Should Infrastructure go Into More Roads or Public Transit? (regional, transportation, population)
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Democrats want to boost infrastructure spending, but I think they are putting to much emphasis on the same old models. I think there should be more focus on public transit.
More should go to roads; however, I do think a larger percent of total transportation spending should be going to public transit than currently is. Building a modern rail system would be a good place to throw massive quantities of money imo.
Our infrastructure has gone mostly towards roads for many decades. I think for a while more should go to public transit to make up for the underinvestment in public transit.
MrRational: That would be fine and dandy if the demand for transportation use were to drop suddenly (such as if there were a dramatic drop in population) but that's unlikely to happen, so, no, that's not a particularly good option.
Transit priorities vary by place. The United States has very little regional/long-distance public transit infrastructure, thanks to our past decisions to base public transit on the private automobile and government-owned roads. Some places are still doing fine with roads, but in many places, there simply isn't enough room to expand roads any further, and doing so makes problems like traffic and pollution worse in the long run. Adding public transit infrastructure, from buses to heavy rail, adds to that total capacity, and allows us to build cities the way we did when Americans built pretty darn good cities.
A lot of that transit infrastructure will have to be strictly local--including not just streetcars and buses but also bike and pedestrian infrastructure, which has the advantage of being very, very inexpensive. But transit infrastructure also has to be tied to land-use planning policy: it's useless to try to promote more fixed-rail public transit and still encourage development of subdivisions that use broken-up cul-de-sac street patterns that make walking and transit more difficult, or commercial districts based on broad parking lots. Again, there are development models in our own past that make cars part of the mixture of transportation rather than its unchallenged deity.
That hasn't really been the experience in most places. BART was extended south and is rarely used. Because it is rarely used it drains money away from BART in San Francisco and the East Bay lines resulting in less frequent service and higher fares so that those lines can subsidize the costs and carry the south bay lines.
In turn, that's lead to a wariness to expand service in areas where it might actually have demand. One stupid decision to build it and they will come has probably set back BART service by 20 years.
On the other hand, you can force demand. Both Seattle and San Francisco are examples of that. In both, parking is artificially constrained and taxed to drive up the price. Seattle just adamantly refuse to build roads. Even the viaduct which is more about safety (it's crumbling away, seismically unsafe, the seawall needs replacement, and it's also really ugly and located on prime real estate) than added capacity, they've got no interest in touching it. Intentionally degrading conventional auto-transportation combined with a build it and they will come approach does work. You just have to sufficiently degrade auto transit. And in the Bay Area the South Bay commuters making six figures aren't really worried about paying $300 a month for parking.
So your solution to what you consider the problem of population growth is to reduce infrastructure?
Not as stupid as it sounds. As soon as you build more infrastructural, people immediately move out to the fringes to take advantage of all the newly available real estate that has reasonable access to the city where they work and go for entertainment beyond the normal movie theater and Apple Blech's.
I'm pretty sure that human fertility and reproduction rates are not controlled by decisions about infrastruture development. Although if it did, it would giv e "build it and they will come" a whole new meaning...
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