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

[Indy Texas]

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.

[Indy Texas]

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.

[Indy Texas]

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.

[Indy Texas]

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."

[Indy Texas]

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.

[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).

[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?