Quote:
Originally Posted by orulz
As I said before, New Starts is not a "government regulation" in the traditional sense. It was a program designed to make it difficult to build transit projects, in order to curtail the amount of money being spent on them.
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Not exactly - the program has proven very useful at building light rail lines in sparse auto-centric cities that don't need them and thus have to cut bus service to pay to operate them. The program is certainly biased against cities with existing transit networks and high transit utilization - which makes it all the more of a coup that Kruesi got two reconstruction projects funded as New Starts.
It's not there to make building transit projects difficult - it's there to make building transit projects difficult without heavy federal involvement and the additional layer of political dealmaking and favoritism involved therein (as the ongoing drama with WMATA's Dulles extension demonstrates, as well as with the Cermak Branch reconstruction, the supposedly objective cost effectiveness criteria fly out the window when politics demands so). As with most expansion of government regulation and involvement at all levels of government, it's about power and control much moreso than any ideological or philosophical goal.