Just a short note since we still have nothing to go on.
Apparently the infrastructure bill is coming once “taxes” are done (as in, the rich people get to loot the treasury.)
The White House is still considering raising the federal gasoline tax to pay for President Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure package, despite resistance from Republicans, according to the Republican chairman of a House subcommittee.
The administration, which is preparing to unveil its long-awaited infrastructure proposal on Capitol Hill next month, has been scrambling to identify potential offsets for the massive rebuilding effort. President Trump met with Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) and other key transportation leaders in the Oval Office this week to discuss the infrastructure plan.
One funding idea that has been floated by the White House is raising the federal fuel tax — a politically risky move that hasn’t been done in more than 20 years. Influential conservative groups and many Republicans remain staunchly opposed to any increase.
As it happens, the Highway Trust Fund is solvent---until 2020. After that? Who knows. I do happen to know that in order to remain level, a 12-cent federal gas tax hike is needed---just to stay at what we currently spend on highways, bridges, and public transit (rail being mostly private in the US).
I’m loling of course, at the gas tax proposal increase. Republicans have fought against it at the federal level since its last increase in the 1990s. But, perhaps times have changed. A wide variety of states blue and red have raised their own gas taxes, or oil company franchise taxes, or whatever, since 2011. I am ambivalent on a gas tax increase. I don’t drive (neither did Robert Moses---and I work in the same field he did) and the gas tax increasingly won’t fund anything given the rise in hybrids and electric vehicles. At some point in the near future it’s going to need to go away because it will be useless.
In addition some of the “tax bill” the House and Senate republicans are ramming through eliminates mechanisms states used to pay for infrastructure. I’m not sure if they’re aware of it, since it’s clear they didn’t fucking read the bill the lobbyists wrote.
Dems seem pretty cool to the proposal---probably because they may have finally become wise to this excuse of an administration.
None of the package's details so far are music to the ears of Democrats, who have pitched their own proposal for $1 trillion in new federal infrastructure money and who have said they won’t support a plan stuffed with budget cuts and environmental rule rollbacks. An infrastructure package would need 60 votes in the Senate, making Democrats the key to its success, even before Alabama Sen.-elect Doug Jones' upset victory Tuesday.
Many questions remain, but Democrats say they've already heard enough about the still-unreleased plan to be skeptical.
"I don’t know what the path is," said Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon, the top Democrat on the House Transportation Committee. "I think we’re lost in the wilderness."
DeFazio observed that the administration has been “rolling out concepts for a year,” and ticked off some of the ways its proposal has morphed since Trump took office. Those include the administration's flirtation with so-called public-private partnerships, in which private entities would use tolls or other revenue to recoup the costs of projects — a concept that Trump told lawmakers in September he had soured on.
"They’ve gone from a trillion dollars to $200 billion that would be done with [public-private partnerships], and then Trump doesn’t like [public-private partnerships], so it’s $200 billion that [White House aide D.J. Gribbin] said last week would be cut from other domestic spending," DeFazio said.
Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, the Senate Commerce Committee's top Democrat, scoffed at the thought that states and localities would raise their own taxes or enter into public-private partnerships to pay for infrastructure needs, including those already covered by the cash-strapped Highway Trust Fund.
"They're not going to do that to repair the Interstates. They're not going to do that to repair the 50,000 bridges that are structurally unsound," Nelson said. "They're not going to do that for the expansion of sewer and water systems and broadband."
Ah so they’re back to P3s too. Whatever.
Trump has repeatedly contradicted his aides by criticizing public-private partnerships, even at times speaking in favor of more direct spending. At a recent sit-down with Democratic senators at the White House, for example, Trump emphatically said he did not like the notion of public-private partnerships ― a key element of his plan ― to pay for an infrastructure overhaul, according to a senator who had attended the meeting.
If the tax bill passed in the House last month becomes law, it would deal a larger blow to the administration’s infrastructure plan. A provision in the bill eliminates the tax-free status of certain bonds that builders rely on to arrange financing for certain projects. Public-private partnerships, for example, rely on such bonds to finance projects including toll roads and airports. The reconstruction and widening of Interstate 66 in Virginia, which was recently completed, received $946 million in private activity bonds, for example.
″[Private activity bonds] are a useful tool for public-private partnerships by allowing private financing to achieve near parity with tax-exempt municipal bonds,” said Michael Sargent, a transportation policy analyst for The Heritage Foundation. “Without PABs, financing for public-private partnerships is likely to be more expensive, thus making traditional government-backed projects potentially more appealing.”
ha ha. What a freking joke.
I understand Elon Musk has a stfan club here and elsewhere amongst tech-savvy progressives. It’s also no secret I cannot stand the man, finding him fake, false, basically the real-life version of Lyle Landley. His response to his Tesla employees reporting racial harassment was to tell them to get over it. And then those employees were fired. He is not pro-union. It is amazing how his Hype(r)loop people have managed to con their way into DOTs, MPOs and other planning organizations over the last year too---it’s a technology we don’t even know if it will work. At least, as far as I know, taxpayer dollars are not being wasted. Yet.
It wasn’t a surprise to read an article in Wired this week about Mr. Musk and his dislike of transit (PS , please read the entire Wired article as it is very good!)
All of which casts a curious light on the fact that last week, Musk revealed he's no great fan of mass transit. The whole sharing space with other humans thing? It's kind of icky.
“There is this premise that good things must be somehow painful,” he said onstage at a Tesla event on the sidelines of the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference in Long Beach, California, in response to an audience question about his take on public transit and urban sprawl. “I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end? And it doesn’t go all the time.”
“It’s a pain in the ass,” he continued. “That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. And so that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.”
When the audience member responded that public transportation seemed to work in Japan, Musk shot back, “What, where they cram people in the subway? That doesn’t sound great.” The CEO reiterated his preference for individual transportation, ie, private cars. Preferably, a private Tesla. (Tesla offered those attending Musk's talk the chance to test drive a Model S.)
One can wonder what this is about. Some speculation I’ve seen on twitter is “well, he was raised in South Africa before the end of apartheid, and white people and black people had completely separate spaces, including mass transit.” This is in fact true, but I didn’t think that was fair, and other than the tone-deaf comments (and tone-deaf firings) at his Tesla employees, he’s never given any real sign he’s a bigot. I did like what Jarrett Walker had to say:
Mr. Musk responded, calling Walker an idiot. He has since apologized.
Now lookit. I’m one of the first to point out how stupid US transit has become and how it needs new and innovative voices. Some of the nation’s biggest transit agencies are run like shit (looking at you MTA in NYC and WMATA in the DMV) and some of that is by design. The United States made a choice in the 1950s, and that choice was the car. I get it. It’s tough if not close to impossible to retrofit a society that’s spent half a century building urban spaces entirely for cars, and then it’s tough to convince people that mass-transit can’t widely work is just an excuse. People like me have their work cut out for them, and we know it.
That said, the innovation has become Uber and Lyft, and “car-sleds”, and vacuum puke-train roller coaster tunnels (that may or may not even work), and fleets of AV cars roaming the streets. Note that all of these are not designed to be mass-transit. They’re mostly individualized transit. Artisinal transit for privileged white hipsters, as one person on Twitter put it. Uber and Lyft solve the “last mile” problem but increase traffic congestion from the induced demand. I don’t even know how the car-sled tunnels will work given how they’ll create significant queues on surface streets AND they’ll induce demand. Fleets of AV cars are still a decade or so away. I don’t think Hype(r)loop will ever work. Mr. Walker wrote about this, calling it elite projection.
Elite projection is the belief, among relatively fortunate and influential people, that what those people find convenient or attractive is good for the society as a whole. Once you learn to recognize this simple mistake, you see it everywhere. It is perhaps the single most comprehensive barrier to prosperous, just, and liberating cities.
This is not a call to bash elites. I am making no claim about the proper distribution of wealth and opportunity, or about anyone’s entitlement to influence. But I am pointing out a mistake that elites are constantly at risk of making. The mistake is to forget that elites are always a minority, and that planning a city or transport network around the preferences of a minority routinely yields an outcome that doesn’t work for the majority. Even the elite minority won’t like the result in the end.
Exactly.
Anyway if some of y’all want to keep on being the citizens of Springfield, knock yourselves out.
This, below, is just offered without comment. 2017, what a fucking year.