The current administration’s transportation department “subordinates civil engineering to social engineering as it pursues an exclusively urban vision of dense housing and government transit,” notes page 5 of the 2016 Republican Party Platform. For example, the administration’s “ill-named Livability Initiative is meant to ‘coerce people out of their cars.'”
In contrast, Republicans pledge “to remove from the Highway Trust Fund programs that should not be the business of the federal government,” including mass transit, “bike share programs, sidewalks, recreational trails, landscaping, and historical renovations.” The platform notes that more than 20 percent of federal highway revenues go to mass transit, yet transit is “an inherently local affair that serves only a small portion of the population, concentrated in six big cities.” (Really, six big urban areas, namely New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, San Francisco-Oakland, and Boston, where two-thirds of transit rides take place.)
