Sunday, February 15, 2009

Oh the Logic

O'Toole writes his rules of the stimulus, wherein I immediately start dying of laughter at his rules and claims...
User fees must cover all operating and most capital costs...Many, if not most, wish-list projects fail this test. House Transportation Committee Chairman James Oberstar, Minnesota Democrat, wants to increase transit's share of federal surface transportation funding from 15 to nearly 30 percent. But transit riders pay only a third of the operating costs and none of the capital costs of transit, while highway users pay 80 to 90 percent of highway costs. This suggests transit will not have anywhere near the stimulative effect of highway spending.
It's official, my mind is officially blown. He's basically saying that since we spend a whole lot of money on driving cars, freeways are the only way to stimulate the economy. I should just give up now because transit is wasteful and doesn't make me spend a lot of my money on cars. In fact, I save so much money from taking transit, it doesn't count when I spend it on something else, like say a nice dinner locally. Let's send our money to the Saudis instead.

4 comments:

Justin said...

Wow...

I want to be paid a lot of money to talk shit!

The Lexington Streetsweeper said...

Maybe O'Toole is right, maybe we should go to a "pay as you use" for the Federal Highway System instead of a fuel tax. That way those who buy gas for their generators, lawn mowers, boats and ATV's would not be subsidizing the wasteful, single occupancy, auto-centric world.

Big brother will know when you use the highway system from the GPS unit in your car(OnStar, TomTom etc.) and send you your portion of the repair/expansion bill.

Does that sound fair Randal?

Anonymous said...

O'Toole once got $50,000 from Koch oil.

So of course he's going to talk shit!

Anonymous said...

You can't make this stuff up:

"No city that still has an uncoordinated traffic signal should invest a dime in rail transit."

Let's see. Turning our downtowns into parking lots didn't work. Carving up the city with freeways and displacing thousands of homes didn't work. I've got it--coordinated traffic signals!! That'll solve everything.