A Generational Challenge: Ending the Age of the Automobile

Jeffrey D. Sachs, professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, as well as the author of The Age of Sustainable Development, writes an op-ed for the Boston Globe calling for a new era of sustainable infrastructure.

According to Sachs, infrastructure is a generational challenge, and this generation is tasked with moving beyond the automobile.

The Automobile Age has run its course; our job is to renew our infrastructure in line with new needs, especially climate safety, and new opportunities, especially ubiquitous online information and smart machines.

Although Sachs acknowledges that the country has been neglecting its infrastructure as it deteriorates around us, Sachs says future infrastructure investments must focus on the long term. For a point of comparison, Sachs offers the infrastructure spending of the 2009 federal stimulus package, which focused on shovel-ready projects and jobs creation.

I PROPOSE THE opposite approach to short-term “stimulus.” I’d call it “long-term thinking,” even “long-term planning” (to use an idea that is anathema in Washington). Rather than trying to deploy construction workers within the next 60 days, I propose that we envision the kind of built environment we want for the next 60 years.

Sachs concludes the op-ed with a call to the current generation of planners, engineers, and citizens to use their imagination in envisioning the cities and rural areas of the future, and the kinds of infrastructure that will underpin their communities.