A World Class Transportation System: Transportation Finance for a New Economy

Our economy is incredibly fragile. Our approach to transportation funding is incredibly fragile. The coalition proposals being put forth around the country will make the system more fragile, not less. Fragile systems eventually break.

Someone emailed me and said, “Chuck, I just want a train.” I get that. We live in a country where, through a complex set of financial circumstances, we created an illusion of wealth that has conditioned us to think big. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. America needs big thinkers with big ideas. And if your big idea is a train, you’ve been in the

With auto-based infrastructure needing dramatically more money than is currently available just to maintain what we’ve already built, urban transportation advocates are forced to support lots of additional revenue for roads to get tepid support for walking, biking and transit funding. Going back to the war analogy, this is like deciding to engage a

So, before operating the actual railroad, these private companies were first land developers. Without developing the land and capturing the value their investment created, few railroad lines would have ever been built[xiv]

(Note that there is a fairly large swath of people that think of themselves as “free market advocates” that will be shocked to find out how insolvent the current system is and how non-market oriented it is.

The proper response to congestion between cities is to build capacity. The proper response to congestion within a city is to intensify land use.

Transportation coalitions and their patrons – a long list of professional whiners dedicated to perpetuating and exploiting the centralized, paternalistic relationship between state and local governments – will not have much to do in a depoliticized transportation system, one dedicated primarily to maintaining what we have already built.

My vision for transit is not a reinterpretation of the automobile highway – corridors for commuters – but a return to traditional transit systems: investments in financially productive places. A successful transit trip begins in a financially-productive place and ends in a financially-productive place, connecting the two in a way that is scaled to

The construction of America’s system of railroads is a complex and nuanced story full of crimes against Native Americans, the exploitation of Asian labor and the general pillaging of the countryside.