When Elaine Chao was confirmed as Secretary of Transportation, rail advocacy groups were optimistic that she and the administration would look favorably towards more funding for rail “infrastructure.” So when Trump’s budget came out, they were shocked, or pretended to be shocked, that Trump proposed cuts to transit, Amtrak, and TIGER grants carried over from the 2009 stimulus program.
Transit cuts were part of Trump’s “attack on cities,” said urbanist Yonah Freemark. No, it was more like part of Trump’s hostility to pouring money down a rathole that produces no benefits.
As the Antiplanner explains in this op-ed in the Morning Consult, New Starts funding is worse than trying to create jobs by digging holes and filling them up. At least the holes, once filled, don’t impose any further obligations on society, but cities that build New Starts projects are legally obligated to continue operating and maintaining the projects for decades. Most of these projects have high costs and negligible benefits.
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Under Trump’s proposal, any projects that do not have full-funding grant agreements would receive no further federal funding. Here’s a list of projects that the Federal Transit Administration has recommended for funding, updated to March 22. Any project that says “FFGA” under the “stage of development” column has such an agreement and would continue to be funded under Trump’s plan. Most of them are already partly or mostly built. All other transit capital projects, whether on this list or not, would be eliminated from further New Starts funding.
Of course, state and local governments could fund 100 percent of those projects, but most probably won’t. After all, the enticement to local politicians is access to “free” federal money.
While it is conceivable that one or two New Starts projects have been worthwhile, every one that I’ve seen has been a drain on local taxpayers and a drag on regional transportation. It is the advocates of New Starts who are truly hostile to cities, since they hate the cities we have today and want to return them to their fantasies of what they looked like before most people had automobiles. That’s never going to happen, so all they are doing is building white elephants that often add to congestion and always add to local tax burdens. Let’s hope Congress gets the message and accepts Trump’s proposal.
