Eisenhower took the wrong route

Re “The roads to prosperity,” Opinion, Jan. 26

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s dollar of infrastructure investment to make half an hour of work failed to consider total costs of ownership -- maintenance, deterioration and renewal; environmental damage from air pollution and global warming; and strategic peril from dependency on foreign oil.

The interstate highway program devastated an overbuilt and underutilized railroad system, replacing it with the biggest resource glutton in the country’s history. Compact and viable older communities were destroyed while energy-hungry sprawl grew like an aggressive weed.

Tom Lewis shows awareness of these facts, and the freeway interchange above his narrative is a picture worth 10,000 words! Infrastructure investment can reap benefits, but not if the Eisenhower paradigm guides our 44th president.

Any investment now needs to focus on making existing space devoted to transportation work more efficiently and effectively. Otherwise, a new source of wastefulness will replace an old one and once again give succeeding generations not payoff but payback.

Robert P. Sechler

Seal Beach