Email to Nancy Pelosi on federal transportation bill

The house is considering a staggering $260B transportation bill, a bill which places the focus on the usual suspects: roads, cars, and drilling. It's an appalling continuation of the 20th century priorities which got us into such a mess of squandered resources, wasteful land use, and reliance on the whims of unstable governments supplying our oil.

Here's my letter to Nancy Pelosi:

It is foolhardy for us to continue spending valuable resources on a highway network which indirectly increases our reliance on fossil fuels, primarily imported.

For energy independence we need to increase the efficiency of our transportation system, which means federal investments, if any, focused on public transit, not highway programs which are a relic of the last, misguided century.

Please end the foolhardy reliance on highway programs which not only increase the nation's already crippling debt burden, but do nothing to create the sort of jobs or infrastructure we need to compete internationally in the 21st century.

It just goes to further demonstrate the profound incompetence of the federal government, and how badly broken our legislative system is. If I or anyone else thought voting in Obama was going to change things, we were hopeless optimists.