Thanks to Congressman Oberstar! I hope his colleagues in Congress can be brought around to seeing that we need to invest in a multi-modal transportation system rather than sinking billions of dollars into expanded highways and more auto infrastructure.

The world is changing rapidly and the worst thing we could do for the health of our economy and our communities would be to expand upon the 1950's Interstate Freeway system.

Here's a brief film (2 minutes) taking a look into the future of Minneapolis if we choose to invest in an auto-dominated system once again:

http://blip.tv/file/1643573

I was reading about this in the huffington post. (see my link http://ws.collactive.com/points/point?id=mEB4n46AtV2O )

I completely agree with Craig Aaron, who worries about the corporate cronies who have been trying to insert themselves into this process.

To me, the most important infrastructure we can build is the internet.

In the 1970's people who were around then may remember that if you wanted to have a phone in your house, you could only rent one from bell telephone. you were not allowed to purchase your own. That's why phones in the 1970's looked just like the same ones that were around in the 1940's. Then the government broke up Bell telephone, and there was a renaissance in the phone business. For one thing, you could purchase your own phone. Not only that but you could attach an acoustic modem to your phone line. that was the beginning of the internet for the public, really. against the will of the phone companies, these modems had a normal competitive market, and they rapidly got faster. they went from 150 bits per second for the earliest ones to 56,000 bits per second, by the time broadband came along.

but now we have come full circle. the vast majority of broadband users have a cable modem. its the same cable modem we have had for years. it is owned by the cable company. we cannot control it, or upgrade it. it takes all its commands from the internet provider. its far slower than it could be.

Right now, we could have 1-10Gbit internet, but these monopolies are doing what they can to keep us from having that, so they can use the bandwidth for their own products, rather than for the public.

The wires go across public lands, and yet, the phone and cable companies think it belongs to them, and not to us. as a result, the internet has gotten more and more expensive and it hasn't gotten faster nearly at the speed it could do so.

so now that we are about to invest in building out the internet, we are at a crossroads.

we can hand more money to the phone companies, who have already taken billions from us in increased billing to build us a high speed network that they've mostly kept for themselves and their tv services, or we can build a real internet, that isn't owned by any companies, that is completely neutral and that will grow and accelerate with the real forces of the market.

Just make sure to write your representative and tell them you do not want our money tossed at the verizons and at&ts of the world. they already have their lobbyists in there, i can assure you, trying to take away our internet even more... don't let them.