Wrapping up Sunday afternoon’s discussion, Lee Schipper, EMBARQ’s Research Director, asked fellow transportation gurus the “million dollar” question: Why do governments and funders tackling transportation problems so often pursue high-cost solutions, like highways and rail systems, when there are solutions like Bus Rapid Transit that are tried, true, and cheap? The debate that followed suggested that there is no simple answer, but it likely has less to do with design and engineering and more to do with sociology and culture.
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During EMBARQ’s Sunday session at the Transportation Review Board’s annual meeting I noticed that one of the day’s ongoing discussion topics dealt with the relationship between transportation policy and class politics. Transportation policy affects all citizens, but it does not always do so uniformly. The commonly held view (as Måns Lönnroth succinctly put it at the event) is that “buses are for poor people; cars are for the middle class.” This supposed truth often drives political decision-making, and can impede sustainable transportation solutions. Understanding the unequal benefits and burdens created by a particular transportation initiative is thus a critical concern. As a number of observers noted on Sunday, political-economic issues are so important that project success often relies more on gaining the support of the middle class than on engineering.
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