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

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

We need the private sector to take the bulk of the risks in today’s economy.

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.

Another important factor here is that our scarce resources will be applied where there is the greatest demand, not the greatest political connections. While the former might sometimes benefit wealthy drivers, this proposal is going to be a lot more egalitarian than the current patronage system. And right now our system is pretty fair in that, when

Most transit advocates I know – “Chuck, I just want a train” is one lament I’ve heard

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

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.

When we began to build the interstate system, in many ways we were attempting to re-create the transformative economic expansion brought about by the construction of the railroads. Only this time it would not be the private sector leading the way and taking the risk. It would be the government.

our core transportation funding problem is that we’ve built more transportation infrastructure than we can effectively utilize. Our solution, bizarrely, is to build more.