President Bush Loves BRT
For any of you progressives or environmentalists (or humans) out there, you know that watching Bush over the last few years has been an exercise in ‘forget what he says’ and ‘oppose everything he does.’
Now, it would be stupid to hate BRT just because Bush loves it - that would be a bit like voting for Barack Obama just because Osama bin Laden wants John McCain to be President. Instead, you should base your support of a candidate or a policy on sound judgment. Look at the facts, and choose. Simple.
But Bush’s history of opposing all environmental regulations (Can you say Black Skies Act?), and promoting the oil, gas, and motoring corporate interests, should be an indicator to all of us that something might be up with his support of BRT. It might be an indicator that this is yet another policy you should oppose. At a minimum, if you generally opposed most things President Bush has done over the last few years, then it would seem prudent to look closely at his support for BRT.
Well, ‘my friends,’ something is up. Nobody seems too sure about what exactly BRT is, but most of us seem to agree on what it is not -Â LRT (light rail transit).
Policy-oriented folks in the audience will know that the best way to achieve public relations success while at the same time accomplishing your goals of killing off a particular program or function of the government is to say that you support it, and then just kill it during the ‘implementation phase’ in one way or another. One tried and true way to do this is to simply not fund a program - think, Every Child Left Behind. But sometimes this is too obvious, so another way to kill a particular program is to divert funds from it in one or more ways, such as giving some funding to ‘alternate programs’ which may or may not have anything to do with the mission of the main program - think Social Security Privatization. I submit that Bush’s support for BRT over LRT is just a very straightforward way to subvert LRT - the greatest threat to the private automobile, and therefore the greatest threat to oil and gas and motor transport profits. Bush is funding BRT because it keeps funds from LRT. Significant also is the fact that it is generally agreed upon that BRT is a lesser alternative to LRT - and this is important if you want to keep people driving their private automobiles instead of taking mass transit.
For a quick run-down of some reasons to think that BRT and Bush’s support for BRT are very bad things, take a look at some commentary (PDF) written by conservative Paul M. Weyrich on why he thinks BRT is so bad. The piece is called ‘Bus Rapid Transit – Deficiencies and Defects,’ and we’ll be covering it in more detail in future posts in this series.
For now, though, there is one important take-away from this post - President Bush actually supports BRT, not just in words but in deeds - he is funding BRT projects instead of light rail projects.
BRT proponents - do you really wish to throw your lot in with the worst president in history?
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