Should we stop funding to maintain California Highway 1? Planning to build a rail line that snakes along the coast through Big Sur?

Intercity rail (HSR where appropriate) should be a national priority, I agree. But in some regions (much of the midwest, many parts of CA) the population density is not high enough to justify bus service that would be frequent enough to be useful to the people who live there.

It all depends on where you are talking about. I think the realistic thing to do is to simply raise the gasoline tax and vehicle registration fees. Let those who want to, and can afford to, live the suburban highway lifestyle pay for it. There’s no reason to simply abandon 50 years of infrastructure. Just shift the funding source to make it more balanced.

“It looks bad for a governor who claims to be obsessed with reducing greenhouse gas to habitually cut funding to transit. For a relatively small cost, he could avoid having to do that altogether.”

I think it is important to put our governor’s “concern” over greenhouse gases into context (and this goes for many other similarly “concerned” legislators as well):

This “concern” extends to somehow reducing greenhouse gas emissions while, at the same time, maintaining our car-based, suburban, status quo. This is a political calculation that has kept substantive changes in our automobile/public transportation entitlement system from occurring.

One reason why the Prius was so desperately embraced by our political elite, and our moneyed left-wing, is that it symbolically allows us to maintain the massive public underwriting for the suburban way of life (aka “The American Dream”, ca. 1950 – present).

So the governor’s “concern” over green house gas is a symbolic issue – because there will be no fundamental shift in how we plan and fund our transportation systems until we’ve totally bankrupted ourselves building highways won’t be able to afford to maintain.

I am a fan of totally de-funding auto transportation, and using the money from that to totally build out our sidewalks, bike capacity, bus system, and rail system. The roads are too expensive and there is no future in them. This is a radical, probably unreasonable, position – but from where I stand it makes sense.