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Thus the House transportation bill is bad not only because it’s bad for transit, but also because it’s bad government. It’s not even selective worrying about cost-effectiveness, a charge often thrown by political transit supporters. It makes no attempt to decouple any funding from gas taxes, a decoupling that it necessary for the purpose of making it possible to tax pollution without demands from both APTA and the AASHTO that the revenues raised be plugged back into transportation. It makes no attempt to let go of projects that cost too much while maintaining those whose cost is adequate. It’s purely an exercise in muscle-flexing, a continuation of the US practice of not having a transportation policy that’s separate from the usual political and lobby bickering.

Alon is right that this ugly attack must be opposed its targets—us—but I can only do so halfheartedly, for the reasons he lists. I can not feign passion for a system of “dedicated funding” that I think is stupid to begin with.

Oh, the horror of having to establish once a year that a government entity needs a few billions from the mean old general fund! What is next, will the public want to know how it all worked out each year, whether the expenditures yielded the expected benefits? Will we… gasp … expect an accounting of lives saved, commerce increased, and pollution averted?

Where I work they decided to do performance reviews twice a year, because too much stuff happens in a year. And it’s true, tons of things happen in a year if you actually do work. No one likes doing the reviews so often, for various obvious reasons, but we do them and it makes a difference.

I understand the appeal of dedicated funding. Everyone would like to have a guaranteed allowance in to spend as they please, but guys: you can’t run a railroad that way. Or actually you could, and it would be called Amtrak.

The gas tax is just a thing we should use to wean ourselves off oil, so that we aren’t dragged into resource wars and then economically ruined when production peaks. But it may be too late to do anything about that now.

Part of the reason we failed to act is we wrapped a simple tax in layers of politics, bureaucracy, and ideology. It became a multiplier for motorist entitlement, even as it failed to cover the one category of roads it was supposed to cover. The piddling American gas tax and the frantic politics surrounding it are one of the most pathetic spectacles of our era.

And money remains, stubbornly, money. It’s just an abstraction whose purpose is to allow humans to shift resources. The idea that governments can and should treat money from one source as being bound to particular categories of spending makes no logical sense. People don’t do that unless they have some gambling, shopping, or drug addiction. It’s a weird political gimmick that was supposed to do all kinds of things that it has utterly failed to do. America’s transit system, with its special dedicated funding, is the envy of no one in the first world.

There are simple, honest, and good arguments for taxing gas at European levels, and separately, for subsidizing public transit. There are no such arguments for automatically assigning some random percentage of gas taxes to transit agencies, and to send the rest to disastrous mega-highways. Instead we just hear procedural excuses, mixed with the same overwrought liberal pleading that has been un-winning the hearts and minds of Americans for the past 30 years.

It’s time to try something else.

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.

That aside, consider what Gingrich is really saying when he derides New Yorkers as elitists because each uptick in the price of gas doesn’t make us itchy to start a new war. In one way, he has a point. Unlike our countrymen trapped in punishing commutes and paying off two-car garages, we big city dwellers are fairly well insulated from fluctuating gas prices.

An “adverse traffic demand response” just means lower traffic volumes. Well, ahem, one man’s “potentially adverse traffic demand response” is another man’s problem solved! It’s only a problem if you’ve already built a bigger bridge and you need the tolls to pay for it. If you reduce traffic volumes instead of building a bigger bridge, well, you just saved us five billion dollars.

Beautiful.

How does having the ‘legal right’ to park have anything to do with how parking should be priced? I have a ‘legal right’ to rent an apartment in the most prestigious street in my city. The fact that I, like most people, can’t afford to do so has nothing to do with whether apartments should be market-priced. Of course, if significant numbers of people can’t afford any decent shelter we must look for solutions. In market economies, those solutions are (usually) targeted and don’t abolish market pricing for real estate generally. In any case, surely parking in busy urban streets is much less of a basic need than housing.

This is why I’ve long argued that it was a stupid idea to frame bridge tolls as paying for transit improvements. The obvious response is, “No, those transit users should pay for their own fucking improvements!” The fact is that we’ve already promised to reconstruct every single bridge on the BQE, including hundreds of thousands to replace the Kosciuszko, with no toll funding whatsoever. We’ve already done major reconstructions on most of the East River Bridges. Why are our transit improvements being held hostage to a bullshit artist like Marge Markey, while we use our income and sales tax dollars to write blank checks to repave every street in the city?

In the congestion pricing debate a few years back, manufactured public opinion hinged on how the expected revenues would be spent. Polls showed good support for pricing if the funds were spent on transit, but no trust that government would actually spend the funds as promised. With only this muddled public support for the policy, Shelly Silver was able to smother it in the Assembly. And in return for its legendary cynicism, the New York public got transit cuts and we get to pay out of general taxes for whatever expenses the congestion pricing revenue would so assuredly have been snatched to cover.

Way to go, world-wise New Yorkers! No government is gonna trick us into supporting a use fee to offset costs incurred by other people’s autos. Unlike other forms of revenue, we must have some magical prophesy about how future governments will spend the money, or else don’t collect it. What a wonderful rule for the few people who wear out the roads, at great expense to everyone else.

As in any confidence trick, the transit riding public was made to feel that declining to charge for private auto use of the streets was the smart and sophisticated thing to do. Will it work every time?