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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.

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.

The biggest unanswered questions involve Cuomo’s promise to leverage state investment with 20 private dollars for every public dollar. The private sector needs to make a return on its investment, of course, and alternative financing doesn’t eliminate the need to actually fund infrastructure investments. If Cuomo isn’t willing to pay for roadwork with a gas tax increase or tolls, it’s not clear how the private sector would be compensated.

Genting won’t like the reality of this situation, but they’re going to need to find a better transit solution that doesn’t rob service from areas with rapidly growing populations and transportation needs. If increasing capacity is not in the cards, this convention center, already a fairly bad idea, will just look worse.

The study examined a number of questions directly related to the built environment, including the convenience of public transportation, the ease of access to shops, the presence of parks and sports facilities, the ease of access to cultural and entertainment facilities, and the presence of libraries. All were found to correlate significantly with happiness, with convenient public transportation and easy access to cultural and leisure facilities showing the strongest correlation.

Strangely, this doesn’t seem to correlate with our city, state, or national government priorities in the slightest.

More broadly, Quinn’s “Transportation Report” contains not one word about public transportation. Framing the council’s transportation agenda as a win for “nearly every New York City driver,” Quinn ignores the 55 percent of commuters who rely on transit. Quinn and the City Council are kowtowing to the city’s motoring elite the same way Republicans in the House of Representatives are writing legislation to please oil companies.

This identity politics robot is not going to mayor. Her attempts to appeal to Real Idiots are about as convincing as John Kerry’s and Hillary Clinton’s. I have never heard an actual human say anything positive about Quinn, except that she is “a favorite” of city hall courtiers. Just don’t tell the public, who are supposed to vote for this unappealing character. Quinn struggles so mightily yet ineffectually to escape her association with Bloomberg, thereby inheriting all of the complaints and none of the appreciation due his administration. She is a royal mess.

Who cares? If the New York Democratic Party can not produce candidates that promote policies in line with the evolving and thriving urban left, they do not deserve to be in government at all.

Ultimately, we need a mixture of big and little. We need proposals to fix the funding mechanisms, ensure sounder oversight and improve the riding experience. Right now, though, who’s listening? New Yorkers are content to hate the MTA, hate their commutes and vote, over and over again, for the politicians responsible for this mess. It’s a never-ending cycle.