The 25-year Hate Campaign Against the Car

“California’s transport crisis is no mystery. It is the direct result of a critical shortage of highway lanes. California’s highway system has not merely been neglected. An ideological war has been waged against it for a quarter century. The refrain has been constant: ‘We just have to get people out of their cars.’

“After 25 years of astronomically expensive mass transit that the masses don’t use, it turns out that people don’t want to get out of their cars. And there’s a reason. The car offers enormous advantages over centralized mass transit systems: cheap doorstep to doorstep, 24-hour a day, on-call, secure service that is infinitely and instantly adaptable to the needs of both passengers and freight. The practical effect of this ideological crusade against the car has been to bring new road construction to a virtual standstill. Most of the highway taxes paid by motorists have now been diverted into non-highway expenditures. Anti-car ideologues often complain that government subsidizes the car. Quite the opposite is true. The car once paid for all highway construction. Now it is used to subsidize every aspect of the welfare state - except for a decent road system....

“The rhetoric of the anti-car crowd is unceasing. The central tenet is: ‘Building more freeways won’t solve anything because the lanes will just fill up....” Listen to the logic behind this argument: ‘Don’t build more freeways, people will use them.’ Today’s modern bureaucrats prefer to build transport systems that people don’t use...” State Assemblyman Tom McClintock “On the Record” The State Capitol, Sacramento CA Apr 99, tel 916 445 8366 assembly.ca.gov/mcclintock