Public Transportation and Smart Growth

What's happening with government (federal, state, local)-owned infrastructure is the same thing that happened to many privately-owned freight railroads several decades ago--decades of systematic disinvestment in the people's transportation plant. Private railroads at least had engineers and people who understood the transportation business; we, however, are cursed with lawyer-politicians and ignorant journalists, PR flacks and ideologues who don't understand that to build infrastructure is to make a committment to maintain it. And tUhat maintenance costs MONEY.

What will happen in the US is already being previewed in the Third World. Many Third World countries have let their highways and RR's go to pieces because they don't spend the money to maintain them.