this is what happens when the democrats and republicans allow their friends in the Saudi royal family to dictate our transportation policies.
When I was taking urban government classes in college the professors were getting all orgasmic over metro governments, Nashville was always the model discussed.
As someone from Illinois which outside of Long Island has the most individual taxing districts of any other suburban area -- I kind of like the small pieces that allow more direct control of the government and more access to political leaders.
However, it seems that there needs to be more regional governments. In the Bay Area, their are some overarching metropolitan associations of leaders that have the ability to set policy and goals and referenda to pull together the region. It seems like the best of both worlds to me.
Speaking of Japan, Japan created a class of municipality a few years ago that allowed large cities to act like provinces. So the mayor has the same power as a governor. This caused a lot of cities to merge in order to reach the required population cap and an incentive to do it as well. As someone that has lived in more than one city that would love to separate themselves from the rest of the state -- this is also an intriguing idea.
elected officials in these other countries [ w/ the exception of China] also have short terms of office- this is no excuse whatsoever for the failure of the politicians in the USA to sit on their obese butts about rail upgrades.After all- we were the first in the world to have high speed and long distance rail in the 19th century - and all of these other places copied us even as we forgot about it and got into our cars.
The rest of the world is much more willing to let experts and career bureaucrats set policy. The political parties are there just to set the agenda -- when your party is in power, you have almost absolute power. The opposition parties are just waiting around really attempting to build coalitions and firing off op-eds until the next round of elections is called. Very often there is a political class though that just moves around from role to role. The bureaucrats are charged with working out the details are not decried in the way that we harp on our civil servants. Policy is tough and complex and you need long term experience to do it well, but we look down on our civilian government workers and instead seem to have instead decided to let think tanks and private lobbies write our policies. We've outsourced our very own government.
I'm with you DC1974, I prefer smaller governmental building blocks.
"They may even bleed across state lines. No branch of government has either the funds or the power to deal with infrastructure - except for one: the federal government."
It seems to me that there are three different issues: funding, planning, and administration. Depending on the project, each of these issues may be best addressed by either the feds, the locality or some sort of a regional authority. The feds are not the best in all situations for funding, planning, and administration.
Before we'll ever get decent high-speed rail here in the USA, we'll have to give up two long running pipe-dreams:
1) A single national passenger rail system that connects all parts of the country, no matter how sparsely populated.
2) Maglev. An insanely expensive, complex, incompatible, difficult to maintain distraction.
Commenting by HaloScan
