Transportation Needs Guaranteed Funding Source
All of the draconian cuts happening to transit all over the country right now - including every year in California - made me think it’d be kind of cool if we had adults in charge.
Then I read something at BikePortland.org about Commissioner Sam’s failed-the-first-time-around ‘Safe, Sound, and Green Streets‘ (SS&GS) proposal. I didn’t look into the details but it almost sounded like a proposal that would guarantee transportation funding through statute - that is, it could not easily be cut by legislators who wanted to get over on working-class and poor people. I don’t think that’s what SS&GS is about, but maybe it should be. And maybe we need to do something like that here in CA.
The whole idea of leaving operating and other costs of transportation up to some ponzi investment scheme where we need to hope for some certain amount of ‘growth’ in order to stay solvent - isn’t that just a bit, what’s the phrase, ‘bat-shit crazy’?
The problem with leaving the decision up to legislators is that they have too much control over the transportation budget, and transportation is too easy to cut - it’s not easy for people to see - so it is easy for politicians to get away with. To me, this seems like an institutional problem that needs to be addressed - we have to remove that temptation, because every human is fallible. When we allow our politicians to cut transportation in the absence of safeguards for the public, the results are predictable:
And we could talk about Katrina and all sorts of catastrophic public works failures even before we get to the funding cuts that regularly hit working-class folks the hardest.
When our legislators allow these failures to happen, they should all be frog-marched down to jail until every last family member is done grieving - however long that takes.
As for the upcoming transportation bill(s), it’s pretty clear that no new roads or bridges should be built - there are just too many disasters waiting to happen that already exist - they need to be fixed, replaced, or tore down. It just may happen that we can’t afford to keep up the roads we’ve already got - in that case, let’s put the wrecking crews to work. Let’s start with this Doyle Drive monstrosity. Listen, we need to concentrate on transportation solutions that work — we just don’t have the money to throw at rebuilding obsoleted freeways. Let’s reappropriate that money to go towards transportation solutions that actually work - like extending the SMART train to the Transbay Terminal.
[Image: Wiki/Kevin Rofidal]
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