As I came to the end of writing the second volume in my two-volume history of Connecticut transportation, I began to see different ways in which the story I was telling resonated in today’s world. From an historical perspective, Connecticut is at a crossroads in its transportation story. Events have created a nexus of transportation policies and programs unique in Connecticut history. For the first time since the Europeans arrived in Connecticut nearly four centuries ago, responsibility for all manner of transportation services has been placed under the bureaucratic domain of one mega-governmental agency comprised of two divisions: the Federal Department of Transportation in Washington and within the state government, the Connecticut Department of Transportation. Together, these two agencies act jointly to plan, finance and execute all major transportation improvements in the state, with the federal agency providing the lead on financing, and therefore policy as well. (Completing this hierarchy are the 169 towns in Connecticut, where local projects are conceived and executed.)
This tri-level bureaucracy, a common arrangement today in numerous areas of government services besides transportation, often presents policy makers with complex decisions upon which the transportation future of the state depends. Since both policy and financing flow downhill from Washington through a maze of government bureaucracy, how are decision-makers to determine a transportation system that best serves the needs of Connecticut? We must never forget that transportation, like the provision of all government services, is a political activity rightly subject to the vagaries of our political system. Still, within these constraints, this blog is dedicated to the belief that many important decisions should be influenced not just by the kind of quantitative data that are normally collected by transportation engineers, but also by less formal, descriptive information derived from our state’s history. My hope is that this blog will add relevant aspects of the state’s transportation history to discussions of transportation policy today. History broadens our perspective on present day problems, and this broader, more inclusive perspective can lead to more informed opinions by decision makers and citizen voters alike.
As I completed this history and finally saw the full story of Connecticut transportation in one piece across the centuries, I realized how the story of Connecticut Transportation mirrored what I call “the story of our times.” The story of Connecticut transportation has three main characters: the people, by which I mean the number of persons living in the state at any given time and how they use the land on which they live; the technology, which encompasses the changes over time in the modes people used to transport themselves and the goods they produce; and the natural environment, which includes all aspects of the web of life, such as clean air and water, on which humankind depends for survival. Since Europeans colonists arrived in Connecticut nearly four centuries ago, we see a story of an ever-increasing population living within a fixed geographic area but increasingly interdependent with people and services from outside the state and the nation, all sustained by technologies that have upset the ecological balance of the natural environment to the point where imbalances that are detrimental to our survival are global in scope. This is the story of our time: the massive impact of humankind and its technologies on the natural environment. What are we to do?
Looking back, we can now see how the burst of environmental awareness propagated in the 1960s (symbolized by the whole earth images first broadcast by the Apollo astronauts) was a turning point in this human story of technology versus ecology. Since then, we have educated ourselves on the problem and debated possible solutions. We have even taken limited actions to ameliorate the situation. For example, the trend in the auto industry toward electric vehicles and in the housing industry toward solar and geothermal power. In Connecticut we have recently signed a Transportation Climate Initiative (TCI) with Massachusetts and Rhode Island intended to reduce carbon emissions by 26% over the next decade. All of these are sensible ideas. However, we have yet to take action as a state or a nation commensurate with the scale of the problem; and for good reason. Such solutions threaten our very way of life as Americans, and challenge our long-held belief in technology, unlimited growth and the progress it appears to portend. So, for now, we grapple with trying to understand and take to heart the message that how we live, how we manufacture and consume goods and services, and how we travel across the planet threatens the day-to-day stability of our own existence. As the comic strip character Pogo mused on Earth Day 1971: “We have met the enemy, and he is us!”
History can provide a useful perspective on various aspects of the planetary crisis we face today, including transportation and our attitude toward the land. It is my hope that this blog will prompt a discussion of transportation issues in an historical context that can inform the decisions of policy makers in Connecticut as they face the difficult job of providing for the common good of all our citizens in the decades ahead. Your thoughts, comments and opinions are an important part of this discussion. So, if you have anything too say on this or future blog posts you can send it to me in the comments section below each entry.