The Political Environment: Transit Spending Creates Broad Benefits, Groups Say

Monday, May 25, 2009

Transit Spending Creates Broad Benefits, Groups Say

Another cogent case made for transit as a stimulus priority for Wisconsin, a coalition argues.

Details, here.

2 comments:

Joseph Thomas Klein said...: The blindness to the economic benefits of transit development is purely ideological.

If we accept:

o the science coming from multiple sources, that burning fossil fuels is detrimental to our planet

o the facts in front of our faces that no cheap alternative to petroleum run automobiles has been given

o the evidence that urban sprawl exaggerates our utilization of finite planetary resources

then we as a society should accept that we need to build more mass transit, especially efficient and clean mass transit, and transit that supports walkable urban neighborhoods and compact small towns.

A pro-transit approach is in both our long term interest as a species, but essential to the economic sustainability of our society.

The free-market libertarians are being manipulated by people like the Koch brothers, who support propagandizing "think tanks" like the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation and CSE. These are the sources embraced buy Sykes, Belling, Ott and Walker in their ideological war against ecologists and building a sustainable society necessary for the survival of our progeny.

The anti-planners are wrapped up in a sick "neo-McCarthyism" that associate sprawl and the automobile centric society with "the American way of life." They emotionally view the rational return to transportation patters of 1920 as equivalent to capitulation to Leninist-Stalinist Communism.

Ironically, the trolley and interurban systems, which most modern transit planners are effectively rebuilding, where historically a uniquely American institution build by private capitol. They where destroyed by government subsidized freeways, cheap oil, the unintended consequences of federal anti-trust polices, and an illegal trust created by GM, Firestone Rubber, Standard Oil, Phillips Petroleum and Mack Truck.; May 25, 2009 at 10:45 AM
Democrat said...: Society should also go back to using telegraphs instead of phones, trains instead of planes. Until gas is unaffordable, society isnt going to abandon their cars and quiet suburbs for the city. It would be a step down. People like the "freedom" that car ownership provides. We love our cars and wont give them up regardless if it is unsustainable.

They want mass transit now when nobody is going to use it as cars are more convenient even when you pay for parking. I would instead invest in repaving the roads. Thats something that works in the long term. Oil is too abundant and will be for a long term period of time. This mass trolley street car idea will fail until the chosen method of transportation is too expensive.; May 28, 2009 at 4:15 PM