Governor Terrible (Brownback) to balance budget via cutting highway funding
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  Governor Terrible (Brownback) to balance budget via cutting highway funding
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Author Topic: Governor Terrible (Brownback) to balance budget via cutting highway funding  (Read 6292 times)
Attorney General, LGC Speaker, and Former PPT Dwarven Dragon
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« on: February 08, 2015, 12:53:28 PM »

http://huff.to/1xL0eIM

Honestly, when is this guy going to stop?
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snowguy716
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« Reply #1 on: February 08, 2015, 01:22:25 PM »

Kansas is doing what MN did under Pawlenty and Ventura.  It doesn't work.
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« Reply #2 on: February 08, 2015, 02:14:36 PM »

Yes highways should really be funded by tolls rather than subsidised by the rest of us.
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« Reply #3 on: February 08, 2015, 02:17:25 PM »

FF. Not many American politicians are willing to take on the freeloading motorists who insist on pouring money into a highway system that is already comically overbuilt.

It's not really freeloading when highways are mostly funded by gas taxes. Also even non-drivers benefit from the existance of highways. How did the food in urban supermarkets get there?
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Indy Texas
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« Reply #4 on: February 08, 2015, 03:05:42 PM »

Ibn Rushd, take my daily commute to work and then tell me how "overbuilt" you think American highways are. The Texas DoT is finally building an interchange that should have been done years ago that will reduce my commute time by a good 10-15%.

For rural areas, highways are their only lifeline to the outside world.
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Reginald
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« Reply #5 on: February 08, 2015, 03:39:08 PM »

And anyway, OP's article mentions that "big highway widening projects" are still the priority for the (decreased) funding. The overbuilding will almost certainly continue.
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Simfan34
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« Reply #6 on: February 08, 2015, 03:52:09 PM »

Excellent news!

Ibn Rushd, take my daily commute to work and then tell me how "overbuilt" you think American highways are. The Texas DoT is finally building an interchange that should have been done years ago that will reduce my commute time by a good 10-15%.

For rural areas, highways are their only lifeline to the outside world.

Ever heard of "induced demand"? Take the train.
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Indy Texas
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« Reply #7 on: February 08, 2015, 04:00:27 PM »

Excellent news!

Ibn Rushd, take my daily commute to work and then tell me how "overbuilt" you think American highways are. The Texas DoT is finally building an interchange that should have been done years ago that will reduce my commute time by a good 10-15%.

For rural areas, highways are their only lifeline to the outside world.

Ever heard of "induced demand"? Take the train.

You really are an idiot, aren't you? There is a whole world outside the Bos-Wash corridor, Simfan. There are none of these "trains" of which you speak in Houston or any other city in these part of the country.
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DC Al Fine
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« Reply #8 on: February 08, 2015, 04:13:28 PM »

Excellent news!

Ibn Rushd, take my daily commute to work and then tell me how "overbuilt" you think American highways are. The Texas DoT is finally building an interchange that should have been done years ago that will reduce my commute time by a good 10-15%.

For rural areas, highways are their only lifeline to the outside world.

Ever heard of "induced demand"? Take the train.

You really are an idiot, aren't you? There is a whole world outside the Bos-Wash corridor, Simfan. There are none of these "trains" of which you speak in Houston or any other city in these part of the country.

Besides, it's freaking Kansas. Large swathes of this money is going to finance infrastructure where population density is extremely low.  It hardly makes sense for people from such places to "take the train".
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Simfan34
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« Reply #9 on: February 08, 2015, 04:16:47 PM »
« Edited: February 08, 2015, 04:19:21 PM by Governor Simfan34 »

You really are an idiot, aren't you? There is a whole world outside the Bos-Wash corridor, Simfan. There are none of these "trains" of which you speak in Houston or any other city in these part of the country.

I'm well aware there is actually no train. But perhaps the question you should ask is why there is no train.

Besides, it's freaking Kansas. Large swathes of this money is going to finance infrastructure where population density is extremely low.  It hardly makes sense for people from such places to "take the train".

Then why do they need all these new highways?
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Indy Texas
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« Reply #10 on: February 08, 2015, 04:30:06 PM »

You really are an idiot, aren't you? There is a whole world outside the Bos-Wash corridor, Simfan. There are none of these "trains" of which you speak in Houston or any other city in these part of the country.

I'm well aware there is actually no train. But perhaps the question you should ask is why there is no train.

You assume, in your blue avatar mind, that if people wanted another way to commute to work, the ghosts of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand would magically make fixed-rail rapid transit descend from the Heavens.

Most of the people I sit in traffic with don't vote, for reasons too numerous and complex to explain here. The result is a radicalized, regressive Republican-dominated slate of office holders who think anything other than sitting alone in an Expedition for an hour every morning is totalitarian communism. Public transport is bad simply because it has the word "public" in it. So when we do make forays into it, they get scaled back to a degree that make them pointless. Texas conservatives love to point and laugh at Austin's light rail system and insist, "No one uses it! Therefore, public transport never works!" Never mind that part of the reason no one uses it is because they're the ones who fought tooth and nail to make the project as limited in scope as possible so that most people wouldn't logistically be able to use it to begin with.
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Simfan34
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« Reply #11 on: February 08, 2015, 04:37:33 PM »

Actually, you're mostly right. But the solution isn't to build more highways. That only compounds the problem.
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King
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« Reply #12 on: February 08, 2015, 04:37:44 PM »

You get what you vote for.
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Indy Texas
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« Reply #13 on: February 08, 2015, 04:49:25 PM »

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."
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Simfan34
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« Reply #14 on: February 08, 2015, 04:51:20 PM »

I would support more tolls. I thought free-market types preferred them, in fact.
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traininthedistance
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« Reply #15 on: February 08, 2015, 04:57:49 PM »
« Edited: February 08, 2015, 05:08:49 PM by traininthedistance »

Excellent news!

Ibn Rushd, take my daily commute to work and then tell me how "overbuilt" you think American highways are. The Texas DoT is finally building an interchange that should have been done years ago that will reduce my commute time by a good 10-15%.

For rural areas, highways are their only lifeline to the outside world.

Ever heard of "induced demand"? Take the train.

You really are an idiot, aren't you? There is a whole world outside the Bos-Wash corridor, Simfan. There are none of these "trains" of which you speak in Houston or any other city in these part of the country.

So what?  That means we need to be locked into subsidizing this counterproductive idiocy for all time? We can never fix our mistakes, ever?

(And let's be perfectly clear here.  This isn't about rural areas' "lifeline to the outside world"- rural routes with little traffic are in no danger here, and work just fine as is with just maintenance rather than expansion.  This is about the perverse nature of our suburbs and exurbs, full stop– and suburbanites should stop wrapping themselves in MUH RURAL AREAS to justify their harmful car-only mentalities.)
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AggregateDemand
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« Reply #16 on: February 08, 2015, 05:02:53 PM »

We don't have a problem with road overbuilding. The opposite, in fact. Road spending is still a small fraction of GDP, (around 1-2%) which means we don't have enough to build new infrastructure for the expanding population and maintain/replace our existing infrastructure. We also have an aggravating penchant to build many square miles of suburban grid next to woefully under-developed highway corridors, which only increases the incentives for people to flee to the next new exurb.
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AggregateDemand
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« Reply #17 on: February 08, 2015, 05:38:35 PM »

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."

Proprietary road networks were undermined by the forefathers in the US Constitution. If conservatives believe in a strict interpretation of the US Constitution, why would their support of public roads be shocking? You don't seem to know anything about the conservative platform.

Founding Fathers said we should spend money on defense, post roads (infrastructure/information by modern interpretation), justice, and monetary policy tools. Back in the 50s and 60s, we spent most of our money on military, roads, justice, and monetary policy tools. Things were pretty good back then.

We should have taken another evolutionary step forward as neoliberalism started to gain popularity, and women entered the workforce, but this asshat named LBJ started steering our money towards social programs that were designed to make segregationist Democrats marketable in the South. He also made a laughing stock of the military by handcuffing them in Vietnam. Today, dumb Yankees and Left-Coasters insist that we spend money on everything but productivity. None of them seem to know the idea was conjured up by a racist Texas hayseed with an unhealthy sentimental attachment to the Southern-wing of the Democratic Party. They imagine that FDR, who created an entitlement policy for people who lived beyond average life-expectancy is the founding father of today's social train-wreck.
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Indy Texas
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« Reply #18 on: February 08, 2015, 06:43:07 PM »

Excellent news!

Ibn Rushd, take my daily commute to work and then tell me how "overbuilt" you think American highways are. The Texas DoT is finally building an interchange that should have been done years ago that will reduce my commute time by a good 10-15%.

For rural areas, highways are their only lifeline to the outside world.

Ever heard of "induced demand"? Take the train.

You really are an idiot, aren't you? There is a whole world outside the Bos-Wash corridor, Simfan. There are none of these "trains" of which you speak in Houston or any other city in these part of the country.

So what?  That means we need to be locked into subsidizing this counterproductive idiocy for all time? We can never fix our mistakes, ever?

(And let's be perfectly clear here.  This isn't about rural areas' "lifeline to the outside world"- rural routes with little traffic are in no danger here, and work just fine as is with just maintenance rather than expansion.  This is about the perverse nature of our suburbs and exurbs, full stop– and suburbanites should stop wrapping themselves in MUH RURAL AREAS to justify their harmful car-only mentalities.)

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.
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DC Al Fine
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« Reply #19 on: February 08, 2015, 07:03:14 PM »

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.
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TJ in Oregon
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« Reply #20 on: February 08, 2015, 07:05:43 PM »

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.

Yup. Buses are the only real option for this scenario. Perhaps in a generation when people are used to the idea of taking the bus rather than driving the demand and money will make sense for rail (in a mid-sized city).
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Indy Texas
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« Reply #21 on: February 08, 2015, 07:16:12 PM »

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).
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bedstuy
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« Reply #22 on: February 08, 2015, 07:25:25 PM »

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?

The next 50 years could see American cities like Phoenix and Denver and Houston become more dense if we're willing to go in that direction.  And, it would also address our highway congestion problems even if not everyone can use mass transit.  Every person who takes the bus or light rail  to work means more available road space for highway commuters.

You're right that the critical piece is density.  When you have a critical mass of density, you allow walking and biking to work and mass transit makes sense.  You do have unique challenges in cities like Houston where the climate is disgusting and people are going to sweat profusely if they don't travel in an air conditioned bubble.  Biking to work or taking light rail is much more comfortable in Amsterdam or Paris than Phoenix. 

It's ultimately a matter of choices I guess, and we need to realize that staying the same is a conscious choice. 
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DC Al Fine
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« Reply #23 on: February 08, 2015, 07:42:30 PM »

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.
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traininthedistance
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« Reply #24 on: February 08, 2015, 07:46:48 PM »
« Edited: February 08, 2015, 07:54:16 PM by 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.

I'll have a longer response when I have the time... but just for right now I will say that if you'd really love for it to change, then stuff the myopic, self-perpetuating defeatism and be willing to advocate for a change!  Don't tell me the "political landscape" is immutable, don't tell me that we are absolutely shackled to the mistakes of past generation; to take that as a given is to give up on the possibility of any change and any betterment.  I reject that line of thinking– and I especially reject its selective application when it comes to MUH CARZ.  To do otherwise would be to abdicate my responsibility as an informed citizen.

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 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.

You make your case in the public square and change the climate, of course.  I'm under no illusions that the exact best program could be implemented immediately, or even in the next decade or two... but you can't just throw up your hands and give up, you push for the changes you want to see and maybe eventually you'll get progress.
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