Improving conditions for bicycling in Bloomington was the top priority expressed by the public during the city’s alternative transportation workshop last month.

The city’s planning office will use the feedback to update the city’s Alternative Transportation and Greenways System Plan, which has not been revised since it was originally adopted in 2001.

According to the original plan document, the plan’s goal is to “mitigate traffic congestion and improve the health, fitness, and quality of life of its residents,” and includes bus and pedestrian options as well as cycling. In addition to bike paths and signed routes, the plan includes “sidepaths” – a wide sidewalk open to bicycles – and multi-use trails that would be open to any non-vehicle traffic.

It was cycling, however, that received the most attention at workshop, which was attended by about 20 people. Planners heard repeated calls for better bicycle access to College Mall and the west-side retail area, the city’s main shopping hubs. The obvious routes are dangerous, participants said, and getting to those routes from outlying neighborhoods by bicycle is difficult.

It's 2:33 p.m. on Saturday, and we just started rolling out of Chicago, 18 minutes late, on the Empire Builder. This train, the eponymous benefactor of the Great Northern railway's founder James Hill, has traveled between Chicago and the West Coast for the past 77 years. For much of its history, it simply was the link between the Pacific Northwest and the rest of the country.

By Monday morning, when the train arrives at the Pacific Ocean, I will have journeyed some 2,200 miles. Our route takes us from Chicago, through Milwaukee and Minneapolis, then to Fargo and places ever northward. We'll spend all of Sunday skimming along just below the Canadian border before turning slightly southwards into the Cascade mountains and down to the sea.

Although the Empire Builder originated with the Great Northern railway, it's no longer a product of it. The Great Northern ceased to exist in the early 1970s, merged into the Burlington Railroad to become the Burlington Northern and then, as railroad merger mania continued, into its present form, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF), one of the last remaining Class I railroad powerhouses.

When it comes to long-distance, economical, eco-friendly travel in America, the options are relatively limited. While Europe is interconnected by an increasingly complex series of train routes, Amtrak is viewed by some as a slow and unreliable alternative to air travel. And Greyhound has been cutting routes, including the one from Bloomington to Indianapolis.

Until last April, many Americans who found themselves without a car or the several hundred dollars needed to buy a plane ticket were stuck at home.

On April 10, "megabus," a "low-cost, daily, express bus service" that started in the UK branched out to form a new hub in Chicago. From there, one can travel to a host of Midwestern cities: Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Toledo, Minneapolis/St. Paul, St. Louis, and, most important locally, Indianapolis.

The summer of 2006 is shaping up to be a decisive moment in the history of U.S. communications policy. Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are considering measures that would radically transform the way American's access the Internet.

Apart from the prospect of tiered Internet access, the proposed legislation fails to ensure universal access to broadband networks, which amounts to "virtual red-lining" of low-income and rural areas.

These same measures would reduce or eliminate the authority local communities have in negotiating cable television franchise fees. This legislation threatens the funding and future viability of public, education and government (PEG) channels.

by Jeanne Melchior

I recently attended a Vincennes District open house, one of six held around the state in mid-August, at which INDOT unveiled its updated 25-year transportation plan. Filled with plans for quite a few new highways and lots of reconstruction, the INDOT 25-year plan was mostly a dinosaur. While safety and mobility should be paramount in highway planning, INDOT unfortunately used these issues to justify building new highways. Rather than looking at sound predictions of the future and current trends, INDOT looked to the past for its planning base. Even the economics are based on an old model that we can see crumbling even as we read about it.

The plan for the future that INDOT unveiled last month with its tiered "statewide mobility corridors" is based on a model of heavy manufacturing with huge numbers of long distance trucks. This is despite the fact that most of the jobs recently lost in Indiana have been manufacturing jobs, and most predictions are that "knowledge workers" will replace factory workers in the jobs of the future. Many studies, including a Congressional Budget Office study, show that an educated workforce is what brings jobs into a community, not more highways.

Recently a FHWA official referred to highway opponents as the "vocal minority." He explained that both the FHWA and INDOT give much stronger credence to what "elected officials" want, believing them to represent the will of the people.

I did my best to try to explain to him that first of all, rural people whose lives are to be most affected by these new highways are few in number and therefore have limited political clout. I reminded him that all too often elected officials represent the handful of special interests who pay for their campaigns and that even given that elected officials might represent the will of the voters (most people don't vote single issues), they don't represent the will of 49% of the voters, nearly half.

And since many people simply don't vote, believing themselves powerless against an unjust system, their voices are not counted either.