Roadbuilders Go Over The Top: Transit Goes Begging

You wonder if the PR staff at the Transportation Development Association ate some bad mushrooms before issuing their hysteria-filled news release Friday about highway contracts and the state's budget problems.

They warn of a "Doomsday Option," and "Black Tuesday" if a state budget repair plan deadline passes that might delay some highway spending in the state.

Update: The release is blasted out again: ONLY EIGHT DAYS UNTIL DOOMSDAY!

The highway lobby is trying to jam the Governor and certain legislative leaders, looking to get as much money as possible from state coffers during a time when belt-tightening is already underway.

It tells you something basic about the road-builders and their allies' overbearing sense of entitlement: any possible reduction in the largesse they count on, and which they feel has been essentially promised to them by politicians in both parties, is a sign that The End Is Near.

The really pathetic piece of this synthetic, greedy little drama, the opportunity lost in part because of the TDA and others benefiting from the status quo, is that now is the absolutely right moment time to seriously launch the transition from reflexive highway building to transit expansion because vehicle fuel costs are heading permanently into the stratosphere.

The old ways inherent in the petroleum paradigm are fading right before our eyes.

A genuine "deal" on state spending would begin by honestly including transit in transportation. A good first step:

Transferring $200 million for the pending commuter rail plan from the excrescent $1.9 billion ticketed for the north-south leg of I-94 from Milwaukee to Illinois, as the City of Milwaukee has sought.

There's your model: repair and modernize what you've got, trim back expansions and invest in transit.

The $6.5 billion southeastern Wisconsin regional transportation (sic) plan, with $2.7 billion already committed to the Marquette Interchange and north-south leg according to traffic patterns predicted when gasoline was $2.30/gallon, could be reduced by additional tens of millions of public dollars if we could trade up to transit expansion and jettison the approximately 90 miles of unnecessary new lane additions remaining in the plan.

Then you follow that with coordinated, intentional state transportation spending shifts to city, village and town street and road repairs, better maintenance, expanded patrolling, and investments in urban transit - - where the people live.

For cities like Milwaukee, that means more money invested in the services that people use within the municipal limits, and less money spent simply moving people through and around population centers to destinations that are becoming too expensive to reach and are financially unsustainable.