MAKING THE CASE THE WRONG WAY? There has been a change in editors at Destination:Freedom and the new editor's manifesto is not encouraging.

China is out-producing us (and everyone else) despite massive inefficiencies (the Chinese use eight times as much energy to produce a ton of steel as we do, yet still beat us on price). In part, that is because there are essentially no environmental or labor laws in China. Those are important factors, and we need to make sure that American workers are not forced into the kind of filthy, slave-labor environment in which the third world toils. But they are also producing engineers by the millions, and we are not. We can’t simply bemoan the competition, because they are winning. We have to beat it, and to do that we will have to do everything smarter and better and more innovatively, and that means travel and shipping have to be faster, cheaper, and more efficient. Take a close look and listen to what Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, is doing with his company, because he gets it. America needs to rationalize --- by that I mean make sensible and logical what is presently wasteful and stupid --- all that it does.

But apparently working faster does not include using aircraft to connect cities separated by farmland or empty space.

For example, it made no sense for jet planes to hop between cities less than 400-500 miles apart when jet fuel was 90 cents a gallon. Now that it is going to $4-5 a gallon, it makes even less sense. Yet we are still going at a snail’s pace in building high speed rail between America’s cities, and a good distribution network at train terminals so people can get around when they get where they want to go. It’s not about wanting choo-choos. It’s not about nostalgia. It’s about winning.

Outside of California, the Official Region, and the Chicago area, where are the emerging corridors that will support a train service calling at stations spaced 50-100 miles apart?

The cost of housing is through the roof in many parts of America, yet as energy costs spiral upward, and congestion worsens, the pressure to live closer to jobs will increase, not decrease, putting still more upward pressure on housing costs. One solution: much better, faster, and more frequent commuter rail, and transit-oriented development.

Possibly. But the houses that will gain in value will be precisely the kind of transit-located, space-conserving high-rises that people have been paying money to move away from. Will the school districts that come bundled with those houses be up to the challenge?

Of course, the question is always raised, how do we pay for all that? And one answer has got to be: stop building unnecessary highways that only make congestion worse. The Highway Trust Fund needs to become a Transportation Trust Fund, and we need a Congress that understands why that is true. As I am fond of saying, highways are a great thing, but they can’t be the only thing.

What unnecessary highways? Private vehicle miles driven have grown far more rapidly than highway miles. Although the Superintendent is partial to Anthony Downs's corollary to Parkinson's Laws on highway congestion, surely the slow expansion of capacity, coupled with the rebuilding-in-place of the existing roads is a more plausible villain than the provision of a few mile roads into now more-settled areas.