Given what a lazy bunny I am, I can just sit back and link to his discussion. Just a couple of points of dissension on his discussion:

1. The Massachusetts governor’s office going to the GOP is not necessarily a big deal or a blow to transit. Romney when he was governor wasn’t mean about transit, and we do have instances of GOP guvnors who are actually quite supportive of transit. Much depends on their base. Schwartzenegger, for example, was supportive of transit in the state of California when he was governor. The Maryland loss is a big deal because anti-transit, pro-road themes entered into that campaign, the way it did for the Fords up in Toronto.

And, at the risk of being a scold, this is the problem with the way transit advocates, particularly the rail fanboys, have marketed and sold transit politically for decades. You can’t treat political topics as binaries of good/evil without somebody, at some point, noticing and taking your binary and using it to bludgeon you with as they get tired of being framed as “lazy/evil/stupid.” If transit is part of the culture war, it’s because advocates have put it there with endless associations between transit and the environment rather than treating transit as a mode like any other. There’s no avoiding urban/rural fights over distribution–those can happen over road money as well as transit money.

But there is absolutely positively no reason why plenty of Reagen-voting real estate developers won’t support transit if they see what’s in it for them. So a little less assuming that Republicans are going give transit the short end of the stick might be a good idea.

2. Scott Walker and Rick Scott might have taken their races, but that’s certainly not the end of the HSR program that Obama so cherished. We re-elected Governor Brown again, and he loves HSR with a love that is more than love. California’s project has finally gotten clear of the lawsuits it set itself up for, and they are building and people are excited. Obama can come jam up traffic in California and visit. It’s not the same as rolling out the beginning of a whole system, but it’s a start, and it took decades for the interstate system to get off the ground, too.

3. I am a party of one on this opinion, and I am unencumbered by actual evidence to substantiate my opinions here, but I am not a great believer that dedicated funds for transport (or anything else) are a great idea. Voters love to tie their taxes to specific things they think can’t get screwed up, but I think dedicated funds exacerbate multiple problems, including construction cost inflation and overcapitalization (the money’s there, everybody sees it, everybody wants a piece of it, etc etc.) Whereas if they had to duke it out of the general fund, it would be a different ball game.

Yeah, everybody hated pork. But Congress actually functioned when pork was on the table and look where we are now.