Why Senator Fitzgerald is not crazy. Ronald Rotunda, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, writes in the National Review Online (June 18): “The Constitution gives Congress plenty of ways to deal with O’Hare, but they all cost money: Congress can use its spending power to expand the airport; it can give the state money on the condition that it expand the airport; it can order federal officials (the Army Corps of Engineers) to build the O’Hare expansion. But Congress may not simply order or authorize state or city officials to violate state law [which requires a state permit for airport expansion]….The proposed federal law dealing with the expansion of O’Hare Airport…authorizes Chicago, a city created by the state, to do that which Illinois law prohibits.”
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Ecotourism is (not) where you find it. David Nicholson-Lord, writing in “Resurgence” (May-June): “I have heard a casino in Laos described as ecotourism–because it was sited in untouched countryside.”
People who live in denser neighborhoods with more public transit have fewer cars and drive less, in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles alike, according to an article published in Transportation Planning and Technology (January), one of whose five authors is Peter Haas of the Center for Neighborhood Technology. Next question: which is the cause and which is the effect? Does living in transit-friendly neighborhoods lead people to drive less? Or do people who already want to drive less seek out such neighborhoods?
