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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

(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.