How about this from City Lab? The federal Transportation Department, from whom much money flows, has produced a Transportation Toolkit, described as a plain language guide to getting involved into the tricky and technical business of highway construction projects.

I think it safe to say some of the advice is already known in Little Rock. Opposition to the concrete gulch known as 30 Crossing to further erode downtown Little Rock began early in the process and has produced some changes, limited and insufficient though they have been. The media have been engaged, too. But the new publication sounds useful.

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This is pretty progressive stuff coming from an agency that that not long ago plowed superhighways through cities, despite the objections of those in the way. The lives of transportation decision-makers at federal and state levels would still be a lot easier if they didn’t factor in the human consequences of traffic engineering. But in recent years, the DOT has placed more emphasis on remedying the ills of 20th century transportation policies, which often “excluded or divided communities… particularly for transit-dependent populations in minority and low-income neighborhoods,” the toolkit states. Under Secretary Anthony Foxx, the DOT has developed special design challenges, leadership academies, and grant programs aimed at bridging those gaps. This guide helps citizens play a role.

Whether this forward-thinking leadership will continue under the next president is anybody’s guess. Donald Trump claims to want big infrastructure spending. The wider the freeway the greater the spending.

Here in Little Rock we still hold that there’s no better policy than plowing super highways through city, widening them ever more to speed suburbanites fleeing the decay the highways have wrought.

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