These Transit Riding Politicians Don't Support Public Transit

Members of Congress have spent an inordinately large chunk of this legislative session hating on mass transit (and that's inordinate compared even to the amount of time they’ve spent hating on other widely beloved American assets such as women, the Census, light bulbs and Muppets). Our own Eric Jaffe had a good roundup back in February of some of Congress’ worst ideas to rewrite 30 years of federal funding for public transit. We won’t rehash the details here except to remind you that The New York Times called those earlier proposals “uniquely terrible,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood (a Republican) called the bill they were embedded in “the worst transportation bill I’ve ever seen,” while Grist smartly summarized the situation as being “soaked in suburban identity politics.”

After months of wrangling, Congress entered this week under deadline to finally produce a bill (lest money for bridges, highways and trains run out). The more we thought about the transportation debate coming to a head in the halls of the Capitol, with senators and House members scurrying back and forth to strike a last-minute deal, the more one thought started to nag at us: Wait a minute. The congressmen who spent much of this year fighting over the value of transit in fact have the sweetest underground public transit system around. And we pay for it.