As FasTracks sorts through its financial challenges and as FasTracks lines get built out (including our own West Corridor line) over the next few years, I suspect we’ll see sustained coverage of the political fights over transit in the Denver region. Of course those fights will heat up considerably when RTD asks the voters for additional sales tax to complete the buildout of the system, as I expect they’ll do in 2010.
I recently came across this interesting article about Paul Weyrich (a key conservative thinker and writer and a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation) and his views on mass transit. His point in a nutshell: the “conservative” arguments against transit seem to be more about an ideological libertarian anti-transit view than based in either real world facts or mainstream conservative doctrine. [NOTE: The original link didn't work. I've updated it and it seems to work fine now.]
It’s refreshing to recall that support for FasTracks was decidedly bipartisan, and in fact it would not have passed without the uncommon alliance between the business community, local governments, and the environmental community. And same sort of broad bipartisan support for FasTracks is evident at the Metro Mayors Caucus (composed of all the mayors in the Denver Metro region) and at the Denver Regional Council of Governments (made up of all the cities and counties in the region), Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike. The politics have become a lot more complicated since that first FasTracks vote, and I don’t know if the coalitions will hold as they did last time, but I’ve been very encouraged that the coalition fissures have been about mechanics and equity issues, not ideology.
