TEMPERING PRINCIPLE WITH PRACTICALITY. The Overhead Wire suggests that rapid transit advocates transcend ideology.

After the passing of Paul Weyrich, I was wondering if there would be anyone to take up the mantle of conservatives and livable communities.

Consider Why Conservatives Should Care About Transit.

It might seem as if nothing could be less important to social conservatives than transportation. The Department of Health and Human Services crafts policies that affect abortion, the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission play crucial roles in determining how prevalent obscenity is in our society, but the Department of Transportation just funds highways, airports, and railroads, or so the usual thinking goes. But decisions about these projects and how to fund them have dramatic and far-reaching consequences for how Americans go about their lives on a day-to-day basis. Transportation decisions have the power to shape how we form communities, families, religious congregations, and even how we start small businesses. Bad transportation decisions can destroy communities, and good transportation decisions can help create them.

What intrigues about the paragraph is that conservatism, as the columnist understands it, is the Welfare Economics Paradigm with a different set of prohibitions and corrective taxes. But the notion of road-building-as-encouraging-social-pathology intrigues. (There's nothing new: the intra-city expressways and housing projects clustered the indigent black population that it didn't displace. At the time, some people used a form of rhyming slang, turning urban renewal into Negro removal.)

Sadly, American conservatives have come to be associated with support for transportation decisions that promote dependence on automobiles, while American liberals are more likely to be associated with public transportation, city life, and pro-pedestrian policies. This association can be traced to the ’70s, when cities became associated with social dysfunction and suburbs remained bastions of ‘normalcy.’ This dynamic was fueled by headlines mocking ill-conceived transit projects that conservatives loved to point out as examples of wasteful government spending. Of course, just because there is a historic explanation for why Democrats are “pro-transit” and Republicans are “pro-car” does not mean that these associations make any sense. Support for government-subsidized highway projects and contempt for efficient mass transit does not follow from any of the core principles of social conservatism.

I wasn't aware there were core principles of social conservatism, a phrase suggesting more of a role for conscious direction and less of a role for emergent order, but we can let that go for now.

A common misperception is that the current American state of auto-dependency is a result of the free market doing its work. In fact, a variety of government interventions ensure that the transportation “market” is skewed towards car-ownership.

Ayup (and hence The Overhead Wire invoking Paul Weyrich).

We often hear complaints that transit systems do not earn profits. This is true (with a few exceptions), but this does not mean that transit systems are a waste of money. When was the last time you heard someone complain about how a local road never manages to turn a profit? If we held roads and transit projects to similar standards of profitability, we would build very few roads indeed.

No. As a first approximation, we can use the quality of a jurisdiction's roads as an indicator of the jurisdiction's effectiveness at serving constituents. Detroit, where some streets are reverting to prairie for lack of maintenance or of traffic, is a limiting case of government failure. It is no accident, however, that mayors of the less-functional jurisdictions are often the loudest advocates of national infrastructure bills, compelling everyone to bear a small share of their irresponsibility.

Transportation infrastructure is a public good, and few dispute that the government should play an active role in providing it. In spite of the problems with thinking about transit as if it were business, however, transit- and pedestrian-oriented transportation projects would actually benefit if transportation decisions were guided entirely by market forces, because the pro-automobile biases in current policies at the local, state, and federal levels, would be eliminated.

No, transportation infrastructure is a club good with congestion, and severe transaction costs to implementing marginal cost pricing. Thus the Highway Trust Fund gets its money from tie-in sales (rubber tires and gasoline functioning as meters for road use) whilst toll-booths limit the use of a relatively few major routes. The local road budget still uses the Monopoly (TM) way: "You are assessed for street repairs. $15 per house. $40 per hotel." I think those were the numbers. Tax breaks for the rich, forsooth. To think of more businesslike ways to finance roads might make building 21st century interurbans look sensible.

A Greater Greater Washington reaction piece extends.