of self-imposed austerity and massive subsidies that would be necessary to create an economy based on renewable energy."
FULL STORY: Goodbye, bullet trains and windmills

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Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools
This six-course series explores essential urban design concepts using open source software and equips planners with the tools they need to participate fully in the urban design process.
Planning for Universal Design
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Gallatin County Department of Planning & Community Development
Heyer Gruel & Associates PA
JM Goldson LLC
City of Camden Redevelopment Agency
City of Astoria
Transportation Research & Education Center (TREC) at Portland State University
Jefferson Parish Government
Camden Redevelopment Agency
City of Claremont