When transportation logic overrules the heart: The American Ideas Institute's new center on transportation

The American Ideas Institute is a conservative think tank which publishes the magazine American Conservative. The Institute received a grant (from the Rockefeller Foundation) to set up a transportation initiative. It will be run by William Lind, who co-wrote with the late Paul Weyrich--a well-known hard core conservative (except on transit)--many interesting papers for the American Public Transportation Association on transit and why conservatives should support it.

They launched the website for the project earlier this week, starting with an online symposium on why conservatives should support public transit.

- Keep America Moving

[Funny story: Paul Weyrich was a hard core conservative but loved transit, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s published a magazine called the New Electric Railway Journal, which focused on new fixed rail transit initiatives in the U.S. such as the San Diego Trolley. His Free Congress Foundation was based just a couple blocks from where I lived in the H Street neighborhood, but I never went over there.

Initially, they worked with George Mason U to publish the journal, and got some federal money to do it. Some prominent Democratic U.S. Senator, I don't remember which one, criticized this grant, because of Weyrich's politics. I actually wrote a letter to the Senator, saying that the issue isn't about politics, but about high quality transit. A high level staffer called me to argue, but I remained firm. I said, he's hard right politically, but has the correct position on transit, and for this particular grant, that's all that should matter. I wish I would have been prescient enough to say "someone like Weyrich might be able to get more conservatives to support transit than people like us."]

So when I heard about this site, I was expecting articles by Wendell Cox, Randal O'Toole, and Sam Staley (actually Sam writes some good stuff), an encomium to bus rapid transit (since money goes to road builders, many conservatives support this form of transit), and some foolish article on personal rapid transit.

Or I was expecting incredibly misleading statements such as those by the Heritage Foundation terming dedicated funding from the Federal Government for the Washington DC subway system--which is relied upon by hundreds of thousands of federal workers going to and from work--as the largest earmark of all time.

But nope, the website for the program starts out with a bunch of well argued short thought articles on different topics on why transit is important.

I was confused at first, because for the most part, these aren't articles by "conservatives" but by leading urbanists, transportationists, and smart growth types, of mostly the "progressive" stripe. The articles by "conservatives" such as Glen Bottoms, a former FTA official, are focused more on addressable problems (cost overruns, appropriate technologies, etc.).

It looks like this project will be a great contribution to the discourse.