MIGHT AS WELL FACE IT, YOU'RE ADDICTED TO ROADS.

Federal grants for highways are almost always welcome.  Federal grants for rail transit, not in Arizona.

Republican legislators in Arizona are seeking to block rail service between Phoenix and Tucson as a condition of continuing legislation to maintain the state’s Department of Transportation, the Arizona Daily Star reports.

One of the conditions added to the continuing legislation, SB1184, by the Senate Committee on Transportation, Technology, and Missing Children is that the state DOT could not accept grants, donations, aid or any other federal funds to operate commuter rail service. State Sen. Jake Hoffman (R-Queen Creek) called promoting 100-year-old technology. “Nobody’s going to ride it,” Hoffman said, according to the newspaper, saying funds should go to expansion of Interstate 10.

“People love their personal automobiles,” Hoffman said. “They love the freedom that it entails them, they love the ability to go when they want, where they want, how they want.” He also said he had a particular interest in blocking the Phoenix-Tucson proposal because possible routes would run through his district.

Other amendments would block the department from proposing plans to reduce greenhouse gases or motor vehicle miles traveled, reducing the number of lanes on any road, or building or maintaining electric vehicle chargers.

Republicans, predictably opposed to socialism unless it's road socialism.  That freedom to move?  It's there, until it isn't.

There's a Cold Spring Shops category, "corporate welfare for roadhogs," that calls attention to the folly of road socialism and the futility of hoping there is enough public money to provide convenient road transportation, either for commuters or for good.  When I'm feeling particularly michievious, that category includes calls for special movement permits for any rubber-tired shipment in a trailer longer than 28 feet.  It has to be tongue-in-cheek, as not even the most avaricious of rent-seeking railroad lobbyist has mooted the suggestion publicly.

Arizona, where the Populist Impulse rests on water somebody else pays for, and roads somebody else pays for, that is until the infrastructure crumbles.  And crumble it will.

Highway building is a bipartisan obsession. In fact, amid all the partisan rancor and cultural division that defines modern political discourse, the one thing that our national leaders can find consensus on is the funding of new highways and bridges.

The largest federal infrastructure spending plan ever proposed identified 173,000 miles of roadway already in poor condition. The bill would only have modernized 20,000 of those miles, and that would take a decade in which time the backlog of maintenance would be even bigger.

Senator Hoffman, presumably, will take some of that money to add those lanes to Interstate 10 and pray for some future porkulus (with those maverick Senators in Washington, good luck with that) providing the money to keep it in a state o good repair.  As long as there are no rotaries, recharging stations, or those annoying trains.  This farce must end, notes a Strong Towns post, continuing,

Until we have a credible plan for maintaining our existing transportation infrastructure, we must stop building more roads and bridges.

Every new lane mile we build adds to our backlog of future transportation costs. Every bridge or interchange we construct makes our fiscal insolvency worse. No matter how important you think your local project is, that project is making your transportation system worse off.

I must continue to take issue with the conservative populists on the subject of road socialism. "Why should road socialism be any different from any other socialism, and why do conservative populists think road socialism is fine?"