Why the 'Friendly' Skies?
The Auto-Air Age Pollutes Skyways and Clogs Roadways

Jane Holtz Kay is an architecture and planning writer and author of Asphalt
Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back.

The word sprouted just in time for Earth Day this past spring that at long last, planes could fly the now-friendly skies over Washington. To and from National Airport. Over the Pentagon. Over the Capitol. Over the White House. Great god of the airways, free at last!

Well, pardon me if I don't uncork the metal-capped, water-thin red wine, the insipid white Bordeaux, or the Bloody Mary mix -- no vodka -- that keeps me from starving on the new food-free flights.

In World War II, we fought for the Four Freedoms. Now we're blessed with the four freedoms of flight: freedom to fill the skies with noisy aircraft. Freedom to search and seize our nail clippers. Freedom to pollute the airways. And the last thing Americans need: freedom to support sprawl-breeding, habitat-wrecking airports.

While Amtrak is starved close to extinction, and Americans become a nation of queasy air travelers, we have yet to contemplate the truly knee-quaking environmental and urban consequences of our fly-drive society. The planes spewing volatile organic compounds that add poisonous smog to the air at ground level, double or triple at higher altitudes. Its jet contrails alter our climate below.

And while we're down to earth here, the damage to our cities and selves multiplies as we spread way out yonder.

Not only do airports despoil the land and add to sprawl, they draw jobs outwards from the city. Instead of supporting appropriate short- or longer-distance rail, the $40 billion spent to build or enlarge airports under the federal Air Expansion Act of 2000 has fed more flying and more haphazard development in a decade of expanding and building across our farmland and fringes. The political reason? Some 71 percent of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives received PAC money from the airline industry that year.

Some folks find the rise of this "Aerotropolis" just fine. They acclaim the gateway airports stretching 15 miles outwards in Los Angeles, Dallas, Memphis, Miami, and D.C., fueling regional economic engines, feeding the global push for "time sensitivity." But how about our human and environmental sensitivity to the "airport city phenomena."

It isn't just the clutter of mall-filled mega-terminals that hit the outburbs. It's the roads and parking lots for flyers and workers. It's the clogged eight- and 10-lane freeways. It's the airport conference halls and edge city hotels sucking business from downtown. And, when close-in airport expansions hit our communities, it's the noise that breeds air rage from the neighbors.

A recent Washington rally for rail by 55 organizations -- from mayors to manufacturers to union leaders -- couldn't have come at a better time to urge lawmakers to end this decade's over-subsidized style of mobility. We must replace the auto-air excess with light and heavy rail lines, with energy-efficient, city-friendly public transit service to unclog roads and stop sprawl.

Expand rail. Mimic Europe's salutary train short-haul service. And, hey, why not a high-speed, long haul, east-west, cross-continental line from, say, San Francisco to Washington, D.C.? At 200 miles-per hour for 2,600 miles, it need not be a daydream. Step on the train at 5 p.m. Dinner at eight. Snooze in a cozy sleeper, and you hit Washington and work at nine o'clock. No red eye. No unfriendly skies. And, better yet: No battered landscape.

This is Jane Holtz Kay for TomPaine.com.
Published: Jun 20 2002

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