In city of a million or so people , sure.. between Atlanta and Chattanooga? Not so much.
The reason we’re OK with funding roads and not OK with funding trains is roads get used and trains don’t. Tax money spent on trains is tax money flushed down the toilet, that’s not a conservative value.
The Interstate System was built with National Defense in mind, which certainly is one of the roles of the Federal Government.
What a joke of an article. The main purpose of highways is to facilitate transportation more effectively. How are you going to move goods and services on light rail and buses to a specific destination?
its about Top down vs. bottom up.
If Chicago wants to build a subway, by all means, let them do it, and let them fund it. Local voters can easily decide and manage it.
If on the other hand, the Feds create plans to start doling out Fed-printed “stimulus” money to localities with the best lobbyists to build “low-carbon” trains, requiring politically-favored union labor, and XX% of special-interest ownership, with bonds issued by the Gov’t support Wall St. Oligopoly, etc, etc... than that is something VERY different.
Because public roads are a legitimate application of the “General Welfare” clause in the Constitution (which sets the tone), since they are used by everyone, while public transportation (as well as a lot of other things that people appeal to the General Welfare clause to justify) are not, or at least it is harder to justify them as such.
85 years ago, in Los Angeles my parents had 2 cars and never used public cattle movement devices!
Roads give freement of movement and don’t constrict time of travle or choice of destination!
Public transportation is nothing but government control of population movement!!!
Kill it all and let the poor and illegals walk!
Director of the American Conservative Center for Pubic Transportation ?
Ya don’t think this clown has any bias, right ? His statistics aren’t slanted, right ?
Naw, shilling for the engineering companies and other pubic parasites making gazillions for worthless “studies”, or contractors whose lips are permanently adhered to the pubic teat - that couldn’t be the motivation.
I’ll take my subsidy in cash, thank you. No need to waste it on “toy train” schemes like Houston’s.
I know this guy is pimping his new book, but he is simply lying here. We get less than 20% of our oil from the Persian Gulf, most of it coming from Canada and domestic production.
Also, will the left ever retire the "no war for oil" canard?
The author is confusing the issues of public ownership and subsidies. Although most roads are publicly owned, they are not subsidized. We pay gas taxes to fund road improvements and construction. I am willing to pay higher gas taxes if necessary to maintain and improve our road system provided that competitive bidding without union mandates and racial preferences not occur.
The important distinction between public ownership and subsidies involves the level of usage and the underlying cost of the infrastructure. Light rail even with good ridership levels must be heavily subsidized by non users because it does not have sufficient capacity. For example, the Denver area has several lines of light rail. Even though these lines have good ridership, there are large subsidies for both construction and operation. These lines are largely funded by sales taxes and general taxes. User fares would have to be quadrupled to fund operations. These lines are nice to ride but they lack capacity to make much of a difference. The lines reduce congestion somewhat. An alternative solution such as bus rapid transit would have cost much less to build and operate. The bus rapid transit lanes could have been shared by tool paying autos.
The gasoline taxes on car drivers pay for the highways. Similarly, the gasoline taxes on car drivers will be used to pay for the railroads. Don't expect to see them paid for by the ticket prices except in a very few locations.
(It is still an open question whether it would make more sense to remove most of the current federal gasoline tax of 18.4 cents per gallon and require the states to tax and pay for their own roads rather than the feds collecting the tax and block granting most of it back to the states with huge strings)
Without reading the article I’ll tell you what’s conservative about the federal highways. I’m not going to talk about the history, or the costs.
Growing up my family would always drive to our vacations. The fastest way from Boise, ID to Portland, OR (Grandparent’s area) is to take I-84, the federal highway.
Occasionally my Dad would drive the speed limit, sometimes he would drive slow, sometimes faster. He got to make this choice. If driving too fast he’d get pulled over and get a ticket. He’d pay the ticket because it was his fault, his responsibility. He was accountable for his own actions, he didn’t blame the police officer, the car manufacturer, or even the company that painted the stripes on the road so they were further apart so it seemed like he was going slower than he actually was.
Almost every trip my Dad would take a “short cut”. This usually involved him seeing a sign to somewhere we’d never been before. These “short cuts” invariably added at least an hour to our drive time.
We’d pull off the federal highway at the exit and drive off into some area off the main road that if you’ve seen Pixar’s “Cars” looked very much like Radiator Springs. A nice little town that got bypassed by the highway system and the locals trying to keep the town from dying and being forgotten.
On these “short cuts” we’d occasionally get “lost”. Well not lost, we knew where we were, just didn’t know how to get where we wanted to be. When we didn’t know how to get where we wanted to be (lost) Dad would pull out a road map and spend a few minutes tracing the roads to figure out how we got to where we were. Then we’d pile back into the car and head off again, probably leading to another “short cut”.
He never called the police to ask for help. Never thought about suing the map manufacturer for not being updated or warning him that a road up in the mountains probably wasn’t passable in the middle of winter.
We could leave at any time of the day. If we wanted to get on the road as the sun came up we could. If we wanted to laze around much of the day and get on the road when we decided “well we better get going” we could. When we got on the road too late and didn’t make the trip till too late we could pull off in any little town and get a hotel. Or not...I spent plenty nights sleeping in the back of my parent’s car parked in a rest area, or in a tent up some side road off the freeway (probably after being “lost” on a “short cut”).
The Federal Highway system is conservatism. On the roads the individual drivers get to make the choice themselves if they want to stay on them, or get off. The drivers themselves choose to go fast, go slow, or the posted speed limits. Leave now? Leave later?
Everything about the Federal Highway system is conservatism.
Compare that to trains, buses, or air plane travel. You leave when the public transportation says you leave. You sit where they tell you to sit. You have no control over your speed. You can’t control if you arrive early or late to your destination, but you better be on time at departure. Your travel, and possibly life, is in the hands of someone else whom you’ve probably never met and will probably never see again.
There is no personal responsibility in public transportation. There is full personal responsibility driving on the Federal Highway System, and that is Conservatism.
Federal interstate highways are channels of interstate commerce. Early (pre-New Deal) Commerce Clause cases established a legitimate national interest in establishing and maintaining the channels of interstate commerce. Navigable waterways and commercial air corridors are other examples. Metro bus lines and intrastate light rail are not.
Shriek?
I DO have a problem with federal money being spent on them, however. Things like this should ALWAYS be paid for by the states or localities that need/want/use them.
Certainly there is opposition to centralized (leftist) confiscation of tax money to be doled out according to political agenda. As in any commercial endeavor the end free-enterprise idea is to provide a service of such quality that individuals will freely pay for it while simultaneously producing a profit. Competition, rather than leftist authoritarianism, fosters that.
For those somewhat younger than myself please know that in the past there was much much wider presence of various transportation modes, river boats, passenger trains, airships, ocean steamers, trolley cars, etc. etc., all in a much more conservative (capitalistic, profit-motive) environment.
It is always this way. Centralized leftist authoritarianism obliterates variety, imagination, competition, opportunity. Indeed, so obvious when one has lived a while, that it shows up Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Cass Sunstein, Harvard, as a really very sick ego-dominated cabal. How obvious is it?
It could have been all different in America. But it's truly doubtful that the dumbed-down can awaken.
Johnny Suntrade
1)It is more cost efficient to move goods via tractor trailer into a small town or throughout a large urban area than to build light rail into same small town.
2)This country is littered with abandoned rail grades into smaller towns and cities that were no longer profitable.
3)Rail is wonderful for long distance freight like stacked tractor trailer cars but horrible for long distance travel when time is of essence.
4) Our economy is based on next day/same day service and those who can provide it will thrive.
5) the Interstate Highway has more than paid back on it’s investment and would have probably occurred privately had this nation not been in the midst of a cold war.
Conservative for several reasons:
1. They were initially built and developed for the military to be able to quickly move men and materials around the country on big enough roads to handle heavy vehicles in all kinds of weather.
2. Boosting commerce by giving trucking and also consumers ways to get places to buy and sell goods. Encouraging people to vacation more/travel more by giving them better and safer roads to get to vacation destinations.
3. Expanding the ability of people to live where they want (ie suburbs, rural areas).