Thursday, April 5, 2012

How Have Transportation Views Changed Or Stayed The Same Since the 50s?

SRTC staff is starting work on a revamp of our Metropolitan Transportation Plan. The MTP is a long-term "blueprint" of where transportation in our region is headed in the future. 20+ years in the future. And while that seems like a long time, the distance between today and the 1950's doesn't seem so far away- at least when you watch this film on traffic congestion produced in the 50's by General Motors.

The film talks about how the nation's roads are 'dying' and maintanence is too expensive and how the price of moving freight is going up.

Some areas where we've come a long way since then though include parking and sprawl. The film advocates for a drastic increase in parking lots and the narrator at one point says, "We're running out of roads! We didn't dream big enough."

No comments:


About SRTC

SRTC is the federally designated Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for Spokane County. Urbanized areas with populations exceeding 50,000 people are required to have an MPO. SRTC was formed to address the county's transportation planning needs. It provides coordination in planning between the public, cities, small towns, the county, the state, transit providers, and tribes.

SRTC offers services including transportation monitoring, transportation modeling, census information analysis, travel demand forecasting, historical traffic count analysis, geographic information systems, and trip generation rates.