Yesterday, I attended an debate between former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell and the corporate/billionaire hack, Grover Norquest about funding infrastructure and deficit reduction. Grover Norquist, the Ayn Rand-disciple, speaks about high speed rail at minutes 23-24 in this debate:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Taxationa
Grover Norquist: “The United States isn’t laid out the way Poland or Moscow is where everyone lives in big, tall, buildings and one subway system between those two points works…it is very depressing over there.”
No jackass, this is completely false. The Northeast corridor and coastal California have population densities as high as Europe. The countries where transit and high speed rail are most successful (Japan, Germany, France, Spain) also have some of highest qualities of life. Transit ridership is very high in Tokyo, Madrid, and Paris but only an Ayn Rand-disciple like Grover Norquist would think these are depressing places to live.
Ridership on Amtrak has also been increasing every month for nearly the past two years, with a 5% increase in ridership in August 2011 compared with a year earlier. This comes at a time when there’s been a sustained drop in driving. If you build transit that is convenient, people will use it.
Norquist also claimed that nobody in the US uses public transit. Really? Except for the 900,000 daily metro trips in DC or the one million daily transit trips in Los Angeles. 20,000 people per hour use the Red Line in DC– the equivalent of building a 10 lane highway on Connecticut Avenue. But I forget, since these cars use oil, it’s not really a subsidy to build all the additional roads and parking structures needed to accommodate them if we didn’t have our transit systems.