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This, of course, is no secret for many of us. We’ve bemoaned the dollars to be sunk into Moynihan will little to no upgrade to train capacity. It’s a similar story at Fulton Street where the headhouse represents a large chunk of an expensive project and sits a block away from a $4 billion PATH hub that also won’t increase capacity.

It is harder to criticize auto boondoggles like the Tappan Zee for increasing capacity in the wrong way when some transit boondoggles do not increase capacity in any way.

When one of the two major parties supports a certain policy and the other party pretends to oppose it — as happened with these radical War on Terror policies during the Bush years — then public opinion is divisive on the question, sharply split. But once the policy becomes the hallmark of both political parties, then public opinion becomes robust in support of it. That’s because people assume that if both political parties support a certain policy that it must be wise, and because policies that enjoy the status of bipartisan consensus are removed from the realm of mainstream challenge.

This is how you get to the astounding fact that a majority of “liberals” now support drone executions without trial. It is right because we’re doing it.

Obama promised change, and he has delivered.

If the House GOP really cared about local control of transportation funds, they could draft a bill that distributes federal funding to cities and towns. The problem for John Boehner and the oil companies who back this bill is that cities and towns spend transportation dollars on things like transit, biking, and walking.

Please work this angle, not the one that sounds like us asking for charity from motorists. That wonderful system of diverting a piddling of gas taxes to transit was set up by Reagan (as we are now reminded by transit advocates trying to perform some Republican Voodoo) to make metropolitan regions look like beggars. Never mind that we pay far more federal taxes overall than we get back in any form, this clever shell game successfully convinces the sprawlists that budgetary up is down.

Battles to receive any federal funding are going to be uphill for the foreseeable future. We can do best in this environment by beating back boondoggles like the Tappan Zee and its cousins around the country. As federal highway spending is reduced, local responsibility necessarily fills the void. New Yorkers will not tolerate silly preferences (such as Cuomo’s) for sprawl over subways when it becomes a question of noticeable differences in our state income tax.

Including public opinion, it appears. According to a Quinnipiac poll released today, a majority of city voters disagree with Quinn and the council that city sanitation stickers are “unnecessarily punitive.” The poll found that 60 percent of voters, including 57 percent who park on the street, support the use of the stickers.

It’s amazing how reliably New York motorists support harsh penalties for auto-rated nuisances, in the abstract. In the congestion pricing debates, all manner of draconian penalties for double parking were bandied about as alternatives that wouldn’t punish the good working people of New York who never double park. We didn’t get to find out if those penalties would have provided some minor gain in efficiency because of course they were dropped the moment that congestion pricing was pushed back. If they were passed, they would surely have been enforced as evenly and thoroughly as the laws against car alarms, horn honking except in case of danger, and blocking bicycle lanes.

The fact that New Yorkers support harsh penalties for acts we often commit is a mix of self-delusion, corrupt privilege (see: ticket fixing scandal), and also a dash of tough New Yawk City bullshit. Look at how we tolerate laws against drinking on stoops and in parks, even as we drink on stoops and in parks, and if we are ever accosted by police for it we will try to get out of the ticket with great passion, but if we fail we will just chuckle and pay the fine. That’s just the way of the world! (Except in most of the world.)

Recognizing this proud civic dysfunction, the best a transportation advocate can do is use it thoughtfully even as we argue for less-insane ways of mitigating simple problems like over-consumption of finite Manhattan street space, such as charging a price for using it. But yeah, bring on the jail time for blocking the box, etc!

Quinn will always fail in her quixotic attempt to play a Real Motorist, because in her circle of elite privilege she isn’t even aware that New York’s commoner oil-addicts have become experts at manipulating the parking kabuki. Lowering the stakes of a misstep removes an advantage they hold dearly over the bumpkins driving in from Pennsylvania.