links for 2006-01-19

I’d take that study with a grain or two of salt. One of the American libertarian planks is that mass transit — particularly steel-wheeled mass transit — is teh evil, despite how well or poorly any given trolley system might be doing. And if you scratch them, you’ll find out that they consider that it’s perfectly okay for the government to underwrite (equally expensive) highway construction, because “user fees” are an acceptable form of taxation.

Which is sad, because it’s painfully obvious that when you can cozy up to the federal teat the costs just magically blow up by an order of magnitude or two, whether your project is a trolley line or a highway (eg: the cost of the latest extensions to the Portland interurban [subsidized by the feds] vs. the cost of the NW/Pearl/University/Folly trolley [local money].) But the libertarians are too busy trying to apply their ideological filter to be able to coherently argue this point, and so the only thing that comes out of their arguments is that, gosh, it’s perfectly natural that the prices of everything streetcar have shot up 1000% in the past 20 years.

Paul Weyrich, of Free Congress Foundation fame, has also argued against the bloating of transit costs, and I believe that he (and his fellow right-wing trolley fanatics) provide a better argument because the only axe they have to grind is that they favor trolley cars.and thus don’t have to go out of their way on long arguments about “now this proves that steel-wheeled transit is an obsolete technology that nobody uses.”