Why Do Progressives Love Trains?
April 21st, 2009 | by Brian Costin Published in TIF Property Taxes, Transportation | 2 Comments
Why Do Progressives Love Trains?
This Independent Institite article sums it up.
What are progressives thinking? If I prefer automobile transportation to taking a train, they condemn me for my greed. Their preference for taxing people and pouring the money into economically wasteful expenditures for rail facilities, however, they laud as the very heart and soul of public-spiritedness.
AMTRAK lives on subsidies; always has, always will. Americans have limited demand for passenger-train services. Nearly everyone prefers to use a personal automobile, for all sorts of good reasons, including privacy, flexibility, and convenience. None of this is news. Transportation economists have been documenting it in study after study for decades.
Yet the leftists of this country at some point — I’m not sure exactly when it happened — fell head over heels in ideological love with trains.
Sounds a lot like Schaumburg’s Mayor Al Larson and the Village board with the STAR Line TIF district boondoggle. Here are some previous Schaumburg Freedom Coalition stories on the Village’s STAR line plans.
Schaumburg committing over $120 million of our tax dollars to the Star Line area before obtaining Metra’s commitment and sustainable funding for the line is both unwise and unrealistic.
The revised budget indicates that the only truly public benefit is a $25,000,000 off ramp. The other $94,500,000 is used up for subsidies to private developers.
Point of disclosure, I take the train everyday to work (Does that make me a progressive?). However, I don’t think I should be subsidized by nonriding taxpayers as a matter of principle. If the subsidy was eliminated, as it should, then I would make a choice based on the real costs of riding the train and the real costs of driving & parking in downtown Chicago.
Meanwhile, Metra and Amtrack have their hands out for billions of more dollars of state funds when our state is essentially bankrupt.
http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/local&id=6767196
Richard Lorenc, from the Illinois Policy Institute is spot on towards the end of the video. He essentially says that public transportation funding should be set by the laws of supply and demand & not politicians. Subsidizing public transportation forces those who do not ride public transportation to part with their money to give to those who do ride public transportation. This subsidization of public transportation is morally and economically wrong.
Food for thought.
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April 22nd, 2009 at 6:26 PM (#)
I think the answer is that trains (and transit in general) fits in with their desire to develop urbanized walkable communities where people live without cars. This also serves as part of their solution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
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Brian Costin Reply:
April 22nd, 2009 at 6:35 PM
I would agree with you that there are benefits of living in such a community.
Perhaps a more exact question would be “Why do some seek to force others (namely non-transit riders and people who don’t want to live near trains) to subsidize the lifestyle they like?
Why do some go to government to finance these types of developments with taxpayer dollars but other non-mass transit oriented developments don’t receive such benefits?
Here’s an interesting tidbit from a Cato Institute study called Does Rail Transit Save Energy or Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions? “Far from protecting the environment, most rail transit lines use more energy per passenger mile, and many generate more greenhouse gases, than the average passenger automobile. Rail transit provides no guarantee that a city will save energy or meet greenhouse gas targets.”
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-615.pdf
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