Transit gets the Nod
Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit magazine
After months of paring down candidates and dancing around who was going to be running, we’re finally rounding that last corner and heading down the stretch to the finish for the 2008 presidential election.
This week the Democrats put on their national convention in Denver, Colo., with a flood of people coming to see the presidential and vice presidential nominees, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
It was nice to see for the first time in quite a while a candidate mentioning transit in a speech, as Joe Biden did last night:
“…I profoundly disagree with the direction John [McCain] wants to take this country, from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Amtrak to veterans.”
Biden is a firm believer in Amtrak. He rides it everyday on his trip back from the Senate to his home in Delaware, so it is easy to understand how he can be a supporter of increased Amtrak funding. Will this self-dubbed, “Mr. Transportation,” help transit infrastructure in the United States? I hope so.
John McCain is not an Amtrak supporter, stating that only the Northeast and far West can support a viable rail system. Currently McCain’s Web site has a section on reforming the transportation sector, but it doesn’t mention public transit.
Frankly for our purposes here, I don’t care what your political leanings are. If you ask anyone in this industry what his or her party affiliation is, the answer should be “transit.” We’re all in this together and we need to stick together to get transit to the forefront of election issues.
We’re at a crossroads with high gas prices causing people to reevaluate America’s “car culture” for the first time. Our elected officials are getting the message, but we need to make sure they know that transit stays an acceptance speech topic.
Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,
August 29th, 2008 at 9:53 am
I must agree that our party affiliation should have nothing to do with our support for public transportation.
During the campaigns leading up to the respective nominations, I heard nothing whatsoever about transit as a possible solution to the explosion in energy costs or ever growing roadway congestion. The cost of energy will shape transportation policy in the future regardless of which millionaire politician resides on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.
After all, the president may try to guide policy, but Congress writes the checks. Convincing our representatives of the value of expanded attention (read: funding) to both mass-transit and intercity rail will go much further than trying to read into the future of an administration from pre-election campaign speeches.
The next two months’ rhetoric will be all about “how bad it is” from one party and “how good it is” from the other. Depending upon our point of view, we will collectively choose one candidate or the other and I honestly doubt that the result for the transit industry will be affected in any measurable way by either one.
August 29th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Concur.
August 30th, 2008 at 10:24 am
The support of public transportation, both urban / suburban and inter city should certainly be a focal point for any plan to address the intertwined problems of energy security and global warming. But you are right, Congress writes the checks. Biden’s support of Amtrak is commendable, but whether he can be any more successful in this than Al Gore was in getting the United States to join the Kyoto Protocol is highly unlikely.
Unlikely, perhaps, until the problems become so severe that such strong support for public transit becomes mandatory. The longer we procrastinate on these vital issues, the worse the problems will be, more socially disruptive and the solutions more expensive. Perhaps gasoline needs to be $10 a gallon before we get the message, but by then we will have lost crucial time in changing our infrastructure to accommodate to the realities of scarce and expensive energy resources.
September 2nd, 2008 at 10:45 am
Biden’s support for Amtrak is a good start, but if we really want to make an impact on energy usage we particularly need candidates to support LOCAL transit systems. Candidates find it hard to set trends, and often are afraid to gamble on such, but they love to piggyback on trends as if the idea was their own. It’s surprising, then, that these candidates haven’t piggybacked on the current trend of rapidly increasing transit ridership. These candidates ought to be thanking those who are making the switch to public transit!
September 2nd, 2008 at 10:46 am
Al Bore and the Kyoto Protocol are not examples you should use concerning the future of mass transit, unless you want me to believe the numbers behind mass transit are as cooked as the junk science Al uses, or that the agenda for mass transit has some connection to redistributing the wealth of America, like the UN agenda of Kyoto. Biden wears his transit ride like a …. well, let’s just say … well, let’s don’t.