Thursday, March 14, 2013

Walker Adds 32% More GPR To Transportation (Read: Highways) Budget

Road-builder bonanza from general purpose revenue [the GPR reference is a correction from earlier language] boost, official figures show.

And the price tag goes up because Walker's putting so much of it on the credit card.

And a reminder about the insanity of it all:
"Widening roads to solve traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity," says Walter Kulash, a traffic engineer from Orlando, Fla.
Former Mayor John Norquist brought Kulash to Milwaukee for a presentation calling interstate highways through cities a bad investment, but a senior official for the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission - - father to the SE freeway system's $6.4 billion expansion and reconstruction that is now undergoing reconstruction of the reconstruction  - - was unimpressed.

So it goes.

2 comments:

  1. Sorry to nitpick here.

    The overall transportation budget is only increasing by 2.7 over the previous base years.

    The 32% refers to the increase in use of general purpose revenue (GPR) for subsidizing the state's transportation budget. GPR is tax $ from income, sales, and excise taxes.

    The subsidy story is compelling. People from the central city are now increasingly subsidizing suburban commuters... hardly seems fair.

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