The Hurricanes, Cars, Highways, And Public Transportation.

Now that the hurricanes have passed people are drawing lessons. Here are two.

First, everybody should own their own car, no matter what it takes. The people with cars were able to evacuate themselves. The people without had to rely on the government to get them out and New Orleans showed how far that'll get you. About as far as the Superdome and the Convention Center. Even with buses available to evacuate people they weren't used.

Second, government needs to build more highways not public transportation. The evacuation of Houston clogged the highways for miles out of town as millions of people took to the roads. I don't know what it's like to build a highway in Texas but here in California it's about as hard a thing to do as you can imagine. Nobody wants a new freeway in their neighborhood, environmental groups oppose it, and the transporation planners just want to build rapid transit. "Smart growth" they self-congratulatorily call it. The hurricanes have revealed that for disaster preparedness anyway it's not very smart at all.

-tdr

UPDATE: Somebody who agrees with me here.