Thursday, March 5, 2009

An Honest Question

Seattle voted against roads and transit last year and then turned around and overwhelmingly voted for transit. It was a big fight to get it back on the ballot but now the road warriors know that people didn't want the roads and are dreaming up ways to steal the money as we speak. But it begs the question in other regions, should people have to vote for roads? We see that residents are always asked to build transit, even if the funding exists, but never asked to build roads. They just do it. Do you think if they had a vote that they would approve of their hard earned money being spent on sprawl roads?

4 comments:

The Urbanophile said...

Most "transit" votes are actually for tax increases to fund transit. As roads typically have already dedicated sources such as gas tax, implementing a special road building tax is generally not necessary, hence no elections.

Randy Simes said...

This is what's going on in Cincinnati right now with our streetcar proposal. There is no tax increase and it would normally be treated as a spending item as part of the capital budget. Several local groups though are collecting signatures to change the city's charter so that any right-of-way acquisition for rail transit has to go before a city-wide vote before funds can be used for such a project.

It's crazy, but it is what's happening right now. Many people have been wondering why road projects aren't held to the same standard. They typically have no public meetings, input or discussion. This would never be the case for transit.

Morgan Wick said...

"Several local groups though are collecting signatures to change the city's charter so that any right-of-way acquisition for rail transit has to go before a city-wide vote before funds can be used for such a project."

Changing the charter like that would take a vote, right? Since they're collecting signatures? There's a chance such an amendment would be demolished in an election.

Anonymous said...

Yes, that chance of demolition of the aforementioned amendment would likely be by these batshit insane opponents people like Stephan Lewis, who contributed to keeping LRT out of Cincinnati once, and I think they would want to do it again.

Too bad they don't hold their beloved highways to the same standard. Apparently, they assume "this is what the public wants".