Posted on Thursday June 4th by Jebediah Reed | 1,012
- Meeting with several governors, Biden spoke of fast trains as potentially transformational, like the interstate system. Money will start going out in August. (Philly Inquirer)
- At the same meeting, Midwestern governors got props for their rail proposal: it would be 3,000 miles long, cost $10 billion, and take 10 years to build. (Chicago Tribune)
- Some Dems in Washington are getting nervous at the possibility that Congress might try to raise gas taxes. Will the voters rebel? (The Hill)
- Chicago sold it’s parking meter rights to private company last year for $1.2 billion — giving the buyer a huge discount, it turns out. City officials never even ran the numbers. Heck of a job, boys! (HuffPo)
- Can Interstate 5 become a green highway? The government has designated it a “Corridor of the Future” with plans for lots of electric vehicle charging stations and bio fuel gas pumps. As yet, there’s not much happening though. (NYT)
- What is it with certain free market fundamentalists and their crazy love affair with highways? After all, if any public works projects reek of Soviet-style central decision making, it’s our freeways. Ryan Avent deals a mighty smackdown. (StreetsBlog)
- George Will: a hilarious cartoon on teevee reminds us all how stupid environmental “awareness” is. (Washington Post)
June 4th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
A green highway is called a railway, thank you very much.
June 4th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Re: Libertarians and highways. This is a totally armchair theory, but I bet it has something to do with the symbolism of the automobile, and the simple fact that driving is something that you do yourself. People think of driving as something where they are totally in control of where they go and how they get there (this is a myth, but still). When you take a bus or a train, it is more immediately obvious that you are relying on the government. There’s the transit agency logo, and the schedule set by transit planners, and the tracks - in the case of trains - that run separately from all the roads that are filled with cars. When you get in a car, it’s your car and you are driving yourself where you are going. Not so with a train.
Also, roads look cheap, and I think we sort of assume they are cheap because they are EVERYWHERE. The main point, though, is that driving is an activity that maintains an illusion of autonomy. Riding transit is quite the opposite - the fact that you are relying the government is right there, in front of your face. I think this occurs on a sub-rational level for many libertarians and conservatives, and no matter how much hard data we transit advocates have to indicate that the government subsidizes driving where transit would cost us less, they won’t believe it.
June 4th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
This raising the gas tax fear is sad. When the Highway Trust fund goes to zero in August, trumpet that and say we have been living with our heads in the sand that this tax is at the very least not indexed to inflation and hasn’t changed in ages, and at the worst so far behind the rest of the world that we can no longer build the things like mass transit that would make the highways less congested.
June 4th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Vin -
Yes, very well put.
-Jebediah
June 11th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
Vin,
Agreed as well!
The ironic part is that most of the train tracks in the US were planned and laid-out by private companies in the late 19th century, while virtually every interstate was planned by the government.
I’m completely in favor of heavily taxing trucks and other freight vehicles on highways so that their real cost in terms of infrastructure and environmental-impact are accounted for. Rail freight is by far the most economic mode of transportation for heavy goods.