Think the “energy transition” is expensive and destructive? You’ll love the transportation transition.
Well, it’s more of a redo than something new. The first transportation transition wasn’t terribly successful. It commenced, one can credibly claim, in 1964, with the passage of the Urban Mass Transportation Act. As Randal O’Toole explained:
The law offered capital grants to cities that operated their own transit systems. At that time, the vast majority of transit systems were privately owned. Although ridership was declining, the industry as a whole earned a profit. Spurred by federal funding, in the next eight years cities purchased the vast majority of private transit systems and poured billions of dollars into their operations. Yet ridership had fallen another 21 percent.
Sorry, GOPers, but on Ronald Reagan’s watch, things got worse:
In 1982, Congress … dedicated a share of federal gasoline taxes to a special mass-transit fund. The mass-transit fund represented a departure from the previous history of the federal highway trust fund. The term trust fund implies an obligation to manage the fund on behalf of the beneficiaries of that fund, in this case the auto drivers who pay into it. By diverting some of the money to transit, Congress was breaching that obligation.
Decade after decade, a river of revenue flowed to transit bureaucracies — and their unionized, politically active employees. But Americans stubbornly clung to their cars. Suburban bliss was, and continues to be, the main culprit. In 1986, Newsweek lamented that Baby Boomers were “leaving the cities for the same reasons as their parents did: a better life for their children or, in some cases, for their dogs.” Generation X embraced low-density living, too. So did the Millennials. So will the Zoomers.
In the last calendar year before the Lockdown, the portion of U.S. commuters who hitched a ride on transit dipped to 5.0 percent. And no turnaround was realistically attainable. The boomtowns of the 21st century have less use for government buses and trains than the nation as a whole. In 2019, “market share” was well below the national figure in Austin (2.0 percent), Houston (2.0 percent), Phoenix (1.9 percent), Orlando (1.7 percent), Charlotte (1.6 percent), Dallas (1.4 percent), Nashville (1.0 percent), Raleigh (0.9 percent), Boise (0.4 percent), and Oklahoma City (0.4 percent).
When COVID-19 brought junk-science mandates in the name of “public health,” traveling to the office vanished for millions of employees. Last week, a Government Accountability Office report “found that the estimated percentage of workers who teleworked for any portion of an average workday increased from 24 percent in 2019 to 38 percent in 2021.” Unsurprisingly, O’Toole’s latest analysis shows that the nation’s “transit agencies carried 71.4 percent as many riders in June 2023 as they did in the same month of 2019.”
“America,” Aaron M. Renn wrote in 2021, “is and will remain a suburban nation, with cars as the central feature of its surface transportation system.” So with the Cult of Gaia’s coercive utopians unable to breathe life into transit’s desiccated corpse, what’s Plan B?
Make driving miserable.
In Denver, pols and bureaucrats are aggressively pursuing their 2018 pledge “to add 125 miles of bikes lanes in the city.” Reporter John Meyer offers scant solace to dissidents: “Motorists may grumble when new lanes appear, and homeowners may grouse when they lose parking in their neighborhoods, but city and state officials are determined to encourage more people to leave their cars at home and commute under their own power.” Well, maybe with a little mechanical power. The Mile High City’s “e-bike rebate program” is going statewide — the Colorado Energy Office has opened its “first round of applications” for $500 to “people making between 80% to 100% of their area median income” and $1,100 to “people at or below 80%.” (Fight “global boiling” and economic inequality — it’s a twofer!)
Bicycle “infrastructure” is only one part of the assault. “Road diets” and “traffic calming” are other components. Most threatening of all, perhaps, is the Biden administration’s two-pronged push for electric-vehicle adoption — a mandate that the Heritage Foundation recognizes will produce cars that are not only “more expensive,” but will “not work as well in very cold or very hot climates.”
The Competitive Enterprise Institute summarized the conflict well: “The war on automobility, the freedom to have and drive an automobile, is a war fought on many fronts.” Failure in one theater merely induces a fresh campaign in another.
There are far more drivers than anti-automobile maniacs in the United States. But public policy is made by people who show up. What are you doing to fight back?
What are you doing to fight back?
Voting for Trump!!