×
I feel like I should do more to highlight Senator Cardin's remarks on transit, as this is the sort of thing we should reward politicians for:
We are in desperate need of significant transit improvements. We've got to have the facilities and we don't today, and then we need the fare-box and economic policies that reward people for taking public transportation. Some try to say that it should be "self-sufficient" or have a certain percentage return through the fare-box. We don't do that on our roads, and public transportation is much better for so many reasons -- not just the environment or the quality of life. We should be providing much stronger incentives for people to use public transportation, but first you need to have the facilities.I'm a big, big supporter of dramatic change in public transportation. It includes more than just the bus and rail systems in our urban areas. It includes a commuter rail and inner-city rail -- the whole gamut of services that get people out of their personal vehicles. I don't want people driving their personal vehicles the way they are today...It starts with service. You have to have economical, convenient, mass transit service. At the national level there are interstate areas that the federal government needs to do a much more effective job on Amtrak and passenger rail. We know about all the controversy surrounding that. Everybody looks at the bottom-line. We shouldn't be looking at the bottom-line. We should be looking at whether adequate passenger rail service in this country so people have alternatives to using their cars. We don't have that today.I would make the Northeast corridor much more convenient, much better serviced, and more reasonable. There are people who literally can't afford to use the corridor because it's so expensive on a train, even though in reality it's less expensive then driving your car. But it still could be made more convenient to get people out of passenger cars.It's a bit implicit in his remarks, but the fact that driving your car is a hugely subsidized activity shouldn't be forgotten. It's incredibly convenient because we've built an extraordinary highway and road infrastructure. If we'd put similar energy into building a public transit infrastructure, then that too would be pretty convenient. The problem is, we only built the highway and road backbone, so more people started using cars, so there arose an enormously large constituency for highway and road improvements. Now that I use transit, I'm much more invested in transit improvements than I used to be. It's a tough political issue because huge investments precede huge ridership and an activated political constituency. It's really important that Senators understand that dynamic. Cardin clearly does.
