I must admit, I was irrationally hopeful when I saw the title on the NYT website: "Bridge Collapse Revives Issue of Road Spending. The article purports to cover how "the collapse is changing a lot of minds about spending priorities." I thought, what an excellent opportunity to revisit how our governments fund one mode of transportation above all others. Only, the views that are presented sound like pretty much the same things people said before the bridge collapse.
Most importantly (to me), there's this statement:
Further, transportation and engineering experts said, lawmakers have financed a boom in rail construction that, while politically popular, has resulted in expensive transit systems that are not used by a vast majority of American commuters.
Oh, I see. Apparently lots of experts think that we've diverted huge sums to build incredibly expensive transit systems...but which experts are these? We'll find out on the flip side...
You have to make it to the second page to find anyone talking about transit, and sure enough, the only "expert" cited is one Randal O'Toole, who happens to be a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Okay, boys and girls, what does that make him?
(Incorrect answer: "transportation expert." The judges would accept multiple variations on "crazed libertarian antigovernment wacko.")
Whenever there's a big local battle about transit funding or anything that encourages walkable or sustainable urban design, it's safe to say that O'Toole isn't far behind, arguing against government intrusion in the free market that has served us so well.
What O'Toole conveniently ignores at every stop is that the free market clearly isn't working here. It's hard for people to choose between competing alternatives when only one option exists. Sure, nobody is going to build a privately run subway in Minneapolis, but nobody is going to build a privately run highway there, either. The government has taken care of one but not the other. Until, 50 years after the last trolley line in Minneapolis was shut down, a light rail test line finally opened to much fanfare (and ridership about twice that of projections). But O'Toole has something to say about that and other transit projects:
"Too many American cities are spending far too much money on expensive rail transit projects, which are used for only 1 to 2 percent of local travel, and far too little on highway projects which are used for 95 to 99 percent of local travel," Randal O’Toole, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, said in an e-mail interview.
Of course, the other main concept that O'Toole fails to understand, or conveniently ignores, is that of induced demand. This effect explains a lot of why our roads are so full, as soon as they're built. But this diary is already far too long and rambling, so that will be a topic for another day...
For now, I'll just like to call BS on this NYT piece and others like it: "transportation experts" aren't using this opportunity to say we're spending too much money on building alternatives to roads, and a libertarian idealogue should not be presented uncritically as an expert. I continue to hope (irrationally, perhaps) for better.