The Nov. 6 general election will include a vote on a half-cent statewide sales tax to raise $2.3 billion, primarily to fi nance more roads, including the widening of Interstate 540 to six or eight lanes. Here are 10 reasons you should vote against it.

A humane vision for Northwest Arkansas. If you’ve had the misfortune to drive Little Rock’s Interstate 430 and Interstate 630 intersection, you have an idea of what our cars-only transportation fixation implies for our future. I-540 will become even more nightmarish as it expands to eight lanes of congested traff c. Shades of the white-knuckled driving in Los Angeles! We should spend this money on buses, commuter rail (see the University of Arkansas Community Design Center’s realistic proposal), trails and sidewalks, as high-quality cities such as Boulder, Colo .,and Portland, Ore., have done.

Do you really want more sprawl? Highways attract sprawl. I-540 is lined with the usual big-box stores, parking lots, car dealers, mega-churches, mega-malls and acres of concrete. The title of James Kunstler’s book names it: “The Geography of Nowhere.” That’s not all, folks. The regional powers have ordered a four-lane “Western Bypass” to bypass the present bypass, miles to the west of I-540.

Highway clutter is likely to be dragged nearly to Lake Wedington.

Build it (highways) and they (cars) will come.

Highways, especially near cities, always fill to capacity, just as I-540 did. This is because fi nanciers are quick to cash in on high-value land created (by our tax dollars) along highways.

We should have prohibited development along I-540, but the high-rollers wouldn’t stand for it. Thus interstate transportation was sacrificed to make I-540 our regional main street. I-540 south of Fayetteville isn’t congested because it’s not “developed.” Widening I-540 means more cars, meaning more development, meaning more congestion.

Many people can’t use, or prefer not to use, cars. The old, young and handicapped cannot drive.

The poor cannot aft ord the car’s $9,000 annual expense (according to AAA fi gures) and many others prefer not to pay it. Many of us prefer transit but it’s not available because of America’s carsonly fi xation.

Drivers should pay for roads. If drivers want eight lanes on I-540, they need to put up the tolls and gasoline taxes to pay for it.

A blue-ribbon commission labored long before proposing this sales tax, but somehow they didn’t consider gasoline taxes.

Drivers already avoid nearly all the costs of driving. The International Center for Technology Assessment has analyzed the true price of automobile transportation. When one includes government subsidization, police, fi re, environmental, health and social costs, there are between $800 billion and $2.2 trillion per year in unpaid (by drivers) costs, amounting to $7 to $20 per gallon added to the present cost of gasoline. Drivers are getting oft scot-free.

Sales taxes are deeply regressive. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reports state, countyand city taxes are deeply regressive because they come mostly from sales rather than income or property taxes. Arkansas has one of the highest tax rates on the poor. The poorest 20 percent pay 12 percent of their income for state and local taxes, while the richest 1 percent pay only 6 percent of their income. A sales tax for roads makes this even more unfair.

Highways help destroy the real America. The heart of Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers and Bentonville is in their downtowns.

Downtown shopping is being destroyed by the big boxes and malls that feed on urban centers by locating out of town on cheap land. Thus one can no longer go to the movies or buy simple commodities downtown. Residents pay for the cars, gasoline, highway, police, etc. needed to get out to these sales barns, which are more likewarehouses than shops. Is this what we want?

Cars are an environmental and resource disaster. Global warming leads the list of problems caused by our oil-soaked economy, but there’s also foreign oil dependence and a host of other issues.

We already overemphasize cars.

America has become totally dependent on cars and airplanes. In contrast to other developed nations, we have no national network of fast, or even slow, trains. Our cities are sprawled, making walking or bicycling unlikely. The result is the industrialized world’s most dangerous, polluting, expensive, ugly, boring, inconvenient and slow transportation system.

It’s time to travel in another direction.

ART HOBSON IS A PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF PHYSICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS.

Opinion, Pages 17 on 08/26/2012