Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Back On Track.” On weekdays, Charlie Lybrand’s car doesn’t budge from its parking space. A student of economics at Denver’s Metropolitan State College, Lybrand lives in an apartment complex in the suburb of Englewood. Just out the door is a light-rail station. “I use […]
Transportation
Posted inNovember 14, 2005: Back On Track
Light rail moves inland from the ‘Left Coast’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Back On Track.” On any given Sunday afternoon in Salt Lake City, Utah, families in their shirt-and-tie finest queue up at light-rail stations near the Mormon temple. On a Saturday night, fans of the Utah Jazz, the city’s professional basketball team, disembark for a […]
Posted inWotr
Why I Cherish the Road to Nowhere
When I was a kid, I hated roads that went to nowhere. Lonely and, to a first-grader’s eyes, completely featureless, the high desert of my childhood had plenty of them. Roads to nowhere meant frustratingly long rides in a station wagon without air-conditioning, whizzing along flat open spaces with tumbleweeds blowing across the highway, the […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 2005: Rangeland Revival
The return of the hodgepodge
That wasn’t just a transportation bill that President Bush signed earlier this month in Illinois. No, the measure — which will spend $286.45 billion in six years on highways, rail and bus service, and bike and hiking trails — has a far more elaborate name. It’s the “Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act — […]
Posted inJune 21, 2004: A Walk Between Worlds
Mining town gambles on a road to riches
A new highway will bypass a competitor, and sacrifice a bighorn sheep herd for development
Posted inWotr
There’s a way to end the RS 2477 road mess
The West’s public lands face many 21st century problems, including pressure from population growth and energy development. But they also face an old problem — the legacy of the Mining Law of 1866, which granted rights-of-way “for the construction of highways” on federal lands not set aside for other uses. That grant became section 2477 […]
Posted inWotr
Protecting fake wilderness goes against the law
Environmental groups are going “wild” over the Interior Department’s recent decisions to recognize Western road claims and chuck out the Clinton administration’s wilderness study policy. Before getting into the angry rhetoric, however, a bit of history is in order. This entire flapdoodle hinges on interpretation of two laws, Revised Statute 2477 — RS 2477 for […]
Posted inJuly 2, 2001: Can Nevada bury Yucca Mountain?
A maverick mayor takes on sprawl
Salt Lake’s Rocky Anderson fights the ‘highways first’ establishment