Half the year gone--poof.

If you think, drivers are cutting back, the pleasure boat industry has been hammered even more. From my inlet vantage point with a view of all comings and goings from various marinas into Long Island bays towards the ocean, those comings and goings are relatively few and far between this summer. Late June--early July weekends normally pack the channel with watercraft--not this year. You've got to have money to burn under any circumstances to take out a cigar boat -- yesterday nary a one passed by to rouse the neighborhood in familiar jackhammer-like cacophony. And the local fishermen seem to be sticking to the docks and surf casting. Marina owners must feel a lot like greenfield suburban developers.

No doubt gasoline costs and energy will become top of mind campaign issues. The candidate worthy of support will map out a long-range plan to get the country out of its mess tied into restoring the nation's rapidly declining infrastructure, which contributes to more wasted time, delays, and costs. We need a New Deal style plan to build new airports, high speed rail, and mass transit, which all link together in our major urban areas, the so-called global gateways where most of our population now gravitates and where most of the nation's business takes place. Not only will a national infrastructure plan help ensure our global competitiveness, it could also put a lot of people to work. Local land use agendas need to tie into the national plan through tax incentives with emphasis on transit oriented development and high rise residential in and around pedestrian friendly urban nodes. We need to take a page from China and reserve 20-30% of our urban and suburban infill for green space--parks convenient to neighborhoods--so people don't have to drive everywhere to recreate. And we need to stop earmarks and funding programs--like tax increment financing--that allow local communities to build roads and sewer systems that perpetuate sprawl and cannibalize tax bases.