WHO ARE THE POOR PEOPLES' LOBBYISTS?

Is anybody surprised that rent-seekers captured public provision of roads?

U.S. transportation policies prioritizing automobile use over public transit are leaving the poor and people of color behind, exacerbating inequality and the climate emergency. That's according to a new report published Wednesday by the Institute for Policy Studies.

The ISP report—entitled How the U.S. Transportation System Fuels Inequality — notes that "for decades, the federal government has allocated about four times as much funding to roadways as it has to public transit such as buses and subways."

"This policy choice has consequences for racial and economic justice, the environment, and more," warns ISP's Basav Sen, the paper's author.

The report reveals that while the extent of U.S. roadways measured in lane-miles increased by 9% between 1990 and 2020, "public transportation systems have an accumulated maintenance and repairs backlog that is estimated by different sources as between $90 billion and $176 billion."

That deferred transit maintenance is a rounding error in the deferred maintenance on those lane-miles, judging by how much money the road socialists (rent-seekers is the politer word) have appropriated for full federal funding of roads and bridges that state and local governments have not been able to properly maintain.

Yes, you can rile up the True Believers with a riff on "women genderquestioning and minorities hardest hit."

According to Sen: "When transit systems are poorly maintained, the frequency and reliability of service suffers, making transit a less viable form of personal transportation. Faced with unreliable (and for as many as 45% of people in the U.S., nonexistent) transit systems, people often have no choice but to drive a personal vehicle to get to work, medical appointments, the grocery store, or anywhere else."

Tou might even be able to make the argument in equity that older, mechanically less reliable and probably less well-maintained cars that poorer people make do with put poorer lives at risk.  The essay (wisely, I submit) doesn't go there, although it hints at the regressive transfer that public provision of roads manifests.

"U.S. transportation policies privileging roadways and personal vehicles over all other modes of travel have not served the economic and transportation needs of all," he adds. "They are a public subsidy for disproportionately white, wealthier households, at the expense of the rest of the population."

The report contends that "transforming U.S. transportation policy priorities from its current overemphasis on (and excessive funding for) roadways at the expense of all other forms of transportation will clearly serve the needs of people of color and low-income people by providing them more affordable and accessible mobility choices that don’t require them to own cars."

You have to dig some, though, to find a simpler explanation than Privilege or Institutional Racism.

Industry lobbying pressure, backed by political campaign donations, are a major impediment to change, the report shows.

"Political campaign contributions by the oil and gas industry over the last five election cycles (2012 through 2020) have totaled $485 million, including $140 million in the last election cycle alone," Sen writes. "In the current (2022) election cycle, a huge share of oil and gas money has gone to just one politician — Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va). The industry's campaign contributions to Manchin are nearly four times their contributions to the next highest recipient."

"Manchin was part of the group of senators who came up with the bipartisan infrastructure bill... which continues the long-standing practice of allocating a disproportionate share of funding to highways at the expense of other modes of transportation," the paper notes. "Clearly, fossil fuel interests are rewarding him for serving their interests."

It is too much to ask of a columnist for a socialist tract, who has an Enemy of the People in the form of Senator Manchin to call out, to grasp the notion that a government in a position to deliver favors is going to deliver favors.  The public roads and waterways have long been a federal project, all the way back to the American System of Internal Improvements, and there are still people who labor under the delusion that these can be paid for out of general revenues.  I'm still waiting for the penny to drop.

What Washington mostly subsidizes is rent-seekers, including the infrastructure lobby, and it gets a lot of those rent-seekers. Indirectly, Washington subsidizes traffic congestion, and it gets traffic congestion.  Perhaps in ten or twenty or a hundred years it will occur to somebody at the Post to suggest that the roads be run like a business.

Heck, there might even be areas of common cause among the lobbyists the poor people do have, the mass transportation industry, crunchy conservatives, and libertarians.