The Times ran a long opinion piece by Walt Crowley, who died last week at the too-young age of 60. It has a nice history of how transportation moved away from rail in the first half of the twentieth century, and how we now have the choice to move in the opposite direction:
Passage of the roads-and-transit plan will not instantly unclog highways nor usher in some modern version of a 19th-century City Beautiful utopia overnight. It will, however, mark a tipping point not unlike the predicted thawing of the polar ice caps, a one-way threshold of no return. We will always need roads and highways, but once the momentum of transportation investment steers away from the gas-powered automobile in favor of transit and other alternatives, there will be no going back.
The read whole thing, it’s very interesting. It’s an interesting perspective, and Crowley was very optimistic about the end of the automobile era. At least here, it’ll only happen if we pass prop 1.