By Rob Gurwitt

Does this sound familiar?

Back in the 1920s, a rather powerful coalition of new businesses began lobbying for heavy public spending on roads. Automobile tire manufacturers, service-station owners, road builders and the like got together to argue that spending money on highways was a crucial investment in the economy and that without it the government would be choking off economic development. Moreover, they said, the money should come from general revenues — from everyone — rather than from user fees that would reimburse local treasuries directly for the cost of road-building, maintenance and police services.

That’s essentially what the U.S. House of Representatives has just said. When it voted last week to extend the moratorium on new Internet taxes for five years, it told state and local governments that this new form of doing business is too important to the national economy to risk screwing up with taxes, and that the cost of nurturing it should be born by the population at large through foregone tax revenues.

It’s a respectable argument. But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that Congress has just come down on the side of progress and economic well-being. It has come down on the side of a particular kind of progress, and of economic well-being for some.

The history of road-building in this country — or of railroad-building, or canal-building — should remind us that there are winners and losers whenever we make what are essentially political decisions about how to support basic infrastructure. And the losers often turn out to be the communities we live in at the moment.

There is no question at all that new roads and highways spurred vast economic growth in this country: They opened up new land for development, made the free movement of goods possible and created entire new industries. They also embedded urban sprawl in our development patterns, destroyed urban neighborhoods and, most subtly, made us come to believe that streets are the domain solely of automobiles, and not of pedestrians or the businesses that line them. As the author of an article on the history of road-paving wrote a couple of decades ago: “In their headlong search for modernity through mobility, American urbanites made a decision to destroy the living environments of nineteenth-century neighborhoods by converting their gathering places into traffic jams, their playgrounds into motorways, and their shopping places into elongated parking lots. These paving decisions effectively made obsolete many of urban America’s older neighborhoods.”

So, too, with the decisions we’re making now about how and whether the public should subsidize e-commerce. When we favor electronic retailing over storefronts — and that is what Congress has just done — we start down a path that is certain to transform what our neighborhoods look like. For good or ill, businesses with a physical presence on the street shape our daily environment. They revitalize older communities, they give us a place to gather, they define the fabric of our neighborhoods, towns and cities. Maybe we want to say goodbye to them and move on to some higher plane of commercial existence. But it’s a choice, not an inevitability, and once it’s been made, we’re going to have to live with the results every day, every time we step out our front doors.

Rob Gurwitt is a Governing staff correspondent.

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