Governor Terrible (Brownback) to balance budget via cutting highway funding

[bedstuy]

A question for the pro-train crowd:
Given development for the past 50+ years, large swaths of American cities aren't dense. This makes light rail and the like more expensive since you have X people living within a short distance of a train station rather than 3X (a rough comparison of Houston and Berlin's densities)

With that in mind, how would you propose creating a mass transit system without bankrupting cash strapped states and municipalities?

The best I can come up with is making heavy use of existing infrastructure by encouraging commuter friendly buses and so on.

How would I want to pay for transit development?  Double or triple the gas tax, vehicle registration taxes, carbon tax, income taxes and bold Federal spending on infrastructure.  I would also pair that with fast track authority to skip EIR and other red tape to cut down costs. 

The interstate highway system cost a half trillion dollars.  Why not try a program like that which focused on sustainable mass transit and infrastructure?

I don't disagree with you, but you are missing my point.

I'm asking how you would implement a mass transit system given the current legislative climate.

Destroy the Republican Party.

[DC Al Fine]

Also, "buses are for poor people" is bullsh*t.  Buses can, and should, be for everyone.  (And there are already apps which help with the problem you mention, which I agree is a real one.)

I take the bus. About half the time I work standard hours and get to take an express bus. It's only 5 minutes longer than driving and cheaper too. The other half, I work odd hours and take a normal bus. It takes me a full 30 minutes longer to get home and has a higher proportion of "problem passengers". I imagine your typical bus in a mid-sized American city is like my "normal bus" rather than my "express bus".

If I had to take the normal bus all the time, I'd drive... and I'm someone with a relatively low income and a somewhat progressive attitude to transportation. What's your average Joe going to do when faced with the same situation?

Part of the challenge for cities will be to make the bus more appealing to middle class commuters.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Buses don't sell. They have the stigma of being the poor man's transportation.

And honestly they're just really hard to "figure out." Subways travel on a fixed line and eventually you'll get where you need to. If you get on the wrong bus, you're screwed. Maybe developing apps to help orient people could solve that problem (i.e. automatically using your current location with the GPS location of all the nearby buses to alert you to when/where the bus you need is).

Thus speaks a man who has clearly never travelled on a bus in his entire life.

[Indy Texas]

Buses don't sell. They have the stigma of being the poor man's transportation.

And honestly they're just really hard to "figure out." Subways travel on a fixed line and eventually you'll get where you need to. If you get on the wrong bus, you're screwed. Maybe developing apps to help orient people could solve that problem (i.e. automatically using your current location with the GPS location of all the nearby buses to alert you to when/where the bus you need is).

Thus speaks a man who has clearly never travelled on a bus in his entire life.

Do school buses count?

[Lief 🗽]

Buses don't sell. They have the stigma of being the poor man's transportation.

And honestly they're just really hard to "figure out." Subways travel on a fixed line and eventually you'll get where you need to. If you get on the wrong bus, you're screwed. Maybe developing apps to help orient people could solve that problem (i.e. automatically using your current location with the GPS location of all the nearby buses to alert you to when/where the bus you need is).

Thus speaks a man who has clearly never travelled on a bus in his entire life.

I've traveled on buses a lot and I agree with everything he said. Obviously having the Google maps app on your phone these days makes it a lot easier, but still.

[Oldiesfreak1854]

Governor Terrible?  I though that was Dan Malloy.

[Lief 🗽]

Governor Terrible?  I though that was Dan Malloy.

No, Dan Malloy is a great man who has done a lot of good for his state.

[DrScholl]

He was re-elected, do you seriously think he wasn't going see that as a mandate to be as aggressive as possible? His career is done after this second term, so he's got absolutely nothing to lose by doing this.

[Attorney General, LGC Speaker, and Former PPT Dwarven Dragon]

Governor Terrible?  I though that was Dan Malloy.

Compared to Brownback, Dan Malloy is the second coming of Lincoln.

[anvi]

Ok, less money for schools, less money for highways....

♫ ♪ ♫ ♪  "You can drop out anytime you like, and you can never leave!" ♪♪♪...

[pbrower2a]

Actually, you're mostly right. But the solution isn't to build more highways. That only compounds the problem.

But that's the only solution that our "deciders" will consider.

Ironically, conservatives (at least around here) fiercely oppose tolling. One would think supporters of free markets would want to use a financing method that ensures users bear the cost most directly rather than "redistributing" it to people who aren't using the roads. But their political base is exurban commuters who are quite content to spend other people's money as long as it's on things they use rather than things "those people" use (which are of course, illegitimate "giveaways").

The result is all these Tea Party Republicans complaining about how we need to fund road construction without any more toll roads and without raising the gas tax or any other tax and how we'd be able to pay for it if we weren't wasting money on "giveaway welfare programs to people who sit around having babies and not working."

Toll roads are expensive to build. They can make sense in places that already have heavy traffic, typically in urban and suburban areas where middle-class commuters are willing to trade some petty cash for travel time to work -- or where a toll road (typically a bridge, possibly a tunnel) crosses some obvious barrier like a river estuary (i.e., the Hudson). They are preposterous as town-to-town routes in which a two-lane blacktop is adequate. 

If one is thinking of putting tolls on existing roads -- such messes up access to property-owners along the road. If your only driveway access is on a two-lane blacktop to be tolled, then your property is degraded; add more costs to using something and the object or property becomes less valuable.  Putting tolls on I-70 through and west of Topeka, I-35 north and east of Emporia, or on I-135 will violate the terms of the Interstate Highway system.

The Kansas Turnpike was a money-loser for several years even if it had the route designed to maximize revenue by connecting the three largest cities of Kansas.

[traininthedistance]

Oh my god, you think I'm going to oppose someone proposing to build a coherent light rail system that I could actually use? With the existing BART/light rail infrastructure that Houston has, I literally cannot get to my job any other way than by driving there in a car. I have looked at the schedules myself and the dots literally do not connect for my location and schedule.

I would love for that to change, but it's not going to. The political landscape here simply will not allow it. So, yes, I am going to wrap myself in MUH HIGHWAYS FOR MUH CAR because there are no other options available to me. It's a choice between sitting in traffic for X amount of time on a congested highway and sitting in traffic for <X amount of time on a less congested, more built-up highway.

Okay, here's another way of thinking about it, putting aside the selective defeatism I already pointed out: MUH HIGHWAYS FOR MUH CAR is, undoubtedly, self-defeating even on its own terms; and likewise, support for expansion and better funding for transit is in your self-interest even if said transit is not currently a realistic option for you yourself to take.

Why?  It's the induced demand, stupid!  Seriously, this is a well-documented phenomenon- you widen the roads to deal with "congestion", and it just makes the congestion worse as people move farther and farther out; take extra trips during rush hour; etc.  Conversely, when urban roads go out of service– as in the Los Angeles shutdown a year or two ago that got everyone in a tizzy, or when San Fran tore down the Central Freeway and replaced it with a landscaped, at-grade boulevard– the prophecies of doom and gloom never come to pass!

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It's not a "choice between sitting in traffic for X amount of time on a congested highway and sitting in traffic for <X amount of time on a less congested, more built-up highway" because that's not how more built-up highways work.  You don't get that option.  I realize that that's how you would intuitively expect them to, but it's pretty much just a settled fact at this point that your preferred approach is self-defeating.

Now, with that in mind, how do you reduce congestion?  Obviously one of the big helps here is going to be to take that pot of money currently earmarked for "congestion-reducing" road projects, and give it to that which is inherently space-saving in comparison to private cars– public transit.  Obviously I wouldn't expect that the Houston bus system would ever be as large a share of the city's fabric as the MTA, the geography of the place forbids it... but if there were more routes, running more frequently, then it would eventually become a viable option for some folks, and take cars off the road.  (And, eventually, spur infill rather than sprawl development, creating a virtuous cycle by which the geometry of the city becomes more efficient and less dependent on long-distance traffic jams.)  Seriously, many of those new roads would not pass muster if DOTs properly accounted for induced demand; and while one might try to argue that they create wealth by opening up land for development, the vast majority of that sprawl has merely served to redistribute wealth away from the core, rather than actually create anything new.

Surely you can see how this would benefit your commute, and the commutes of others, even if you're not one of those folks who makes the switch.  (Surely you can also see Nix's point about being the change you want to see in the world and, to the extent that it's within your means, living close to work.  It's the old saw– you're not stuck in traffic, you are traffic.)

The other big thing, and the author of the quoted article seems more bullish on it as a congestion-reducing proposal than public transit, TBH, is congestion pricing.  Now that's a proposal I wouldn't really advocate for in Houston right now, despite it being the straightforwardly economist-approved way of doing things (esp. one which charges mainly on peak commuting hours, so as to incentivize discretionary trips towards non-peak hours where the roads are clear).  I would support it in NYC, but we have a much graver need and our strong public transit system means that equity arguments are basically just concern trolling rather than a real legitimate point, as they would be in your city. 

But even if I'm not going to advocate road-pricing schemes for Houston at this exact moment*, the fact still remains that private automobile travel is ludicrously over-subsidized in many ways and we need to find ways of starting to roll those subsidies back, and redirect them to less wasteful ends.  Not all at once– people will need time to adapt– but our environment, the fiscal health of our cities and states, our general sense of well-being, our economy all hang in the balance.

*I will, absolutely, advocate raising the gas tax and indexing it to inflation, though– a recent study in Germany pegged the optimal gas tax at $4.36/gallon.  Obviously we can't exactly get there from here, but the gap is so yawning that we have a moral duty to take a baby step in the right direction, to try and narrow it a little at least.

[Brittain33]

Buses don't sell. They have the stigma of being the poor man's transportation.

Also, since bus lines can (and do) get moved or removed, they don't trigger long-term real estate development the way an investment in rail does.

[Citizen Hats]

Buses don't sell. They have the stigma of being the poor man's transportation.

Also, since bus lines can (and do) get moved or removed, they don't trigger long-term real estate development the way an investment in rail does.

Don't say portland.

[Mr. Illini]

Kansas is crumbling and voters approve.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Boy you guys are gunna look silly when we invent teleportation in the next few years.

[pbrower2a]

By 2070 the automobile could be obsolete, and Interstate roadbeds might often be re-purposed as super-speed train paths.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Enough of this arguing about transportation policy-let's talk about more important things.

Like how terrible Brownback is.

[user12345]

Enough of this arguing about transportation policy-let's talk about more important things.

Like how terrible the people of Kansas are for re-electing Brownback.

Fixed.

[Ban my account ffs!]

Or self driving compact cars that make biking, walking, and massive wide freeways obsolete.

[Small Business Owner of Any Repute]

Buses don't sell. They have the stigma of being the poor man's transportation.

And honestly they're just really hard to "figure out." Subways travel on a fixed line and eventually you'll get where you need to. If you get on the wrong bus, you're screwed. Maybe developing apps to help orient people could solve that problem (i.e. automatically using your current location with the GPS location of all the nearby buses to alert you to when/where the bus you need is).

Thus speaks a man who has clearly never travelled on a bus in his entire life.

And also a man who has clearly never used the Google Maps app, which has literally had that exact function for the last 5 years at least.

[traininthedistance]

Or self driving compact cars that make biking, walking, and massive wide freeways obsolete.

Yes, magical technology silver bullets are always the answer to everything.  No need to do anything in the meantime.

Also... who the hell would want to get rid of walking?!

[Small Business Owner of Any Repute]

Also... who the hell would want to get rid of walking?!

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=205756.0

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Or self driving compact cars that make biking, walking, and massive wide freeways obsolete.

Yes, magical technology silver bullets are always the answer to everything.  No need to do anything in the meantime.

Also... who the hell would want to get rid of walking?!

Some people watched Pixar's Wall-E and thought it looked kinda neat?

[Foucaulf]

This topic has been derailed hilariously early. Brownback rerouted money not simply for greater highway construction, but from the State Transportion Department's Highway Fund. The money in it isn't going toward building new highways, as it is repairing creaky bridges and paying back debt on highways already built. Though, like someone in this topic mentioned already, the highway widening projects will apparently continue.

Legislators are actually more infuriated that the state is rolling back contributions to the public pension fund.

In the larger context, Brownback's growth by a thousand tax cuts still hasn't materialized, and I've seen one economist who argued the state is stagnating. Maybe he can stall the budgetary shortfall by freezing as much nominal growth in government as possible, but one day...