The Washington Post ran an editorial Sunday describing the funding gap we need to make up just to maintain public transit in the US:
Washington’s inattention to public transportation is bipartisan and longstanding. Congress and the Bush administration have done little to fix it. In the omnibus transportation bill signed in 2005 (covering the period from 2003 to 2008), annual funding for mass transit is targeted at around $10 billion, of which about $7 billion goes to capital infrastructure projects. Add that to state and local funding, and the nation’s total capital spending on transit amounts to roughly $13 billion annually. But even by the administration’s conservative estimates, the minimum need is closer to $20 billion. And the American Public Transportation Association reckons $45 billion to $60 billion annually would be optimal to replace and modernize aging buses, facilities, subways and rail systems. That’s quite a gap.
It’s worth reading the whole thing.
how many days of Iraq war would that be? 2? 3?
At most a month or so.
Aren’t we building and updating their freeways for our troop movements…maybe we are building light rail for them as well…
From the article: “insisting that states and localities pony up greater shares of such [capital] projects, often up to half”
This is ridiculous. Up to half? Other than perhaps University Link, when have the Feds funded half of any transit capital projects in this region?
I believe that new tax on oil companies could have given us a hefty amount of that. Good thing that failed again in Congress…
By region you mean puget sound?
The last time were the interstates.