There is really no denying that transportation makes money. Just consider the huge shopping malls perched around interstate off-ramps, the office parks positioned close to airports, the skyscrapers next to subway stations.

But transportation itself is usually a money loser. We pour billions of public dollars into highways, airports and transit systems, while others, the home builders, the department store mavens, make the money that comes slows from those public investments.

Hong Kong’s metro system, MTR, has changed this equation, and that is why it’s worth looking at.

If you are ever lucky enough to visit Hong Kong, which is Manhattan-like with its narrow streets lined with high rises, you will see that the MTR’s services are excellent. You may ride the gleaming new high-speed rail line from the new airport that takes you into the new central rail station. Or one of the nine rail and subway lines, including the special train that goes to Disneyland Hong Kong.

What’s amazing about the agency that runs these lines, MTR, is that it actually makes money. So much money that it’s listed on the stock exchange, although the government still owns a majority share.

The Hong Kong’s metro system has been in the news in the New York city region because the chief of New York City’s transit agency, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, shocked the region by announcing his departure to lead Hong Kong’s system for a million-dollar plus annual salary. He left at a particularly bad time, breaking a seven year contract just as the MTA was facing yet another round of funding gaps and necessary cuts.

Given the perennial money-losing nature of most transportation departments, from highways to rail, it bears asking: how does Hong Kong do it?

The answer is that Hong Kong’s MTR doesn’t let private developers be the only ones that perch next to its stations. It builds its homes, offices and stores. In short, MTR acts as a real estate developer and business company, as well as a train operator. It owns, among other things, 12 shopping malls built around its stations. These properties and businesses produce substantial cash, which keep the transit agency as a whole in the black.

Hong Kong’s MTR is unusual in also actually making money from its fares as well. How it can do this relates in part the uniqueness of running trains on an intense few strips of land filled with development. But for our purposes it’s worth looking at its actions as a developer, and that as a model for transportation agencies and departments in this country.

By many standards, MTR is an unusual company.

The MTR only began service in 1979. But once cash was flowing (through development around stations), the government “graduated” MTR to become a private company, still majority owned by government, so that it could raise funding through capital markets and more nimbly enter into joint ventures with private investors.

In 2000, the Hong Kong government converted the public MTRC into the private MTR Corporation Limited (MTRCL), although the government maintains a majority stake. Shares are traded on the Hong Kong stock exchange. WIkipedia reports that MTR also invests in railways in different parts in the world, and has obtained contracts to operate rapid-transit systems in London, Stockholm, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Melbourne.

Could transit and highway departments in the United States ever do something equally innovative? Why shouldn’t a highway department make money on the shopping malls built around its exits? Shouldn’t it at least get a cut?

While it may seem extraordinary to have a transit company operating like a profit-making company, it’s not novel. A century ago private streetcar lines made money more on the homes and shops built around their tracks, on company-owned land, than the nickel fares they received.

While retaining public control of vital infrastructure systems — a crucial point — governments can facilitate new versions of these old arrangements.

Let me be clear here. I don’t want the transit agencies or highway departments to be only concerned with making a profit for their shareholders, which is how private businesses act. I want them to make a profit for the public, so that roads can be maintained well, taxes and fares kept down.

It’s a long way from anywhere in the United States to Hong Kong, but there’s no reason we can’t learn from it.

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As snow and cold weather swept over so much of the nation for the holidays, many families huddled around the television were likely watching an old but still popular television series set in an often icy and windswept place: The Mary Tyler Moore show.

Quick, tell me where was this show set? Minneapolis/St. Paul, I bet most people remember. When the series debuted in 1970, the Minnesota cities represented an unusual and risky choice. Would viewers connect with a region so far from both coasts and the bulk of the country’s population?

But the Twin Cities as location helped establish the show’s distinctive personality. The opening credits with the bouncy theme song — “You might just make it after all!” — show the newly single “Mary Richards” taking the exit ramp to “Minneapolis/St Paul,” walking by Donaldson’s department store (now of course defunct), and walking through wintery streets clad in fur. Now a statue of “Mary” now stands in a square near to where Donaldson’s Department Store used to be.

More than a major league sports team, more than an opera house or symphony, having a network set a television series in your city is an announcement, that you have arrived as a metropolis.  Not that many midsized or even larger cities have been the setting for shows. Boston Legal was set in of course Boston. Breaking Bad from AMC is set in Albuquerque. Mork & Mindy, the 1970s show where Robin Williams startled a nation with his talents, was set in Boulder. The Wire from HBO was set in Baltimore, although its portrayal was not flattering.

Whatever the city, the choice of location for a show is a big deal. New York City defined the popular comedy Seinfeld, even though, like the Mary Tyler Moore Show, it was actually filmed in California.

One city that has recently arrived is Portland. The show “Life Unexpected” from the CW network, now in its second season, is set there. The show, which is about a 16 year-old girl raised in foster homes finding her birth parents and moving in with them, is cloying and annoying in its characters and plots, but the city of Portland shines through bright and clear. Just about every scene switch is transitioned by shots of the city’s light rail trains with “Gresham” on the front, or the steel-girder bridges across the Willamette River, or shots of the city’s skyline. The opening credits are a mini travel guide to the city. The show is actually mostly filmed in neighboring Vancouver, but as with Mary Tyler Moore or Seinfeld, that’s not what is important.

Oregon and Portland have been pursuing the road less traveled for at least four decades, passing growth management laws as well as things unrelated to urban planning such as assisted-suicide laws, motor voter bills and medical marijuana laws. This has earned them the enmity of various established interests, including sometimes the federal government. But one more clearly positive thing it has earned the city, which really can’t be separated from the state, is distinctiveness. Beyond income per capita, unemployment rate or overall wealth, Portland is a city that is itself and nothing else. That’s rare these days.

Portland and Oregon have taken a lot of flak for their choices and they’re having a tough time in the Great Recession. But right or wrong, they should be praised for having the courage to go their own way, to be democracies in the fullest sense of the word. What this has earned them over time is specialness.

It’s hard to imagine other midsize cities have enough personality and presence to carry a TV show. Hovering around Portland in size, if you compare metro areas, are such cities as Tampa, St. Louis, Sacramento, Orlando, Charlotte and Indianapolis. Can you imagine a drama or comedy set in one of them? Can you imagine a viewer tuning into one of those cities week after week?

Portland once wasn’t so special. In the early 1970s, Portland was just another midsized city with a downtown full of parking lots, half empty storefronts and street-killing freeways, similar to my native city of Norfolk. Then Oregon and Portland tore down a freeway, passed a state growth control measure, established a regional government and capped downtown parking. The state and the city began becoming distinctive places, as well as more prosperous. Population figures tell the story. The city of Portland grew from a low of 366,000 people in 1980 to 540,000 today. Norfolk by comparison, has shrunk from 307,000 in 1970 to a 230,000 today. Two cities once roughly comparable are now starkly different.

And in the long run, being distinctive is a positive thing for a city because rather than being nowhere, you’re somewhere. It can’t be faked though. It’s about confronting hard choices and making the right ones. Here’s hoping that more cities and states follow Portland’s and Oregon’s lead, and become distinctive.

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About ten years ago, I was looking for a new bike equipped with something you would think would not be that difficult to find: a chain guard. That is, that sheath of metal that wraps at least partially around the greasy links that help power the bike.

No luck.

“American bicycle manufacturers are overly influenced by the sports market,” said the bicycle shop worker in the Cambridge bike shop I was in, in one of the most succinct analysis of the bike market I had ever heard, as we surveyed the rows of lean and mean machines. It seemed I would have to wait.

I was seeking a chain guard because I was tired of tucking the hem of my right pants leg into my sock, and then forgetting about it and finding myself looking ridiculous, hours later. Or using a metal clip to do the same thing, and forgetting to take it off. Or just saying the heck with it, and then getting my pants leg blackened with grease.

Today, although I haven’t bought a new bike yet, I’ve no shortage of possibilities. Many manufacturers, from big companies to small start-ups, make specifically urban bicycles, meant for city riding, not laps around the track or careening down a mountain. I see them in every city I visit, chained to lampposts or bike racks, all with that most coveted of things, a chain guard. Some even have the Dutch-style ones, that wrap completely around the chain, making it virtually impossible to get grease on clothes.

That’s important if you’re dressing up, which people are. Ruth La Ferla of The New York Times, its fashion reporter, wrote a story in September about women looking good riding around town on bikes.

“These daring young women, in their stylish attire, are turning heads as they roll by,” La Ferla. “They are clad not in spandex but in fluttery skirts, capes and kitten heels.”

It’s clear in the article that the bicycle, which might have a wicker basket upfront and usually was constructed so as to give the rider an upright posture, was seen as part of the women’s fashionable attire, not a detraction from it. Such women could even choose tony accessories made by French couture companies.

The Times article: an official announcement that times have changed. But this trend is not confined to New York City.

The retail clothing company Banana Republic, found in countless malls, has run full-page ads in national magazines showing a relaxed young man in a dark gray suit, scarf, red shirt and tie, straddling a bike. He’s not behind the wheel of an Italian sports car. He’s on a bike.

There are countless blogs — “Urbanely, or Cyclelicious, Velo Chic, Velo Vixens, Chic Cyclists, Girl on a Bicycle, The Town Bicycle, Bikes and the City” — dedicated to celebrating cycling in the town and city. One is called appropriately enough, “Riding Pretty,” which shows women and a few men on bikes, including the author, often in heels and a dress, in and around San Francisco. The site says it is “is dedicated to all the girls in the world who want to ride pretty on a bicycle. Here’s to living a bicycle lifestyle!”

The mixing of cycling and fashion show that bikes are becoming once again a means of transportation, and not just devises to use for exercise or sport. And like that other mode of transportation, the car, they are becoming a means of expressing ourselves, for displaying who we are. Not since the 1880s, when the first bicycle craze hit the nation and help produced some of its first paved roads, have this two-wheeled, self-propelled machine been such a symbol of urbanity and style.

And while the bike is getting cooler, the car is getting less so.

Donna St. George, a writer for The Washington Post, wrote a story earlier this year that highlighted how in 2008, just 30 percent of 16 year-olds got their driver licenses, compared to 45 percent in 1988. That’s a big drop. My brother’s 18-year-old son, who lives in North Carolina, doesn’t have a license nor do many of his friends. A car is “helpful,” but not really “cool,” says my brother, interpreting his teenager’s habits.

Here in New York City, there’s no question that public policy, while not creating this trend, has helped facilitate it. Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, herself a biker, is creating new bike lanes all over town by the judicious use of the paintbrush. She is leaving in her wake more riders and controversy, as drivers unaccustomed to seeing lanes taken away from them start reacting.

Other cities and towns are following the lead of New York, San Francisco and other cosmopolitan cities. Even automobile-centric cities like Charlotte are building bike paths and exploring ways to make cycling more convenient and most important, safer.

Although bike lanes are nice, what would really make cycling safer is to change the legal lines so that drivers are automatically at fault if they hit a cyclist. This is how things are in cycle-friendly countries like the Netherlands, where not coincidentally, it’s quite common to see well-dressed women and men on bicycles.

With full chain guards of course.

Alex Marshall’s e-mail address is alexmarshall@alexmarshall.org.

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Writers write best about what they know, and what I know best about Roberta Gratz, longtime urban journalist and author of the new book — The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs (Nation Books, 2010) — is my own relationship with her, which began about 20 years ago now.

At the time I was a reporter for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, stirring up trouble with my stories on urban planning and development. Gratz had once done the same thing at the New York Post. I would call up Gratz, whose first book, The Living City, had just come out and which I loved. She would respond to my questions with great long quotes about the importance of remaking cities and their neighborhoods from the ground up, protecting the urban fabric, avoiding mega-projects, and nurturing real urban life.

Gradually over time, I made the same leap Gratz did: from being a reporter on urban planning to a thinker and writer on the subject in my own right. As happens when mentees grow up, I gradually started to disagree with Roberta some of the time, but we were and are still friends.

I say all this as background in reviewing her latest book, because it doesn’t seem quite right to leave it out. It’s certainly affects my view of Gratz and her writing.

The Battle for Gotham is essentially a memoir, although that’s not how it is billed, and it is the memoir portions that are best. Gratz’s story encompasses six or seven decades in and around New York City, including growing up on Washington Square Park, a move to the Connecticut suburbs, back to Manhattan as a young woman, working as a reporter at the New York Post, urban homesteading on the Upper West Side when it was still dangerous. And more than that: it covers the fortunes of her husband’s light manufacturing business (Gratz Industries), becoming friends with Jane Jacobs and helping persuade her to go public with her opposition to the Westway highway project, helping renovate a synagogue on the Lower East Side. And more.

Those rich experiences serve quite nicely as vehicle for Gratz’s many insights into ways one should and should not grow a city. It’s the perspective of an outsider, even as Gratz herself has become an insider of sorts, serving on the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission and numerous other public bodies.

Gratz’s viewpoints are surely sharpened by the fact that a bulldozer and eviction notices have been following her family around for most of her life. New York University tore down her parents’ home, Moses’ policies shoved out her father’s dry-cleaning business on 8th Street, and another urban renewal project in the 1960s tore down the building that housed her husband’s metal-working shop on West 32nd Street. (It successfully moved to Long Island City, the strangely-named industrial neighborhood in Queens.)

Gratz’s stories of her past glide smoothly into her commentary on the present, which is equally valuable. She points out, accurately in my view, that the quasi independent public authority, The Empire State Development Corporation has essentially replaced Robert Moses in doing big projects, such as the big stadium and housing project Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, with little real public input. As Moses would have liked, these big projects often sit like islands in the city they are nominally part of.

I certainly don’t agree with Gratz on everything. She hints that the organization where I’m a senior fellow, The Regional Plan Association, is a bunch of highway-loving stooges to the powers that be because its 1929 Regional Plan called for more highways. The roadways actually made perfect sense at the time, given that the majority of the nation’s roads then were dirt and gravel. And at least since the late 1930s, RPA has worked tirelessly on behalf of the region’s mass transit system.

But I digress. What I see as Gratz’s central point is one I agree with: Moses’ style of anti-urban, anti-transit, anti-street style of development has continued in New York, (and I dare say other cities as well), routinely pushed by governments in the name of economic development, despite Jacob’s victory in academic and intellectual circles. We should figure out why this is the case, and change it. At least part of the story is that these big mega blocks reflect the realities of power, where some private interests hold disproportionate shares.

What’s unfortunate about the book is that it is billed as a story of Robert Moses, the mega-builder, versus Jane Jacobs, the champion of the traditional city. The book does recount much of their history, but this story has been told before and better elsewhere (including Anthony Flint’s 2009 book, Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City).

Gratz (or her editors) should have had the guts to bill the book as a straight memoir, rather than hanging her personal story on the overexposed Moses and Jacobs. I would have entitled it: Gratz: An Urban Memoir. And what a memoir it is!

Alex Marshall’s e-mail address is alexmarshall@alexmarshall.org.

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It’s become popular sport to deride the first decade of this century, the 2000-2009 years, as a downhill ride of terrorism, war and economic depression.

But there’s one multi-syllabic word that enjoyed a big comeback, after decades of neglect. That word: infrastructure. We at least began to think about the physical systems that support us, nurture us, and make much of life possible.

I posit that the “aughts,” as they have been called, were in fact a decade of infrastructure breakthroughs. Sure, we didn’t spend enough on it, or even more than in previous decades (I know of no official list of infrastructure projects, so it’s hard to tell). But I would argue that infrastructure did crystalize as a subject in the hearts and minds of the country’s citizens and opinion leaders as a subject worthy of attention and focus. A decade ago, even the word “infrastructure” was hardly known outside the specialized worlds of public works departments. Now editorial writers bandy it about without explanation and debate how much we should spend on it.

The opening salvo in this attention on infrastructure may have been the attack on New York and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Although the twin towers arguably were not infrastructure themselves, they involved so many systems of rail lines, water lines, power lines and so forth, that the nation’s attention was turned to them. In addition, the possibility that infrastructure systems in general, particularly transportation, but also power and water, could be used as instruments of terror highlighted infrastructure’s importance. When New York City began to rebuild, attention turned almost immediately to making infrastructure, in the form of new or revamped train stations- arguably a signal of America’s capacity for renewal in the face of danger. One of those new stations, the new PATH station at World Trade Center, was designed by the most famous designer of infrastructure in the world, Santiago Calatrava, the famed Spanish architect and engineer.

Then there was the Interstate highway bridge collapsing in Minneapolis, in 2007. This focused our attention on the vast litany of rusting and decrepit bridges and other infrastructure, and the need for funds to repair them. The replacement bridge was built and opened in just over a year – a compliment to the capacity of professionals to work fast when needed.

A year later, we saw the future President Barack Obama campaigning on something called an “infrastructure bank.” Once elected, he would persuade Congress, in a massive economic recovery act, to appropriating hundreds of billions of dollars for all types of infrastructure – to jump-start the economy but also as an investment in the future. Not incidentally, this spending included billions for intercity train travel, whose initial grants were recently announced. This is the first significant investment in intercity train travel since the early 20th century.

Looking abroad, China, India, Korea, Spain and other countries began during the decade to build highways, airports, entire new subway systems, and high-speed rail lines at furious rates. It was the decade that breathtakingly beautiful bridges opened in Europe, like the Millau Viaduct in France and the Oresund Bridge between Sweden and Denmark. This rising tide of mega-projects would help pressure the United States to at least contemplate spending and investing more on similar projects.

We began to use our streets – a kind of infrastructure, after all – more wisely in an number of cities. Rather than just being concourses for cars, streets were opened to cyclists, pedestrians, and even loungers. Cities from Chattanooga to St. Louis began converting one-way streets back to two-way streets, to better accommodate a diverse street environment. Parts of Broadway running through Times Square in New York City, where formerly thousands of cars had traveled, were turned into public plazas with chairs and tables!

We began to understand better how infrastructure is paid for – or not. There was greater acceptance that government subsidizes all forms of transportation, and that no mode pays for itself. The latest on roads was a 2009 study by the Texas Transportation Institute, which concluded that “there is not one road in Texas that pays for itself based on the tax system of today.” A typical example was a highway outside Houston that was projected to cost $1 billion over its 40-year life span and generate only $162 million in gas taxes.

With no mode of transportation paying for itself, it was easier to start discussing in reasonable tones which transportation mode was best in a given situation. “Mode-neutral” was another concept that came into vogue in the years after 2000. It was also a decade when “green” or “smart” infrastructure came into being, when a water engineer was as likely to recommend protecting a watershed as building a new filtration plant.
There’s no question the “aughts” gave us a bumpy ride economically, plus unsettling degrees of war and terrorism. But in terms of infrastructure, we may remember the decade as the start of a truly positive (if desperately overdue) trend.

Well if you ever plan to motor west,
Just take my way, that’s the highway that’s the best.
Get your kicks on Route sixty-six.

Well it winds from Chicago to LA
More than two-thousand miles all the way.
Get your kicks on Route sixty-six….

Well it goes through St. Louie down to Missouri
Oklahoma City looks oh so pretty.
You’ll see Amarillo, Gallup, New Mexico
Flagstaff, Arizona, don’t forget Winona,
Kingsman, Barstow, San Bernardino.

Won’t you get hip to this timely tip
And think you’ll take that California trip.
Get your kicks on route sixty-six.
Get your kicks on route sixty-six.
– (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66, By Bobby Troup, 1946.

Bobby Troup’s bouncy 1946 tune about the joys of Route 66 has its roots in a series of federal transportation bills after World War I and the resulting scramble by state boosters and budding state transportation departments to get a piece of the action.

In this, it resembles today’s efforts to create a high or higher speed rail system. Law and policy making can be both dull and messy, but if done right, can produce dreams and songs. States and regions are vying for a share of the new railroad money. Their competition for dollars is not pretty. But if Route 66 is any example, it may produce something worthwhile.

Troup said he was inspired to write his famous song while literally driving Route 66. At that time, in post-war America, driving cross-country in one’s personal automobile was still a novel and amazing thing. Route 66 had been cobbled together by linking some existing roads, and many of them still just dirt, until the make-work, depression relief, WPA project under President Franklin Roosevelt in 1938 completed its paving. Those final drops of asphalt completed a vision that had taken two decades of policy-making and spending to achieve. This was the dream of true inter-city highways, a dream that then seemed as distant around World War I as 200-mph trains do today.

It took a few attempts to get it right. In the Federal-Aid Road Act of 1916, Congress approved $75 million for highways–then a whole lot of money–to go for roads outside and between cities. But states, which were in charge of distributing the money, tended to spread the money to every county, which meant the benefits were felt everywhere and nowhere.

To counteract this tendency, Congress required, in the successor Federal-Aid Road Act of 1921, that 60 percent of the money be used for inter-city travel and on a limited number of roads. This helped create Route 66, which was not really a new highway, just a cobbling together of existing dirt or roughly paved roads through common signage, along with a commitment to improve them.

Predictably, arguments about the location of routes ensued. Just like today with high speed rail, states and regions recognize that being on a route is ticket to prosperity. But even route numbers were in contention, as regions vied to be designated one of the numbers divisible by ten. Route 60 was thought to be particularly attractive.

Things were at loggerheads, until Oklahoma promoter Cyrus Avery, who was on the numbering board appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture, decided Route 66, with its alliteration, would be even better than Route 60. (The Bureau of Public Roads, back then, was just a division of Agriculture on the theory that good roads were mostly there to get farmers to market; only later did it mutate into today’s mammoth federal Transportation Department).

Avery in 1925 sent a telegram to the Bureau of Public Roads chief, Thomas MacDonald, saying “We prefer sixty-six.” And the fight ended. Cyrus had had the insight that the alliterative “Sixty-Six” was catchier than say “Route 60″ or “Route 70.” And it seems Cyrus was right. Singing “Get Your Kicks On Route Sixty” just doesn’t compete.

Flash forward three quarters of a century. Todays’ state and regional boosters are haggling for some of the billions that Congress has awarded for higher speed rail, just as boosters and backers haggled for road money back in the 1920s. This is messy, but also to be expected. It’s unwise to think that the selection of routes and spending of money can be done on some sort of pure technocratic basis. Who wants it more is a valid criterion–though it should be just one–for awarding funds.

How much money is out there? It’s getting difficult to add it all up. President Obama got Congress to award, in last winter’s Recovery Act, an initial $8 billion for high-speed rail projects. He requested another $5 billion in the 2010 budget. Congress recently awarded another $2.5 billion for high-speed train travel. These numbers may sound big, but actually they are a pittance compared to say China, which by some estimates is putting $750 billion into building a high-speed rail system between its major cities.

Still, Congress new openness to trains opens the rails to the most significant new investment in train travel in several generations. And states and cities are vying for the funding. So far, the Federal Railroad Administration has received more than 250 applications, totalling more than $50 billion, for high-speed rail projects.

How should these funds be awarded and where? A recent report by America 2050, a research and planning group, has ranked corridors around the country in their receptivity and potential to high-speed rail, the first comparison of that type ever made.

But let’s focus too on the top lesson from yesteryear: not to fritter away the big cash of the moment by giving a pittance to everyone. Spend the money on a few places, where it can demonstrably and dramatically improve train travel, making it higher speed if not true European style high speed travel. Only then can we jump-start our dreams, as well as a few projects.

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As America gets ready for debate on federal transportation legislation next year, we’ll surely be told again to place our confidence in the familiar yardsticks of miles traveled per hour, average commuting times, cost per passenger.

But couldn’t we have license to think more fully and imaginatively about this sector that is not only essential economically but occupies so much of our lives?

When I was a teacher in Virginia 25 years ago, I used to drive 35 minutes each day from Virginia Beach to my job at a high school in Norfolk. I drove at 60 mph almost the entire way. Not a bad commute, though I noted even then that high speed freeway driving is tiring. Pay attention or you may kill someone, yourself included.

Now in present day Brooklyn, I often commute 45 minutes to the offices of Regional Plan Association in Manhattan. This involves a 15-minute walk to the subway, a five-minute wait for the train, a 20-minute subway ride, and a five-minute walk to work. This is longer than my old 30 minutes commute by car. But it’s less tiring. I enjoy the morning (and evening) walk. I can read or watch TV (my newest bad habit) on my iPhone while on the subway. I enjoy talking to strangers.

My conclusion: when it comes to transportation, time is an elastic, subjective, almost mystical thing. One minute spent traveling one way is not the same as another. But the “intangibles” are hard to introduce into official transportation debates.

And how about biking and walking? Sometimes I do ride by bike to work. This is actually shorter in time than the subway, but it’s qualitatively much different. I arrive invigorated from the excitement, and let’s face it, danger of urban cycling, while also physically tired, even though I ride pretty slowly. And there’s the weather to consider.

By foot? I sometimes walk part of the way to or from work, say a mile, just for the hell of it. Walking 20 blocks in a crowded city is fun. But let’s say I lived in suburban Long Island or New Jersey? I probably wouldn’t walk a mile along a suburban arterial with cars whizzing by me, even if I covered the same distance in the same amount of time.

Travel between cities offers qualitative differences in experience as well. Plane travel seems to have become a series of lines that one waits in, broken up by small quantities of actually flying. Train travel, if available and good, can offer unbroken hours for sustained concentration. Driving for hours in a car between cities, with or without company, can be good or bad depending on one’s temperament, physical size, and the quality of one’s stereo.

Speaking of stereos, years ago I did a story as a reporter for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk called “Drive Time.” It was a counter-intuitive story about the guilty pleasure many people experienced while commuting to work because it was often the only time they had to themselves. Particularly if they had young children and or a demanding job, driving was often they only time they had to listen to music or simply to sit quietly. Even being stuck in traffic wasn’t so bad, particularly if they had a nice car.

Another difference: the shape of equipment. My 35-minute commute to Norfolk was in my aunt’s old 1973 Ford LTD that I had bought from her. Not a bad car, but a Jaguar might have eased my commute. I love train travel, but when I lived in Spain in the early 1980s I hated traveling in the slow, uncomfortable and crowded trains they had then. The country was still recovering from decades of dictatorship, and its infrastructure was poor. Now Spain has a network of sleek rapid trains I’d love to board.

Or–my experience on the New York subway. It would have been very different in the bad old days a generation ago, when the subways were hulking wrecks, lurching along through bad smelling, dangerous dark stations. My 45 minute commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan would doubtless have been an unpleasant affair I did not care to repeat. But now the New York subways are clean, free of graffiti, and orderly–one reason their ridership had often grown faster than the standard models based on population and economic growth would have predicted.

Do policy makers consider things like the quality of a car ride when considering whether to fund a new light rail line, build another lane on a highway or repair a crumbling road? Shouldn’t they–even if there’s really no fully objective way to pronounce, conclusively, one way of traveling better than another?

Miles, speeds, costs are a vital transportation issues–numbers can’t and shouldn’t go away. But we shouldn’t pretend that quality doesn’t matter as well, even if it’s hard to quantify.

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If you’re one of my graduate students–or, I suspect, any American under 40–you’re unlikely to recognize the name of Michael Dukakis.

But Dukakis was the 1988 Democratic nominee for the presidency. And a lot more. He was twice elected governor of Massachusetts. Most governors had usually “presided,” letting their cabinet officers go their separate ways; Dukakis by contrast was the first governor ever to form a development cabinet focused on specific goals, led by revival of historic Lowell and all the Bay State’s declining older industrial cities.

Many political observers scoff at Dukakis, noting only how he frittered away a strong early lead against George H.W. Bush in his presidential bid.

But Dukakis has never lost his fire for public causes, as I noted at a recent conference on cities in Cambridge sponsored by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the Nieman Foundation, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He looked remarkably unchanged from my memory of him from his White House race 21 years ago. He still had the helmet of dark hair, the same lines etched around a bulbous nose, and thick bushy eyebrows. At 76, he’s still a bundle of convictions and energy.

Dukakis was speaking to a group of journalists about where cities were (or should be) heading. One thing soon became clear: Above all else, Dukakis is a rail man. His blood runs steel grey. He dismissed congestion pricing, Bus Rapid Transit and HOV lanes as decoys, meant only to divert attention from the one true path to better cities and better lives. The key to reviving cities and metropolitan areas, says Dukakis, is rail.

All this makes sense when you understand that Dukakis began his career in the 1960s as a community activist and then state legislator from his neighborhood of Brookline, an inner city streetcar suburb. He fought the expressways with under which planners appeared ready to eviscerate and strangle the historic urban fabric, and then as governor pressed for funding to improve and extend the subways and commuter rail services.

Just look at the stunning dividends now, three decades later, Dukakis claimed at the conference. Boston is thriving, a city and metropolitan area for all to envy. It’s no accident, he suggested: basically, you get what you invest in. Spend your money on highways and airports, you get sprawl. Spend your money on subways, trolleys, commuter rail and inter-city rail, and you get dense, thriving compact places and cities that become springboards for economic development.

And even as governor, Dukakis rode the “Green Line” to his workplace on Beacon Hill. Later, he served several years as vice chairman of the Amtrak board, constantly urging a robust American passage rail system.

As you might expect, the news that Obama had won $8 billion from Congress for higher speed rail, plus additional funding for Amtrak, was exciting news for Dukakis. But this erstwhile politico was markedly sober about the difficulties in spending this money. The state and local governments that actually carry out construction projects, he said, are tolerating huge, multi-year delays. Boston’s “Big Dig,” initially conceived by Fred Salvucci, Dukakis’ transportation director, did become the poster child for delay, cost overrun and poor construction. But Dukakis argues that if his successor, Gov. William Weld, had retained Dukakis’s secretary of Transportation Fred Salvucci as Dukakis had advised him to do, the Big Dig would have been completed in “half the time and half the price.”

Today, argues Dukakis, the pattern of drawn-out construction has become a pervasive pattern. Even a simple HOV lane in his wintertime home in Los Angeles, he said, is taking years to complete. A modest extension of the Green Line in Boston won’t be completed until 2014, an absurdly long amount of time. By comparison, said Dukakis, the extension of the Red Line in the early 1980s, a much more complicated project, took about two years.

The cure, said Dukakis, is competence: to learn to undertake great projects again, and to value quality government. (Dukakis’ focus on competence reminded me–wasn’t that his theme in the 1988 presidential campaign? It lacked political glitz, but after Katrina and numerous other fiascos, maybe Americans will listen more.)

Listening to Dukakis talk, I was struck by parallels to Obama. Dukakis lacks Obama’s soaring rhetoric and physical grace. But he shares with Obama a knowledge of government that starts from the ground up. Both, indeed, were community organizers before entering politics.

If he’d been elected in 1988, Dukakis suggests, there’d have been no Bush I, therefore no Bush II, and consequently II, no Iraq war. It’s a rather strained chain of causality. Yet if Obama delivers swifter trains and urban renewal for America, Dukakis will be entitled to bask in the deliverance of his long-delayed agenda.

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While Congress gets ready for a rancorous debate over guidelines for spending billions in infrastructure stimulus funds, some states and cities are already getting deadly serious–not so much about bigger and fancier infrastructure projects, but smarter infrastructure systems.

Just this month, for example, New York City joined a group of far-sighted managers of waterworks nationwide by recommending a “sustainable stormwater management plan” to expand water and sewer capacity. The idea is not to build more plants or pipes but rather by invest in decentralized conservation systems and better maintenance.

Also this year, Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City’s transportation commissioner, made headlines when she put tables and chairs and bike lanes in the middle of downtown streets and said that the highest and best use of a thoroughfare was not necessarily more cars.

And James Rogers, president if Duke Energy, has been shocking utility commissions by insisting his company be paid for getting its customers to use less, not more power.

Question: What’s up here? Isn’t “more is better” the proven, undisputed motto of all infrastructure projects? Isn’t the issue just about laying pipe, asphalt, train tracks, cables, water lines and making the big machinery that serves them? To build, as it were, the world’s skeleton, with the idea that more is always better?

Well, perhaps not–any more. The powerful new trend is to put the words “green” or “smart” as descriptors in front of the word “infrastructure.” The labels vary, the movement disparate. But there’s clearly a growing new orientation that cuts across disciplines as disparate as roads and power, parks and airports.

The smart infrastructure crew, in short, is now concluding that more is not always better. The goal, instead: to figure out why people need something, then meet the need in smarter, more efficient and often less expensive ways.

To grasp what it’s all about take a deep breath and absorb this conclusion of the America 2050 organization’s newest report, “An Infrastructure Vision for the 21st Century”:

“Experience over the last fifteen years has demonstrated that pollution prevention, water conservation, appropriate pricing, ecosystem service and use of ‘green infrastructure’ approaches that protect or mimic natural systems, and improving management efficiency can provide the same benefits at a far lower cost than the traditional exclusive reliance on larger capital-intensive facilities. These non-structural approaches have also been proven to provide greater flexibility, save money, use less energy, protect and restore wildlife habitat and scenic and recreation areas, reduce flooding and flood damage, and create local jobs.”

Let me try the same in laymen’s terms:

When it comes to roads, it’s understanding that people don’t just want to drive or move for no reason. They move about for a reason–for access to jobs, goods and services, and other people. So why not focus on places relatively close to them that offer what they want? Or in general to building more local employment centers, sidewalks, bike paths and public plazas, missing transit lines, and selected road investments. It means figuring out how commerce and human movement work, so that transportation is a servant, not a master.

With power, it’s understanding that while people want light and heat, that need can be met in a variety of ways. So progressive power companies are handing out low-energy use light bulbs, and more radically, exploring more comprehensive ways to get power companies into the business of conserving energy rather than constantly demanding new generating facilities.

With water, it means understanding that people want clean, fresh water to drink and bathe in, but that a big part of that need can be met by plugging leaks in pipes, installing low-flow toilets, and protecting land around reservoirs, forestalling the need to build billion dollar filtration plants and tapping more lakes and rivers.

Technology is big in this movement, when it’s used to do more with less. A top example is the “Smart Grid,” the idea of integrating broadband communications with the electrical grid, allowing real-time pricing information to reach consumers, so they can scale back energy use in peak periods. This approach also looks for ways to expand distributed generation, allowing power generation in every home or business, and the ability to sell power back to the grid.

It helps to understand that the roots of this movement go deep. Starting in the 1990s, Albert Appleton, then Department of Environmental Protection commissioner for New York City, (i.e. water commissioner), pioneered many of the conservation strategies that allowed the city to meet rising population and net demand without expanding capacity. Now, the average New Yorker uses substantially less water per capita today than two decades ago.

Can Congress and the Obama administration find ways to reward such conserving ways in a fast-action economic stimulus plan? Let’s hope so. Otherwise, we’ll just be reinforcing yesterday’s infrastructure orthodoxy, and missing a green–and golden–opportunity.

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As a recent professor of U.S. Constitutional law, presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama doubtless knows that the founding rule book of these United States provides that “The Congress should have Power To . . . establish Post Offices and post Roads.”

Maybe that’s why Obama, in contrast to his opponent Sen. John McCain, is advocating the feds play a larger role in the creation and improvement of our national transportation network.

Obama laid out his themes clearly in a June 21 speech in Miami to the U.S. Conference of Mayors entitled “Strategy for America’s Future.”

“We’ll unlock the potential of all our regions by connecting them with a 21st century infrastructure,” said Obama. “You know why this is so important. You see the traffic along I-95 in Miami. You see the crumbling roads and bridges, the aging water and sewer pipes, the faltering electrical grids that cost us billions in blackouts, repairs, and travel delays.”

Obama went on to urge investing in “a world-class transit system, . . green energy technology, . . . and in our ports, roads, and high-speed rails.”

The candidate is picking up on an increasingly heard theme. Policy wonks and concerned citizens alike have been showing sharpened concern about the health, safety and quality of the nation’s infrastructure. The collapse of a federal interstate bridge in Minneapolis a year ago, which killed 13, appeared to be the final tipping point. That Obama mentioned such an unsexy issue at all shows how viable it has become.

Yet he’s hardly alone. Just 10 days before his Miami speech, the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program held a conference, where I moderated a panel, that advocated metropolitan areas as a focus for renewed federal infrastructure investment. In May, the America 2050, a project of the Regional Plan Association in New York held a conference , “Rebuilding and Renewing America: Toward a 21st Century Infrastructure Investment Plan,” underscoring the historic legacy of national transportation planning, a theme Obama emphasized.

Meanwhile, Obama’s congressional colleagues have been turning to the issue. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Oregon, has introduced legislation to establish a “Commission on Rebuilding America for the 21st Century,” featuring a renewed federal role in infrastructure development. In the Senate, Republican Chuck Hagel and Democrat Sen. Chris Dodd have introduced a bill to establish a National Infrastructure Bank. Such a bank would consist of a separate board, appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate, to evaluate large infrastructure projects and issue debt to pay for them.

And there’s strong bipartisan interest among the nation’s governors as well – Last winter Edward Rendell, D-Pa. and Arnold Schwarzenegger, R-Calif., in alliance New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Govs. Charlie Crist, R-Fla., Janet Napolitano, D-Ariz. and others – announced a new “Building America’s Future” focused on the need for major national infrastructure investments.

One suspects most state and local Republican officeholders agree at least privately with Obama that “It’s time to stop spending $10 billion a month in Iraq and start investing that money in Phoenix, Nashville, Seattle and metro areas across this country.”

Strangely, all this seems to escape McCain. When he touches transportation issues at all, it’s to condemn congressional earmarks and urge cutting pork from appropriation bills. He does talk a great deal about energy, more fuel-efficient autos, nuclear power and energy grids. But not the mega-issue of surface transportation. Roads and rails aren’t mentioned on his web site. And McCain has been a long-term, consistent opponent of Amtrak.

In fairness to the skeptics, federal investment in transportation has always brought mixed results. The feds helped the private railroads in the 19th century with land, cash and special powers. This built a huge national train network, but left some smaller towns and cities at the mercy of single railroad companies that their tax dollars had helped finance.

In the early 20th century, the federal Bureau of Public Roads did a good job building the enormous secondary road system that still carries a massive portion of traffic. But with the design and approval of the interstate system in the 1950s, Washington not only stimulated national economic growth but, by its massive investment in a single transportation mode, help sink passenger and freight rail service, spawning automobile sprawl coast to coast.

In the early ’90s Congress did move, under leadership of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to structure federal transportation spending to bolster metropolitan regions, mass transit and even sidewalks. But that vision has sadly declined under the pressure of earmarks and muddied national transportation goals.

Could the commissions, the Obama interest, the Minnesota bridge collapse, presage a fresh burst of federal attention to basic infrastructure? Since roads and rails do cross state lines, a national government role seems indispensable. But there’s a caution — in dealing with Washington, always be careful what you wish for.

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