According to this article in the Triangle Business Journal, some transportation geniuses are deriving new ways to drain more of your money in order to subsidize overpriced mass transit for wealthy folks so they don’t have to lower themselves to taking buses. Of course, such projects never reduce the traffic they claim to reduce (usually 1 percent for about a year) and instead create more congestion around the lines they "develop". Turns out it’s a special interest boondoggle that people, who will never see it, will nevertheless have to pay for — concentrated benefits, dispersed costs. Scarce resources that should go to roadways go to gilded trolleys, instead. Utterly fetishistic, but I digress.
I’ll pass over how the author of this piece – one Chris Baysden – doesn’t offer anything in the way of a dissenting opinion about the wisdom of such a monstrous creation. (Then again, from what I’ve seen of the TBJ, that pub hasn’t seen any corporate welfare it didn’t like.)
Apparently, this eh hem trust fund will be modeled after the phenomenally successful Highway Trust Fund (HTF) that has been raided and misused countless times by the Governor, the General Assembly, and the less-than-scrupulous political appointees of the Board of Transportation. We can only expect this one will enjoy all the stewardship of the old HTF if it emerges – snarling, hungry and breech born – into this world.
-Max Borders
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