USDOT thinks you shouldn’t ride the train so much.

Apparently it’s berate the Federal Government day at BeyondDC. From Streesblog, via Avent:

Like a burned-out addict stealing to support a meth habit, U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said yesterday that due to declining gas tax revenues, the Highway Trust Fund would need to borrow money from its mass transit account to pay for road projects. Today’s big news story was buried at the bottom of page A17 in the New York Times:

Gasoline tax revenue is falling so fast that the federal government may not be able to meet its commitments to states for road projects already under way, the secretary of transportation said Monday.

The secretary, Mary E. Peters, said the short-term solution would be for the Highway Trust Fund’s highway account to borrow money from the fund’s mass transit account, a step that would balance the accounts as highway travel declines and use of mass transit increases.

So in the crazy world of Mary Peters, it’s a big problem that Americans are driving less and riding transit more, because that means we can’t build so many roads. Her even crazier solution to that non-problem is to take money away from successful, increasingly popular transit programs and use that money instead to fund more of the same roads on which people are no longer driving. BeyondDC doesn’t know what ridiculous world that is, but it ain’t the one we live on.

Earth to Mary Peters: Your job is not to build roads. Your job is to move people. Stop putting the needs road builders ahead of the needs of the American people. Whatever credibility you had, you have lost thanks to this ridiculous proposal.