Thoughts for today
Drive on I-270 and it's hard to miss. Like the bitterly ironic suburban paradise in Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands, rows of cookie-cutter houses and apartment complexes line Columbus highways in idyllic glory. Strip malls offer dry cleaners, video stores and fast food restaurants. A sprawling suburban monster has wrapped its hideous concrete tentacles around Columbus, eating up farmland and consuming every small town in its path. Bexley, Whitehall and Upper Arlington were the first victims to be devoured. But its hunger is insatiable, seemingly unstoppable, as designer strips like Easton continue to be constructed. Building new roads to reach the "exurbs," the suburbs beyond the suburbs, will feed the malignancy around central Ohio in years to come, causing more travel time, congestion and reliance on cars.
In the rush to build the American Dream, suburbia is turning into a traffic nightmare. And if changes aren't made soon, the city's traffic problems will only get worse. COTA has made predictions that over the next 20 years, Columbus will experience a population growth equal to the number of people now living in the city of Cleveland. With that magnitude of a population increase just over the horizon, city and regional planners are working on ways to cut sprawl and increase public transportation. But can Columbus swerve down the right path to relieving traffic congestion and sprawl or will it become just another concrete wasteland?