Sun, 2008-09-07 21:58 — lambert
No, not SEPTA:
BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Furious rail commuters in Argentina set fire to a train on Thursday in anger over delays during the morning rush hour.
Television images showed black smoke and flames engulfing the train at the station of Merlo, in the western suburbs of the capital, Buenos Aires. At nearby Castelar, passengers hurled stones at the ticket office and blocked the rails.
Amazingly enough.
It will be interesting to see how the billions that at some point will be spent on public transportation will be spent. Hey, I've got an idea! Let's have Halliburton build them!
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The Candidates on Local Mass Transit
IMO, neither of the major three candidates had a really stellar increase for the funding of local mass transit systems:
Hillary is a Senate sponsor for a $1.7 billion pot (or is it an increase?) for local mass transit (btw, she was also endorsed by the Amalgamated Transit Union)
I can find no plans on Obama's website about mass transit, though, I can remember hearing him offering a funding number a few months back, but only in passing and I can't remember what it was.
I'm not even going to bother looking for McCain's support (or lack there of) for mass transit, both national and local. When he was chairman of the Science, Commerce and Transportation committee he killed $10 in capital funding for Amtrak. That's really all that I need to know.
If someone can find some more information on their plans and stances, that would be great.
BTW, would someone mind keeping an eye out on how much of our GDP we spend on mass transit? I can't seem to find any information on this for the life of me, but remember hearing it's some rather insignificant percentage compared to other top-tiere First Worlders.
More Info
I was able to find through some research that local mass transit systems fall under the Federal Transit Administration (which is a branch of the Department of Transporation), which provides technical and financial assistance to local mass transit systems.
For Fiscal Year 2009, the FTA requested $10.1 billion. This is out of a bugdet of $3.1 TRILLION dollars, though.