He’d Like to Suggest a Very Different Train of Thought

I just read your “Road to Utopia” (July 1) about the proposed Automated Highway Systems. What a concept: little trains of cars, each with its own separate engine, inefficiently pulling its inmate along the road alone in a sterile little cell, sundered from fellow travelers and the world.

At least it’s a good excuse for smothering the world with yet more asphalt, as the last 50 years have shown that as soon as you do anything to create more road capacity, people rush to cram more cars onto the road.

Why not build trains instead? Then people could travel at high levels of mechanical efficiency while remaining part of their human community during transit. Or better yet, quit building those bleak and lonely bedroom suburbs where there’s nothing to do but go to sleep and which coerce people into driving a long way just to work, see a movie or buy a loaf of bread.

Cities without neighborhoods are wastelands. Suburbs without civic life are prisons. Why waste billions on a technology whose very purpose is to facilitate this spiritually fatal separation of work and life, when we’ve known for years that it is destroying our culture?

RICHARD RISEMBERG

Los Angeles