George Will (and Others) Playing Politics With Transportation
Last week we told you that George Will considers high-speed rail not just a bad investment for the United States, but also a step toward the ultimate liberal goal of “diminishing Americans’ individualism.” (A simple “wrong” would have done just fine.) It turns out that Will was singing a very different tune in October 2001, however, when a Republican was in the White House. In the wake of September 11, Will pushed hard for the America to “build high-speed rail service.” Sarah Goodyear at Grist points out the delicious political flip-flop:
Now that it’s a Democratic administration advocating for rail, Will sees it not as a sensible solution for moving people from one place to another, but instead as a tool to control an unsuspecting populace.
Conservative motives regarding transportation are frequently questioned in this space — Florida’s decision to kill high-speed rail being another recent example — but it should be noted that Democrats can play politics with travel policy too. It’s happening in New York, according to writer Dana Goldstein, who wishes some of the city’s liberal leaders would “stop whining” about the livability changes being made by transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. As Matthew Yglesias points out, partisanship is at the root of the matter:
… Bloomberg’s not a Democrat. So someone has to take the anti-Bloomberg side on bike lanes, and those “someones” wind up being the Democrats. So even though at the margin the decision to mildly reduce the massive pro-automobile bias of status quo allocation of streetspace is good for poor people and good for the environment, you have prominent Democrats taking the anti-bike stance. This upends the logic of the national Democratic Party’s ideological commitments …
The problem is even greater on the national scale. On one hand, the Obama Administration has proposed massive infrastructure investments without suggesting how to pay for them. On the other, many Republicans, rather than offer a modest plan in response, simply oppose all spending. Neither side will endorse the most sensible method of financing transportation changes: increasing the gas tax. As Yonah Freemark writes, summing up the shenanigans, the country’s infrastructure is all the worse for them:
If there was once a sense that the government has a responsibility to guarantee the good condition of the nation’s roads and rails, that feeling has evaporated from the consensus.
At least everyone can agree on that.
infrastructurist.com |
