THERE THEY GO AGAIN.

Somewhere in all the vote-buying Washington politicians engage in, there are plans, and perhaps printed money, for an expansion of Amtrak's regional corridors, including service from Chicago to Rockford and perhaps Dubuque, and the extension of Hiawatha service to Madison, along with some sort of continuation to the Twin Cities, perhaps including connecting regional service approximating the former Victory and Viking onward to the Cities by way of Eau Claire and across the St. Croix at Hudson.

In the same way that Washington's transportation gurus keep returning to the same plans, Wisconsin's politicians keep returning to the same objections.  "Wisconsin GOP leaders unified in opposition to MKE-Madison train."  It's not a Milwaukee to Madison train, it is the continuation of a Chicago to Milwaukee service onward to Madison.  That's not how state Republicans see it.

The Republican leader of the Wisconsin Senate said Thursday that he opposes spending any state money to help Madison bring a passenger rail line that would connect the capital city to Milwaukee, joining the state's other top GOP legislative leader in opposition to the project.

Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu told The Associated Press that he opposes state funding for the project but had not been briefed by Madison city leaders on what they were attempting. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos was blunt last week when asked about it, saying only “No state funding.”

It's going to be on Passenger Rail advocates of all political stripes to provide a reality check.

It was on Wisconsin's Passenger Rail advocates to rebut the bad-faith arguments [former Milwaukee radio talker Charlie] Sykes and other Milwaukee area radio yakkers raised against the extension of the Hiawatha.  It was never simply a yuppie conveyance from downtown Milwaukee to Capitol Square; it was also collegians from Chicago's northern suburbs enroute to the university, or shoppers from Watertown headed to the Mag Mile, while that was still a safe destination, or the professional couple now in Illinois treating the kids to a visit to their Wisconsin grandparents.  But none of that came up in a pithy way in places that mattered.

I wonder if Mr Sykes, who has been carrying water for Democrats on MSNBC, will break with his new pals on the matter of the train.

The continuation of the Republican argument is the same as it was ten years ago, and it has not aged well.

“I don’t think it makes sense to build a rail, even if it’s mostly through federal money, if we're stuck on the hook subsidizing it for the next 30 years,” LeMahieu said, agreeing with Vos.

Republicans control the Legislature and if they do not agree to state funding for the rail line, it could doom the nascent project, which is envisioned as an expansion between Chicago and St. Paul, Minnesota. Former Gov. Scott Walker, also a Republican, opposed a similar rail line when he ran for governor in 2010 and then killed the project, which would have been funded with $810 million from the federal government.

Walker made similar arguments then, saying the state would be left footing costs for a rail line that few people would use.

“I don’t think the numbers really worked then and I know there are a lot of people that commute between the two cities, but it seems like anytime there’s a huge project like that ... there’s always cost overruns and then the state’s stuck subsidizing it for forever,” LeMahieu said.

Isn't that also true of the interstate highways, which are still not toll roads?  I wrote a long post about the objections to the Madison project back in 2010, and I could simply quote it in full again today.  All those years ago, Wisconsin's transportation officials asked if they couldn't apply their Madison train construction grant to road repairs instead, and Washington's keepers of the purse strings said no.  There's been a lot of money put into widening the rural interstates radiating out of Madison, and rebuilding the interchanges in Milwaukee to get rid of those diverging-left-to-left-merge configurations of the original expressway interchanges, and some of that federal money put to work widening the expressways within Milwaukee and its inner suburbs, and after the construction delays your tax dollars make possible, the motorists will not be able to go any faster, and the farebox recovery to the state tollway authority is ... oh, wait.

Then there's the expressway that occupies land previously used by the previous version of the Rapid Transit Line.  One section of it is still in its as-built form, as of sixty years ago, and that's been well-and-truly pounded by all those free riders.  But widening it is a false economy.  "It’s time to stop pretending roads pay for themselves and be more fiscally responsible for sustaining and improving what we already have in our cities."  The current lieutenant governor, a Democrat from Milwaukee, objects to widening that stretch, even if the money gets in whatever bundle of pork ultimately comes from Washington.  They're not, yet, talking seriously about turning the interstates into toll roads, or raising the gasoline tax.  Sometimes you have to trade one injustice, a regressive tax, for another, the cheaper housing is often near the expressways.

It's on the Passenger Rail advocates, though, to ask the Wisconsin legislatures how much the state will be on the hook taking care of those expressways, including the widening of that final stretch in Milwaukee, out of state and local revenues, and to compare the cost-benefit ratios of state spending running the trains with state spending on the upkeep of those roads.