To the editor:
Our two main parties offer us miserable choices on very important issues. An example is the replacement of the I-81 viaduct in Syracuse.
Marc Molinaro, along with local Republican candidates for the state legislature, backs a plan to build both a tunnel and the Community Grid. This will cost us all billions for construction, and more billions for decades of tunnel maintenance below the salty water table. Gov. Cuomo has waffled, but local Democrats are clearly committed to removing the viaduct, leaving only the street-level grid through Syracuse, and re-designating I-481 as I-81. This will cost much less, but still requires taking of properties to build new on-ramps. It will also likely worsen rush-hour bottlenecks near Lyndon Corners, resulting in little decrease in dangerous car, bicycle and pedestrian accidents.
Fortunately, we have a third-party gubernatorial candidate, Libertarian Larry Sharpe. Like Gov. Dewitt Clinton 200 years ago, Sharpe offers a forward-thinking approach that ties together new technologies and new funding mechanisms involving private-public partnership.
The new technology is smart highways that will have the possibility of communicating with onboard computers in vehicles, allowing them — even driverless cars and trucks — safe and hassle-free movement, at higher speeds and worse weather conditions than the current I-81 can handle.
The new funding mechanism is to allow one or more of the mega-corporations that plan to manufacture or deploy fleets of smart cars and trucks — Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, UPS — to tear down and rebuild I-81 as a supersmart highway along its current path. These companies can bid on this project, allowing them to make Central New York their test bed for a 21st-century transportation system. Non-conformity with current (soon-to-be-archaic) interstate standards requires taking it out of the federal system and rebuilding it as a state highway.
Future-Gov. Sharpe thus neatly solves the hardest rebuild problem for I-81 — paying for it. Just about any one of the above companies has 2018 sales revenue that exceeds all annual federal fuel taxes. Massive private investment to build such a technological marvel through downtown Syracuse ought to make city politicians rethink their opposition.
The beauty of Sharpe’s proposal is that its best features aren’t tied exclusively to rebuilding I-81 on its current path. If the current I-481 in ends up being re-designated as the I-81 of the future, then installing smart-highway technology on its most congested portions, all the way out E. Genesee to Lyndon Corners, is a great way to reduce congestion and increase safety in that most-heavily-used area.
Geography is destiny. Central New York’s intrinsic economic value has always been tied to transportation. Two centuries ago, Dewitt Clinton overcame many politically powerful skeptics to dig the Erie Canal. “Clinton’s Ditch” surprised the naysayers, powering an economic boom not only for CNY, but the entire state.
Larry Sharpe has my full-throated support to become governor, because he is the only candidate with the vision and drive to embrace Central New York’s geographic destiny and work the same kind of economic magic in the 21st century.
Mark Braiman
Cazenovia
