The United States is a country full of aging and failing infrastructure. We choose not to keep up with it as it ages and then spend more to repair it because we wait to long to do so. Earlier this month, a bridge in Pittsburg collapsed and many in that city are worried about other bridges that are the same age failing. The American way of maintaining important roads is to put a band-aid on it to fix it temporarily in the cheapest way possible. We actually end up spending more money, because we aren't fixing it for good.

This mentality transfers over into public transportation as well. Public transit, to many it is viewed as only for the poor. Which plainly spoken isn't true. If you grow up in a major east coast city like DC or New York, you will use public transit even if you aren't poor. It can often get you there faster and cheaper than by car, because of how bad traffic is. Yet, so much public transit is limited to just major cities. You have a much harder time traveling across the country or in smaller cities with it. It's not just the lack of trains, but lack of buses as well. We've built it in a way so that cars are the only option.

Lets turn back time, how did we get here? After WW2, you had a lot of pressure to expand the road system to allow for more cars as more people were able to afford them. In some areas, this expansion of cars led to destroying the ability to use walking/biking as a form of transit. If you now have a major highway between where you want to do, you can't easily walk it. Or a 6 lane 55 MPH road with no sidewalk. It's not safe to walk or bike along these roads as drivers don't care about pedestrians.

It would be amazing to have more walkable/public transit in cities and even outside of cities. I miss the ability to bike to almost any store I wanted to go to back when I lived in the DC area. I could get basically anywhere. Moving outside of the suburbs of DC in Northern Virginia allowed me to realize that isn't the case in much of the country. Where it is the case, a lot more people don't have the ability to spend the time it takes. I had the luxury of being a teenager/20 something with more time than money and biking 30 minutes each way to go to best buy was never an issue.

I miss the ability to bike places. I used to think biking was superior. Buying a car is something one should be happy about, more freedom, ability to go anywhere. Yet it didn't give me those feelings. It more gave me the feelings of oh I'm in a place now where I can't bike everywhere or walk everywhere. I have to live this lifestyle of majority using a car as my transit.

I'm not saying to get rid of cars. That isn't my motive here. I just want the ability for a greater combination of transportation. If you have more buses, more bikeable areas, and more trains for transportation, you have more options. If my car breaks down somewhere and I live it at a shop, I am forced to call an uber, lyft, or taxi. I can't just hop on the bus and get back to my home. I'm forced to put more miles on my car by driving when if able, I would prefer to bike.

Additionally, if you have a city that is easy to walk and bike in, that is easy exercise for people. Maybe the stereotype that Americans are fat is partly due to our ideals that we must drive everywhere and only poor people do otherwise. We need to get out of the mentality that public transit, walking, and biking is for poor people. We also need to maintain our bridges and roadways while making them safer for people choosing other ways to go places.