"Right of way is a precious resource," Blumenauer tells Time Magazine

Congressman Earl Blumenauer’s ideas for using the nation’s highways to transform transportation and energy production were featured in a Time Magazine article released on Monday.

The article, titled “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now” touts the “right of way” policies that Blumenauer has been pushing for years. The idea is to use the federal highway grid already in place to expand transportation alternatives to rail, lay broadband cable, and expand on the opportunities to use alternative energies for transportation.

"Right of way is a precious resource," Blumenauer told Time’s Richard Lacayo. "It's been developed over centuries at great cost. It's strategically located and immediately available."

One way to take advantage of right of way is to place solar panels along side federal highways to power highway lights. This project is currently being experimented with in Oregon. But that’s not all that the state is doing to take advantage of right of way. Time Magazine also points to Portland’s Trimet Rail system as an example of effectively using right of way to expand transportation options.

Lacayo cautions that spreading Blumenauer’s and Portland’s right of way ideas to coordinate with other cities, other states, and the rest of the country will be the big challenge that right of way advocates have to overcome. But, Lacayo wrote, if the federal government could find a way to coordinate all the efforts, the outcome could result in the country’s biggest transportation revolution since the idea of a federal highway system.

“It was, after all, one great federal effort that built the interstates,” Lacayo wrote of the federal help to coordinate highways. “Maybe there can be another one that rebuilds them.”