Meme Weeding: Regular Funding

American and British discourses on public transportation are too obsessed with getting regular funding. In the United States, it’s a commonplace among advocates that what the mode really needs is a regular source of funding protected from the usual political process. American thinktanks trying to talk about construction costs, such as Eno, even spoke with fascination about the bipartisan consensus in favor of expanding the Madrid Metro, in contrast with the American situation. In the United Kingdom, it’s specialized to some aspects and their construction costs, but the “feast or famine” line on electrification is particularly common. In truth, there’s quite a lot of funding regularity and political consensus in parts of the United States and United Kingdom that nonetheless cannot build anything, and conversely, some of the most prolific, lowest-cost builders in the world do so in an environment of funding uncertainty, especially when we consider the effect of the Great Recession.…