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Going Nowhere Slowly
by Paul Jacob
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I hope you had a good Labor Day holiday. Of course,
if you did, it's probably because you didn't drive
anywhere. All over the country it seems that our
transportation system is bottle-necked.
The problem: consumers who want transportation, with
dollars to spend, who can't get the transportation
services they want. The reason: hardly any
marketplace for building and maintaining the roads
or running city buses, subways and trains. They are
almost all government run.
So transportation decisions are often political
decisions, not business decisions. A road or a new
airport isn't built because it will return a profit
on investment, but because it is considered good
politics. Which leads to politicians promising all
kinds of pet transportation projects to please
various special interest groups instead of pleasing
customers.
Example. The traffic on the highways in
Minneapolis/St. Paul is a mess. Many legislators
want to raise gas taxes to fund new road projects
and a light rail system.
But the Taxpayers League of Minnesota found that
over the past ten years, spending on transportation
has more than doubled in Minnesota, while road
capacity there has increased only two percent. The
League also points out that the light rail project
politicians are pushing would have the highest cost
of any of the proposed projects, and with the fewest
people using it.
In the free market, businesses must please customers
to survive. Politicians? They have re-election
campaigns to worry about.
This is Common Sense. I'm Paul Jacob.
TAKE ACTION * * * * * TAKE ACTION
You can find out more about government mismanagement
of transportation in Minnesota by visiting the
Taxpayers League of Minnesota's web site:
http://www.taxpayersleague.org/social_engineering.php
Mike Ford
Initiative for Texas
(512) 447-2086
mikeford@quik.com
http://www.initiativefortexas.org
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