Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker recently informed us that sustainable living and better public transportation are needed to emerge from the recession. The inference being that if we all lived in one-room apartments and took the bus to work, we wouldn’t be in this economic mess?
Regardless, today’s online Washington Examiner editorializes about the ties between pork barrel spending and public transit:
According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the net government subsidy for airline passengers is one tenth of a cent per passenger mile and a half penny for motorists. That compares to 22 cents for Amtrak riders and 61 cents for public transit passengers. The Obama administration’s plans to pump billions more into high-speed rail will increase this already grossly distorted distribution of federal transportation funds.
And what a coincidence that three of the top contenders for high-speed rail funding just so happen to be located in the home districts of the president, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. High-speed rail, it seems, is more about pork than transportation. For example, at the top of the funding list is an $11.5 billion high-speed electric rail project to link Obama’s adopted hometown of Chicago with St. Louis, even though there are plenty of other ways to get from one city to the other without spending billions in tax dollars that the federal government doesn’t have.
Of course, we already know about the grand success of Raleigh’s latest foray into public transit.
