"Bring Back the Urban Visionaries" by David Gelernter, in City Journal (Summer 1995), Manhattan Institute, 52 Vanderbilt Ave., New York, N.Y.10017.

In 1940, an express train could speed passengers from New Haven, Connecticut, to Grand Central Station in Manhattan in 90 minutes. In the 55 years since then, not only has no progress been made in reducing that time, but there is no express train--and the trip takes an hour and 41 minutes. Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale University, blames such failures to advance on the absence of urban visionaries.

Technology could improve transportation and otherwise make city life better, Gelernter contends, but imaginative proposals are not forthcoming, chiefly because "today's technology visionaries know little and care less about the mundane problems of daily urban life." To an earlier generation of thinkers, including Norman Be1 Geddes and others, these were central concerns. To contemporary thinkers such as George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Esther Dyson, using powerful computers and the information highway to telecommute and teleconference is more important than mere physical transportation.

To improve city life, Gelernter argues, visionaries should be tackling such everyday problems as how to cut the New Haven-to-Grand Central commute to an hour or less.

The conventional wisdom is that better tracks and fancy new trains, perhaps magnetic-levitation models, are needed. Gelernter instead proposes paving over the tracks and running buses on the right-of-way. "Suppose they ran on two-lane busroads, the outer lane for high-speed express travel and the inner for station stops." Not only would such buses be faster, they could-with the aid of central computers that swiftly responded to requests from riders-be scheduled more flexibly.

Such ideas might or might not prove eco- nomically practical, Gelernter argues, but they certainly are worth considering--and that, he says, is precisely the problem: they are not even being put on the public agenda.