I'm not going to head off into wild political flames - - - check back through my earlier posts and you'll find I'm a 4th-generation registered Republican who worked for Goldwater and Nixon, voted for Reagan, etc. etc. What I don't want to see is my party doing things like:
> Discouraging fuel conservation (yes, from the same root as "conservative"...) , so that our dollars go overseas to line pockets in Saudi Arabia and Russia instead of staying here to grow our economy.
> Eliminating transit so it's harder for people to get to work, earn money, better themselves, pay taxes, and not end up on welfare - all goals I thought we stood for.
Check out
http://www.trolleycar.org/, sponsored by the Free Congress Foundation, a solidly conservative group that supports transit as a way of encouraging independence and self-reliance.
Yes, you're right, I drive a 32-mpg Civic and I recently saw a Hummer with a Kerry-Edwards sticker on it...
Finally, remember that the feds do contribute to local transit. But the old 80-20 funding split has been reduced to 60-40 and may even hit 50-50. That makes it a lot harder to get local governments to pony up the difference so many projects are dead in the water. Most of that reduction has happened since 1994, btw.
I'm not even gonna touch Amtrak since that's another swamp and it has its own forum on this board.
We now return you to a discussion of SEPTA.