Dan wrote:
As to transit, you are right. The entire state shouldn't have to pay for Minneapolis to have the luxury of state of the art mass transit.
Minneapolis is not an isolated community. The whole metro region needs good transit, not just one city. Many plans that spread the cost over the metro region have been proposed.
> the users of the service should pay for the service. I choose to drive a car.
I don't ask the state to pay my insurance, or make my car payments. I pay for the transportation I use. I pay for the roads that I drive on through vehicle registration and fuel taxes.
Only partly. 31% of the cost of county roads, 51% of the cost of city roads and 63% of the cost of township roads is paid through property taxes. The amount of money paid by government for parking and private drives alone is almost double our subsidy for public transportation. Businesses pay over four times the amount government does for their parking needs.
Every aspect of transportation is subsidized. None of it is covered completely by user fees.
The cost of building the Hiawatha LRT, a 50 year investment, was three percect of our annual surface transportation expenditures for one year and we only paid for half of it. It will cost roughly the same amount to add lanes to I-494 from I-394 to the river (a project already underway) which doesn't include the vehicles or parking needs.
The Midtown Greenway streetcar will cost less than a tenth of Hiawatha.
But more important than facts and figures are the quality of life issues. Public transportation ties communities together and fosters economic development. For every dollar put into public transportation, five are returned. Hiawatha is already spurring development.
Public transportation is not an expense. It's an investment.
David Greene
The Wedge
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