The Great American Dream, for a fee

A pet peeve of mine is the lack of federal funding for public transportation in this country. Trains don't run on time, if at all, and it costs less to fly than to take them. This is ludicrous, and if I don't post about it often, I at least mean to.

Colin, in a recent conversation, pointed out that half of the problem is mindset -- many people view their cars as their birthright, guaranteed to them somewhere in the Bill of Rights along with freedom of speech, religion, and the press; to wrest them away from them would be fundamentally un-American. To this I say, Oy.

But, it's appearing that, while they can keep the cars, the price for using them will just continue to rise. In today's paper, an article about converting freeways to toll roads to avoid congestion. Yes, the statistics are appalling. From the article:

• "The average commuter now loses 46 hours a year sitting idle in a car."
  
• "Average peak hour speeds on the 91 Express lanes [the new toll lanes] were 60 to 65 miles an hour last year, versus 15 to 20 m.p.h. on the free lanes, according to federal officials."
  
• "'Californians can't get from place to place on little fairy wings,' said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger."
  

Still, while the Governator is right about that fact, he could be proposing public transportation alternatives, rather than pushing a plan that promotes more pollution, congestion, and everything evil and baby-killing.

This is wrong on so many levels:

• New quarter-mile wide highways are being proposed in Texas, to cut across swaths of farmland
  
• It's inherently classist -- the lanes are priced according to how much congestion there is, so to escape a 10-mph commute, you end up paying $11ish on a round trip. Those who can't afford to live nearer to their jobs are the ones commuting anyhow, and probably won't be able to afford this extra surcharge. Arr.
  
• The general trend towards privatizing everything. Health care, then Social Security -- now highways? Like I said above, I'm way more pro-public-transportation than I am pro-cars and the gas they consume, but I have a feeling that the government (and both federal and state, at that) could be spending money on highway improvements instead of just outsourcing it all. Call it a hunch.
  

The only possible way this trend could be good is that it's forcing more people to carpool -- apparently, these new toll lanes (at least in some implementations -- not sure about in general) are free to HOVs, or high-occupancy vehicles (a term one can't escape while living within the Beltway, as I've done for the past two years. This is good.

Part of this, I'll acknowledge, is just the fallout from urban sprawl. I've been lucky to have been at a job for a while to which I could commute by bike or or foot; now, the awesome job for which I'm interviewing is 40 miles away, and I would be using the highways to commute. Yes, I'd be on a company-run shuttle, and therefore carpooling; yes, there would be free wifi on the shuttle(!), and so I wouldn't lose work time if I didn't want to. But it sucks that, to get down there for my final interview today, I'll have to take three separate rail systems, which will cost me about $7 each way, and then a cab from the station to the site (paid for by the company, but still) -- the entirety of which will take me a little over two hours. I hate that this is the situation, and acknowledge that part of this is just going to be the reality of a mobile lifestyle. But I still think that more energy could be being focused on public, non-polluting transportation than on charging for highway use. Sheesh.