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“The Federal Government should move immediately to adopt 
a policy which will both increase the level of funding available 
to the development and improvement of transportation services 
and also foster the coordination of all forms of transportation, 
public and private, at Federal, State, regional, and local levels 
of responsibility. 
The Congress of the United States is urged to immediately adopt 
legislation to convert the Highway Trust Fund into a General 
Transportation Fund to be utilized for all modes of transporta- 
tion.” 
At its 62nd Annual Convention, the National Association for the Ad- 
vancement of Colored People affirmed the “right to mobility as a basic 
human right,’ and noted the discrepancies in our present policies. “The 
Urban Mass Transportation Administration of the Department of Trans- 
portation has a budget of $400 million while the Federal Highway Admin- 
istration has a budget of over $5.5 billion. This is all part of a pattern of 
extensive subsidies for road construction, and minimal subsidies for mass 
transportation and transportation planning.” 
Our transportation system is antiquated. The priorities were basically 
set 15 years ago, when Congress decided to undertake a massive road- 
building effort and to allocate the major portion of Federal transportation 
assistance to highways. Building a highway system — one even better than 
the German autobahns — seemed a great idea. 
We have since succeeded in creating a super network of highways, but 
we have also reached the point where more highways will not necessarily 
increase our mobility. Indeed, they are beginning to impede our ability to 
get where we want to go. 
In 1956, there was even some reason to believe that a vast highway net- 
work would add to our national defense. Today, this thought seems absurd: 
If ever a national alert were sounded, we would all be bumper to bumper, 
honking our horns, and watching enemy missiles flying over our heads from 
the special vantage point of a traffic jam. 
Our transportation system is destructive of our environment. On al- 
most a weekly basis, one reads or hears about the removal of a park or a 
historical monument for the sake of a highway. In some cases, “just” homes 
of individual citizens are destroyed. In others, places of great historical 
significance or aesthetic value to millions of people are wiped out. 
Right now, here in Washington, a site of exceptional beauty, the Three 
Sisters Islands on the Potomac, is threatened by the proposed construction 
of an Interstate Highway bridge, which would bring thousands of additional 
cars across the river and then disgorge them onto already overcrowded 
city streets. 
Up to 80 percent of the air pollution in urban areas comes from auto 
exhaust fumes. Up to two-thirds of the available land space in cities goes for 
roads, parking lots, gas stations, and other automobile-related purposes. 
We tear down parks, homes, historical monuments, and trees of a 
hundred years’ making, and when people object, we dismiss them as 
butterfly-chasers, sentimentalists, or opponents of progress. 
A system so blatantly bad as the one we have allowed to develop must 
be changed. 
