Transit Investment: Some Real-world, Reality-based Suggestions

Kudos to Std-Ex columnist Trentelman and one GOP State Senator

By Curmudgeon

Excellent column this morning in the Standard-Examiner by Charles Trentelman --- a fine example of the "reality based world" that our legislators, most of them, seem reluctant to live in, or at least to legislate in.

The title of Trentelman's column is "No Cheap Road Around It: The Future Is Going To Be Taxing." He looks at the number of cars owned an driven in Davis County as an example. Davis County's population is expected to bump up by about a third over the next dozen years, with about 60K additional cars in the county. And right now Utah needs $16 billion just to maintain the roads we have and build badly needed new ones. Cost of building and maintaining new roads into the future looks like a financial tsunami for Utah taxpayers, and it's absolutely on the way.

Trentelman talks too about the need for transit investment to take some [but only a fraction] of those cars off the roads.

What's truly appealing about the column is (a) its conclusions are based on research, on defensible numbers, not on [as is far to often the case], election-driven hopin' and wishin' and dreamin'. [Latest example: Candidate McCain's promise that if elected, he will reduce federal taxes still more and yet balance the federal budget. No he won't, not any more than Reagan or Bush Two did following similar campaign assurances.] And (2) Trentelman does not succumb to the American Public Revenue Syndrome [APRS]: that, somehow, we can have the government do all we insist that it do [in this case, build ever more capacious highways, and maintain them to high standards] without our having to pay for it through taxes. [APRS is epidemic across the spending spectrum, not just involving roads. We want excellent schools, but we don't want to pay for them; we want an excellent military, but we don't want to pay for it... and so on.]

And Trentelman's actually found a legislator... a Republican legislator... who is taking a hard look at the facts, and drawing the inevitable reality-based conclusions: Sen. Sheldon Killpack [R-Syracuse] who's talking about bumping the state gas tax another 14 cents a gallon and charging congestion tolls [higher tolls for driving during rush hours into SLC for example] to raise the $16 billion Utah needs for road building and maintenance. Imagine that. [And compare it to the la-la-land proposals of Senators McCain and Clinton that suspending the 17 cent per gallon federal tax on gas for three months this summer --- costing the federal highway fund billions of dollars without in fact guaranteeing even that gas prices would go down a single cent over the summer as a result --- is what needs to be done.]

Kudos to Sen. Killpack, and columnist Trentelman, for making some real-world, reality-based suggestions.