How about a ride on a cigar boat?

Half the year gone--poof.

If you think, drivers are cutting back, the pleasure boat industry has been hammered even more. From my inlet vantage point with a view of all comings and goings from various marinas into Long Island bays towards the ocean, those comings and goings are relatively few and far between this summer. Late June--early July weekends normally pack the channel with watercraft--not this year. You've got to have money to burn under any circumstances to take out a cigar boat -- yesterday nary a one passed by to rouse the neighborhood in familiar jackhammer-like cacophony. And the local fishermen seem to be sticking to the docks and surf casting. Marina owners must feel a lot like greenfield suburban developers.

No doubt gasoline costs and energy will become top of mind campaign issues. The candidate worthy of support will map out a long-range plan to get the country out of its mess tied into restoring the nation's rapidly declining infrastructure, which contributes to more wasted time, delays, and costs. We need a New Deal style plan to build new airports, high speed rail, and mass transit, which all link together in our major urban areas, the so-called global gateways where most of our population now gravitates and where most of the nation's business takes place. Not only will a national infrastructure plan help ensure our global competitiveness, it could also put a lot of people to work. Local land use agendas need to tie into the national plan through tax incentives with emphasis on transit oriented development and high rise residential in and around pedestrian friendly urban nodes. We need to take a page from China and reserve 20-30% of our urban and suburban infill for green space--parks convenient to neighborhoods--so people don't have to drive everywhere to recreate. And we need to stop earmarks and funding programs--like tax increment financing--that allow local communities to build roads and sewer systems that perpetuate sprawl and cannibalize tax bases.

Even if we come up with the electric car or the no-carbon footprint car battery, greater self-sufficiency on energy will not solve our congestion crisis. We desperately need a more top down approach to land planning and infrastructure or all the talk about new solutions won't matter much. We're slated to add 100 million people to the country in the next 35 years and we will all be in perpetual gridlock, if we don't fix the system for how we will all move around.

Or we can just keep depending on gas costs increasing and sending more "foreign aid" to some of our favorite places like Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Venezuela. Our roads will be more potholed, but that won't matter so much. Highways will be congestion free--just like the ocean inlet.

Anyone need a cigar boat or a Hummer to drive to the marina?

Comments

[bill]

we need to put a freeze on immigration. We cant add 2 million people a year in the US. There is no way we can reduce our carbon use with those numbers coming in. Soon all our farmland will be used for building little pink houses.

[bill]

We need to drastically reduce immigration to the US. 3 million people a year here is not sustainable! all our farmland will be used to build little pink houses!

[bill]

We need to drastically reduce immigration to the US. 3 million people a year here is not sustainable! all our farmland will be used to build little pink houses!

[bill]

We need to drastically reduce immigration to the US. 3 million people a year here is not sustainable! all our farmland will be used to build little pink houses!

[BDH]

Agree on all accounts, with one clarification. Tax increment financing can be used for encouraging sprawl, but it has and should continue to be used also for encouraging infill development. Much of the redevelopment of areas surrounding downtown Denver - which you spoke highly of in past posts - was financed with TIF funding. Tying that funding to a regional plan that incorporates forward thinking about infrastructure is key. But don't through the TIF baby out with the bathwater.

[driverhawaii]

Oil at $100 per barrel was feared as a disaster. We're now facing $150 per barrel and figuring we'll somehow survive - but still operating businesses as if oil was $50 a barrel. We will change, because there's no other choice. Just as buggy whip makers went broke in the early 1900's, so will businesses which rely on cheaper energy - but they'll be replaced by new industries.