At a National Press Club speech intended to promote the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) stimulus spending initiatives, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood explained how his policies are designed to discourage the ownership and use of automobiles. Although many imagine road building when “shovel-ready” projects are mentioned, the only efforts highlighted by LaHood as worthy of receiving federal taxpayer subsidy included buses, light rail and other forms of multi-modal transit. ”We have $8 billion,” LaHood said. “You’re going to see new buses; you’re going to see ability of transit districts to really have the equipment . . . And we’ll begin at DOT to set a standard for our ability to get out of the recession, get people back to work in good-paying jobs.” LaHood says some of those federally funded jobs involve driving buses.
“Well, I’ve said that I’m open-minded about transit districts being able to use some of their money for operating,” LaHood said. “I think it’s a little bit silly to provide all of this money to transit districts to buy new buses if you can’t afford to have drivers and employees to use the equipment. And in these hard times, it is difficult sometimes for transit districts to have the operating money.”
LaHood insisted that he wanted to “think outside of the box” when searching for a source of operating money for the buses and the bus drivers. Imposing tolls on new and existing roads using the infrastructure bank endorsed by President Obama was at the top of the secretary’s list of revenue-raising initiatives.
“Well, now is not a very good time to be talking about raising taxes,” LaHood said. “Infrastructure bank is one thing we’re thinking about. We’re thinking about tolling . . . We need to find ways—other ways to do it—perhaps even public-private partnerships that have been used around the country very effectively.”
When asked whether this included a per-mile satellite-based tax, LaHood side-stepped the issue with a joke. The Transportation Secretary admitted that the new fees and regulations are designed to make driving less attractive. He suggested the only opposition to this policy is found in a recent Newsweek column in which George Will dubbed LaHood the “Secretary of Behavior Modification” for his plan to “transform” Americans out of their cars.
Notwithstanding the fact that George Will doesn’t like this idea—the idea of creating opportunities for people to get out of their cars—we’re working with the secretary of HUD, Shaun Donovan, on opportunities for housing, walking paths, biking paths . . . And that concept of livable communities is something that we’re going to promote and work with the committee on, because we think it’s the way forward. It’s the way to get people more opportunities, rather than just in their automobiles.
Much of these new opportunities will be paid for by diverting gas tax revenue paid by motorists into general funds that will cover the non-road related expenses. Already, such diversions amount to billions of dollars. In 2003, $18 billion in gas tax dollars were funneled into unrelated projects at the federal level, on top of the $9 billion diverted at the state and local level. LaHood explained his fundamental purpose in response to press questions seeking clarification.
“It is a way to coerce people out of their cars, yeah. Look, people don’t like spending an hour and a half getting to work. And people don’t like spending an hour going to the grocery store. And all of you who live around here know exactly what I’m talking about . . . About everything we do around here is government intrusion in people’s lives.”
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Jeebus – What scares me is that these are intelligent people who are talking themselves into believing terrible ideas.
Livable community….sounds great!
Ever gone grocery shopping for a family of 4 on a bus?
“…the idea of creating opportunities for people to get out of their cars—we’re working with the secretary of HUD, Shaun Donovan, on opportunities for housing, walking paths, biking paths . . . And that concept of livable communities is something that we’re going to promote and work with the committee on, because we think it’s the way forward. It’s the way to get people more opportunities, rather than just in their automobiles.
Uhm, what’s your timeline on all this wonderfulness, buddy?
The city of Dallas has been building a light rail system for the decade that I’ve lived here. In 5 more years, you may be able to actually go somewhere besides City Hall on it.
Who voted for these people? Not me.
Ain’t no way these solutions will work for me or most of the other suburbanites in this world.
Secretary LaHood: “Well, I’ve said that I’m open-minded about transit districts being able to use some of their money for operating,” LaHood said. “I think it’s a little bit silly to provide all of this money to transit districts to buy new buses if you can’t afford to have drivers and employees to use the equipment. And in these hard times, it is difficult sometimes for transit districts to have the operating money.”
I’ll bet that the unions representing transit workers are salivating over that one. At negotiating time, they can say, “See, you can use federal money to meet our wage and benefit demands.” And, since the politicians doing the negotiating are also courting the unions representing the workers at election time, I’m sure that they will be happy to acquiesce. After all, it’s “found money” for the municipality, right?
As for his other plans – I have no problem with offering people alternatives to automobile travel. I have the sneaking suspicion, however, that most of us will still drive to many of our destinations – I’m not lugging multiple bags of groceries on a bus, let alone on a bicycle – because it is the most convenient and comfortable way to travel. Which won’t satisfy some people.
I enjoy bike riding for fun and fitness – not as a way to get to work.
And this is interesting…In 2003, $18 billion in gas tax dollars were funneled into unrelated projects at the federal level, on top of the $9 billion diverted at the state and local level.
Wait, I thought that everyone else was subsidizing drivers?!
Americans will not abandon their cars, or the suburbs, overnight, but things are going to be very different from here on out. The days of cheap hydrocarbons and “anyone with a pulse” credit are over. Now would be a good time to start an “X-burbs Deathwatch”. For those of you who bought McMansions out in Oriented Strandboard Estates, you are so screwed.
What do you know? Has it really been two and a half years already:
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/the-road-ahead/
The gist of what he is saying is valid — that too many people drive. You can’t argue against that stance for places like LA or Orange County.
I just imagine all the billions we’ve spent propping up GM and Chrysler, and the sorts of public transportation infrastructure we could have created with that money.
I live in the NY Capital District. The only time it takes you an hour to go to the grocery store is when you take the bus instead of your car.
If you’ve got $54 you don’t know what to do with, spend it on this book. It will tell you how to make money in this new economy.
http://www.amazon.com/Residential-Streets-Walter-M-Kulash/dp/0874208793
I’l bet the DOT secretary arrived at the National Press Club in one of those black US Government Suburbans. No chance he took the metro.
I’d like to see the Gov’t use the money to provide incentives to private companies who set up generous teleworking or alternative work schedule programs to get people off the road and reduce conjestion.
Couldn’t he have done this speech from his home using a live video feed or at least something like skype?
In the late 20’s GM bought up city trolley systems, ripped them out, and sold the cities on using their buses. Now we have to re-buy all the rights of way to get light rail systems back.
Our tax money has been supporting the car manufacturers (suburbs, interstates, and low taxes on fuel) and trucking companies for 90 years it is about time the small amount of tax money we collect on fuel goes to other ideas.
We don’t know what ideas will work because we have wasted so much time and money on just supporting the car manufacturers and land developers. Hopefully we will study other countries and get some ideas.
I used to ride the bus in LA. Took an hour to get anywhere. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
Why not spend the gas tax money on roads, which people would actually use, instead of transit projects nobody wants?
I’ve never understood this, even from a strictly populist point of view you would think transit projects are about the worst “investments” possible since almost nobody wants to use them.
D
skor: Now would be a good time to start an “X-burbs Deathwatch”. For those of you who bought McMansions out in Oriented Strandboard Estates, you are so screwed.
That’s premature. Consider these facts:
These problems can be seen in the migration numbers. A demographic analysis conducted by my colleagues at the Praxis Strategy Group over the past decade found that New York and other top cities—including Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston—have been suffering the largest net out-migration of residents of virtually all places in the country, albeit the pattern has slowed with the recession.
It’s astonishing that, even with the many improvements over the past decade in New York, for example, more residents left its five boroughs for other locales in 2006 than in 1993, when the city was in demonstrably far worse shape. In 2006, the city had a net loss of 153,828 residents through domestic out-migration, compared to a decline of 141,047 in 1993, with every borough except Brooklyn experiencing a higher number of out-migrants in 2006.
And this:
And like other American cities, Chicago now has a growing glut of “luxury” condos, a pattern that became evident as early as 2006 and has now, as Chicago magazine put it, “stalled” as a result of a “perfect storm” of toughened mortgage standards, overbuilding, job losses, and rising crime.
Or this:
Short of a catastrophic change, the country will remain predominately made up of suburban, exurban and small town residents. Since 2000, more than four-fifths of metropolitan growth has taken place in suburbs and exurbs. Economically, we see a similar pattern. According to a recent Brookings Institution study of 98 large metropolitan areas, only 21% of employees work within three miles of downtown. The report found that only three regions avoided the decentralizing trend.
Or this:
One archetype will be the Bloombergian “luxury city,” a very expensive urban area dominated by the wealthy and their servants, students and nomadic young workers as well as the poor. The affluent will drive this growth, but only in a relatively few neighborhoods in attractive places like New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Denver and Minneapolis.
San Francisco may presage this urban form. Already middle-class families are becoming scarce in the city by the bay. The place seems increasingly something of a Disneyland for privileged adults, exempting of course the large homeless population. “A cross between Carmel and Calcutta,” jokes California historian and San Francisco native Kevin Starr.
The city is nice if you are rich. And even then, virtually all rich people who live in the city also have a nice place in the country to “get away from it all.”
folkdancer: In the late 20’s GM bought up city trolley systems, ripped them out, and sold the cities on using their buses. Now we have to re-buy all the rights of way to get light rail systems back.
That never happened. Cities were ripping out their trolley tracks before GM bought the rights of way. Cities wanted rid of their trolley lines, which made repaving roads more difficult and were subject to falling ridership rates because the routes were fixed.
Follow the money…
As to LaHood’s comments about it taking an hour to get to the grocery store, I would simply make this comment: If you bought a home that’s an hour away from a grocery store, you’re in the middle of nowhere.
+1 for dcdriver – maybe LaHood should lead by example.
“Anti-car agenda” is somewhat of a reactionary label for a plan that aims to offer alternatives to the use of a car. The tone of this piece really is paranoid enough that it reminds me of a militia newsletter frightening their members into thinking that the government will come and take their guns away. Get a grip.
“Ever gone grocery shopping for a family of 4 on a bus?”
As a matter of fact, I used to do it when I lived in Germany. It’s a part of normal everyday life there.
I love cars as much, if not more, than anyone on here. I collect cars and work on cars of all kinds. I will never give them up as a hobby. I would, however, give up one of my daily driver cars that I have to beat the snot out of every day to commute back and forth to work with. I would love to be able to take a light rail or a bus to work every day.
As an enthusiast, I would love to see fewer cars on the road. I would love to see fewer unattentive drivers on the road. I would love driving to become nothing but my hobby and not my daily necessity.
I really wonder how the northern part of the country (i.e. the snow belt) would function with bike paths and walkways as the promoted function of how to get to work.
I actually watched this past winter (which was relatively mild for SE PA) how many months it was “cold”. Cold being 40 or below.
5 months of the year.
5 months of the year I would not want to commute 1 mile via my own feet or on a bike due to weather. And that’s when the ground is dry.
I’m all for promoting well engineered living. Just don’t ever remove the choice from the citizen, or else the citizen’s choice is to move elsewhere.
Mass transit is fine and good, but there are few cities that it would actually work well in. As Lokkii said, here in DFW they’ve been working on a mass transit system for years and it’s still not even close to adequate. There’s simply too much space to cover, and too many people working in too many different places.
Must be nice for people with taxpayer paid limos and air force transportation at their beck and call to be making such decisions for us lowly stupid people who do not have a clue about how horrible this world is by virtue of the fact that we exist.
Like I said above– one solution is teleworking. Obviously it’s not feasible all the time and for all occupations, but a lot of work can be done from home. Let me keep my multiple gas-guzzlers, let me work from home as much as possible.
I am a gearhead with gasoline in my viens. I would actually LOVE not to HAVE to drive to everything, including work (when I used to work). However there are VERY few areas in America where that is even remotely realistic. Only the older cities on the east coast and in the midwest are capable of this. Why? They were laid out before the advent of the car. Newer cities such as Dallas, Phx, LA have no hope of ever becoming mass-transit cities.
EXAMPLE:I live in PHX. It’s about a 15 minute walk to the nearest bus stop, and that’s pretty good in this area. Some outlying areas don’t even have bus service. I can take the bus to the light rail to get to the airport. Sounds cool, huh? Here’s the drill. Walk 15 minutes to the nearest bus stop. Possibly wait 1/2 hour for the next bus to the light rail. Takes 1/2 hr. to go the 5 mi to the light rail station with all the stops. Wait 10 min for then next light rail train. Travel about 15 minutes to the airport. Wait 10min for shuttle to terminal. Travel 5-10 min to terminal. Let’s add it up: Almost 2hrs. It takes me 11 minutes in my car, and I’ll bet my car uses LESS energy in the process, too. Hence, even though I live in what would be the “center” of the metro-area, I don’t think I could live without a car. Can you imagine that 15 inute walk and all those waits (outside BTW) on a 115* day? Yeah, not so great.
Tin-foil-hat-guy will also argue that govt loves mass transit for the simple fact that they can control how & when & which people can move around…
I really do support his efforts.
The more people use public transport, the more space there is on the roads.
Space for me to drive my car.
And all the people who don’t care about driving, who don’t know how to drive, or who don’t enjoy it will be somewhere else.
Great!
Mass transit folks always have it backwards. They want to plan the routes, then get people to use them. It has always seemed to me that the better approach is like should be used with sidewalks. – If you want to pour sidewalks, wait awhile and see where paths develop. Then pour where the paths are.
Same thing with mass transit. In every metropolitan area, there have to be many highly congested routes where driving is a pain. Design a transit system that is reasonably priced and with easy access and people will use it. Nobody is going to use a system because they should. People will only use it where it is more convenient than driving.
“[A] plan that aims to offer alternatives to the use of a car” is somewhat of an Orwellian name for a plan that plans to heavily subsidize the alternatives by taxing unrelated people who won’t use them. If the plan were even limited to paying for capital improvements for transit options that could break even operationally, that would be one thing, but these have to be subsidized on a massive scale even for operation. That’s not just “offering alternatives.”
The initial reason for the city trolley systems going away was an anti-monopoly law that forbade electric utilities from owning and operating them. Most trolley systems would technically operate on a loss as an independent unit, but because they were owned by the electric company and used that power, they made a profit for their corporate parent. The Public Utility Holding Corporation Act of 1935 forced companies to choose between streetcars and electricity; the electricity companies, having divested the streetcars, promptly increased their rates.
No, not at the federal level we haven’t. Cars have subsidized other transit for years.
They also want to plan the routes, then somehow increase the density around the routes enough to sustain them. That doesn’t work either. The people who already live there are happy to take the light rail, but they tend to be as NIMBY about additional density as anyone.
Mass transit works fine when there’s enough density. Building it where density doesn’t exist and then expecting density to magically appear (and the neighbors to approve the necessary zoning changes) doesn’t work too well.
This socialist/facist/communist nonsense has to stop. They’ll pry my cold, dead fingers from my leather wrapped steering wheel before I give up my car.
maniceightball Your comment above made me think about something.
One hand of the government is wasting our money to prop up 2 failed companies. The other hand is working to kill the incentive for people to purchase cars. If his stupid ideas work people will buy less cars since their will be less of a need for them. GM and Chrysler couldn’t even survive with a 16m market, and sure can’t live on the depressed market we have now, yet they are working to have future car sales be low. This just doesn’t work.
The other problem with this is they plan to pay for it with gas taxes and then per mile tax charges again on the people driving. Less people driving mean less tax to pay for these wonderful bus and rail systems. So what are they going to do raise the tax, and people will drive less, again.
I am just amazed by how stupid our government is at times.
GREAT!!!
I can’t wait for the Government to start implementing all those ideas into reality – a sure thing to get an average Joe real, real angry so the next time around he/she pays really good attention to who gets into congress and the oval office.
I am just amazed by how stupid our government is at times.
The Government, any bureaucracy by definition is incapable of running anything “smartly”.
No surprises here.
The more Government – the more waste, inefficiency and stupidity. That’s just the way it is.
Whoever gets into the White House next better start cleaning and shrinking that place up… or we’re @#$#@!
carguy said:”“Anti-car agenda” is somewhat of a reactionary label for a plan that aims to offer alternatives to the use of a car. The tone of this piece really is paranoid enough that it reminds me of a militia newsletter frightening their members into thinking that the government will come and take their guns away. Get a grip.”
The article clearly quoted the transportation secretary saying he wanted to coerce people of their cars and that govt is engaging in government intrusion into people’s lives.
Governments too have banned some, but certainly not all, types of civilian arms. Further, prominent govt leaders have clearly stated their desire to place new bans on currently legal guns.
So your statement is factually wrong on all accounts.
No doubt you like the coercion and bans but are saddend to see people resisting the progressive change you seek.
I used to ride the bus in LA. Took an hour to get anywhere. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
Why not spend the gas tax money on roads, which people would actually use, instead of transit projects nobody wants?
I’ve never understood this, even from a strictly populist point of view you would think transit projects are about the worst “investments” possible since almost nobody wants to use them.
It took 100 years to build our present car friendly cities and suburbs. We have been building great roads for 100 years. Now we have traffic jams and bad air in super car friendly cities like Phoenix.
Are you saying NOBODY wants anything different when we haven’t really tried much of anything else?
All inclusive words like NOBODY, EVERYBODY, and THEY seldom fit the situation.
We in the U.S. have been on an addiction high with cars for a long time. Some of the problems mentioned like the high expense of homes near light rail and the inability of getting across LA or Phoenix by public transit are very true. We can think of these problems as part of kicking the habit which will take a long painful time to get through but then we have been addicts for a long time.
After living in Phoenix for 10 years and being scared by the heat, wondering if the government can find enough water, and living through a crisis when a land developer broke our one pipe line that furnished all grades of gas and diesel I wonder if any more that a few dozen people should try to live here.
Two or three native American groups have tried and failed to live here when periods of drought came along. Maybe betting almost everything on a car/oil culture will doom us present occupants.
That dodge on the GPS tracking question is not encouraging. Everything else discussed is more of the same as far as I’m concerned. I’ve got no problems funding mass transit (hey, half of my commute depends on it).
“It is a way to coerce people out of their cars”
hahahaha
too honest for politics. That’ll be corrected shortly.
It’s a damn shame that we could fix this all with a little paint.
If we had narrow (Naro?) cars we could add lanes without additional infrastructure build out, capital expenditures or Nanny-state behaviour modification.
Hell, why don’t they just subsidize motorcycles and scooters? I could sure use a Ducati-sized bailout.
Nice to see a mix of comments. I had thought they would mostly be ravings about those commie pinkos taking our God-given rights to drive away, and am glad to see they’re mostly not.
To those comments about how mass transit will never work in most of America, I grew up in Fort Worth. I know about being stranded out in the middle of nowhere until I was old enough to have a car, and am grateful to now live in Seattle, which currently has at least passable mass transit for getting to work. I remember the summer day when I realized that I needed to do physical work to stay healthy, and that I’d be happy to walk to school, but it was too far and not safe on the rutted, barely-maintained, no-shoulder road into town. Having a car to drive the relatively short distance so you could walk a little way across a parking lot was an absolute necessity. It was totally dumb. I was probably 11.
I also like cars. I liked working on them in high school and college, and like the lines and colors. Shiny. But since college it’s been glaringly obvious that cars are a huge liability, and a significant tool for keeping people in debt.
The simple fact of the matter is that America has consistently made the worst possible choices over the last 60 years in how cities were built, what industries were emphasized, and what advertising was used to train people into thinking what they absolutely needed. A whole system was built up with no thought to preserving the natural landscape and human physical and mental health. It is ultimately tragic in the Shakespearean sense that we have implemented a model of suburban and exurban nowheres that only make sense with individual cars–an arrangement that simply cannot function in the future. There is not enough energy and raw material to keep it going.
We should be despondent about the bailout billions to the auto companies ultimately not because we’re giving money to incompetent corporate scum who will never pay it back, but because that money, representing a block of resources and time available to society that will never come again, will just disappear to entropy. It will do so because the car is a failed technology serving a failed model.
The Transportation Secretary is correct in that he should be anti-car. The way we use cars, and the entire system we built to service them (at our expense as physical living animals), cannot continue. We need to invest or rapidly dwindling national treasure in making a sustainable society, instead of propping up dead industries. Doing so will ultimately employ more people, solve more problems, and make us all richer than the current path.
Good times for the museum industry!
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/04/415.asp
“Last week, the U.S. Senate passed H.R. 3, a six-year transportation authorization bill funded primarily by revenue from the federal gasoline tax. The House passed its version of the legislation in March, and the two versions must be reconciled before becoming law.”
The following spending projects are part of H.R. 3:
$3,000,000 to renovate and expand the National Packard Museum
$3,000,000 for the National Infantry Museum Transportation Network
$1,705,000 to reconstruct Union Station in North Canaan, CT and establish a transportation museum
$1,000,000 to construct the Transportation and Heritage Museum in Townsend, Tennessee
$500,000 to Rehabilitate and redesign Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse, NY
$250,000 for the Issaquah Valley Trolley Project
“It will do so because the car is a failed technology serving a failed model.
The Transportation Secretary is correct in that he should be anti-car. The way we use cars, and the entire system we built to service them (at our expense as physical living animals), cannot continue. We need to invest or rapidly dwindling national treasure in making a sustainable society, instead of propping up dead industries. Doing so will ultimately employ more people, solve more problems, and make us all richer than the current path.”
The above is so wrong on so many levels I don’t know where to start, except to say that it’s free markets and free peoples who can decide what is best to serve them. Not the government planners, who not coincedently, never have to live under the constraints and conditions of their plans. If YOU feel the suburbs are bad or that you are driving too much then YOU do something about it. But don’t pull me into your concept of
“sustainable society”. After you’ve done it for a few years maybe I will look at it and judge for myself, but don’t be surprised if I say “no thanks”.
I’m always fascinated by the anti-mass transit rantings of the “right”. “Why should I have to subsidize transportation for losers?”, is their stock argument. “I wanna be free to make my own transportation choices!” I’ve got news for you, almost the entire auto infrastructure in the US is subsidized. When was the last time a private developer, using private funds, build an interstate road? I’m not certain, but I’ll guess it was never. The only reason you can drive 100 miles from your job in the city, out to your McMansion in Nowheresville, is because the GOVERNMENT built the road, as well as the power lines, water supply etc. When you look at from cost per mile, the “independent” red stater gets more of subsidy from the government than does the “loser” riding the subway in NYC.
dex3703: A whole system was built up with no thought to preserving the natural landscape and human physical and mental health.
Check out the life expectancy of the average American man and woman in the late 1940s, and compare them to similar figures for Americans today. More people can expect to live longer today than ever before.
Incidentally, anyone who thinks that city living prior to the postwar suburban boom was some sort of Urbanist Garden of Eden needs to do some research. There’s a reason lots of people left the city for the suburbs, and it’s not because mean old GM tricked them into doing it.
And I fail to see how riding mass transit makes us any healthier than driving. In both cases, one is sitting in a moving vehicle. Unless buses and subway cars now come equipped with treadmills, stairmasters and free weights for passengers to use between stops.
dex3703: The way we use cars, and the entire system we built to service them (at our expense as physical living animals), cannot continue.
If you don’t want to use cars, then don’t. That is your decision. Please don’t conflate “what I prefer” with “no one else can make any other choices because civilization as we know it will collapse if they continue to do so” nonsense.
dex3703: We need to invest or rapidly dwindling national treasure in making a sustainable society, instead of propping up dead industries.
Based on the standards of those who promote “sustainability” (a word that has many different meanings, depending on which aspect of modern life the speaker doesn’t like that particular day), the only truly sustainable societies are those that gather nuts and berries, hunt animals and run around practically naked. I didn’t realize that Secretary LaHood was proposing THAT scenario for the U.S.
skor: When was the last time a private developer, using private funds, build an interstate road?
And when was the last time a private developer built a subway or mass transit system? ALL transportation systems rely on government subsidies or government purchases of rights of way.
skor: When you look at from cost per mile, the “independent” red stater gets more of subsidy from the government than does the “loser” riding the subway in NYC.
Not according to the link provided by johnthacker. Cars have subsidized other forms of transporation – at the federal level – for years.
I have no problem with subsidizing mass transit systems. It provides a form of transportation to the poor, handicapped or elderly. It provides transportation options to people who don’t want to drive, or don’t like it, and therefore shouldn’t really be behind the wheel. But let’s be accurate as to which parties are getting subsidized.
Question for the B & B here:
Does government exist to serve the people or are people supposed to serve the government?
Notice how few people stop to ask this very basic question…..
skor: I’ve got news for you, almost the entire auto infrastructure in the US is subsidized. Yes, with taxes from the gasoline purchased by drivers.
The only reason you can drive 100 miles from your job in the city, out to your McMansion in Nowheresville, is because the GOVERNMENT built the road, as well as the power lines, water supply etc. The government does not have money unless they first take it from people. Simple concept, I know.
When you look at from cost per mile, the “independent” red stater gets more of subsidy from the government than does the “loser” riding the subway in NYC. Care to explain this one? The subway rider’s fare is subsidized heavily, while the driver’s every mile is taxed through gasoline sales. Not to mention, the typical suburban driver most likely pays more income taxes than the typical urban subway rider.
The status quo is that we are spending billions of dollars on GM every quarter. The proposal of spending billions on buying buses may not be the perfect idea, but at least it’s an improvement over the status quo. So, go for it.
Hey, this whole “government” idea isn’t working out. Time to think outside the prison.
Voters are retarded children…Obviously.
The public school phules never get what they want but get what they deserve.
This is nothing compared to what the scumbag Obama is planning:
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2009/05/22/face-it-progs-obamas-a-dud
The simple fact of the matter is that America has consistently made the worst possible choices over the last 60 years in how cities were built, what industries were emphasized, and what advertising was used to train people into thinking what they absolutely needed.
Wow. And here I thought that individuals made choices about where to live and what to buy and that other individuals got together to supply those preferences.
Yes, let’s be accurate about who is being subsidized: car drivers in “red states”. Typically red states — home of independence loving “real Americans” — receive more money from the feds than they pay in federal taxes. Most of the “commie” blue states pay more money to the feds than they get back. New Jersey gets 65cents for every dollar it sends to Washington.
BTW, the original NYC subway lines were all privately built(funded). The rail tunnels connecting NYC to Jersey were privately built. I don’t know of any interstate highway system that was built with private funds.
I`m sure many readers of TTAC live in large cities where mass transit is available but realistically,how many would REALLY use it?
Most “burbs” don’t have mass transport available anywhere near them!
Even if they did,what about security/safety concerns???
I guess I could get a carry permit for a handgun….
But I would rather keep it under the seat and avoid situations(try THAT on a bus)that would cause me to use it!
Mass transport need to be inner city only!
Put more money in our rail system!
I would love to travel city to city by rail rather than drive!Why isn’t this on the list…because of airline lobbyist`s Ill bet.
More of our ‘government of graft’ in action!
The day I have to take the bus to work is the day I retire!!!!!!
Gary Numan :
May 27th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Question for the B & B here:
Does government exist to serve the people or are people supposed to serve the government?
Notice how few people stop to ask this very basic question…..
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Neither.
Government = A collection of individuals compromising freedom for stability
Of course, the individuals don’t compromise the same amount.
If an individual thinks the stability he receives outweigh the compromised freedom, he stays put and maybe complains verbally. Otherwise, he rebels.
I wholeheartedly support this anti-car agenda. Get people off the roads and into buses and trains. It’ll make the roads safer for folks like Jack Baruth.