I saw this mentioned on Fresh Loaf yesterday, but Brian reminded me of it this morning.

The SaportaReport relays a talk given by William Lind, director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation in Arlington VA, to the Sustainable Atlanta Roundtable back on June 3rd, which points out that while liberals are most well-known for their near-sexual attraction to public transportation, it’s actually an issue that transcends party affiliation.  Some really juicy quotes in this one…

“You can’t get conservative votes with liberal arguments,” Lind said. For example, they should not utter the word — environment. Instead, they should talk about conservation and stewardship. “Vocabulary is important.”

Lind is a big proponent of rail transit rather than traditional city buses. “Very few conservatives will ride buses,” Lind said. “Rail can provide a quality of service to compete with cars.”

Also…

Lind said conservatives also will embrace the national security argument for transit.

“One third of our defense budget can be traced back to our dependence on foreign oil,” Lind said. But that dependence can be reduced by bringing back rail transit. “Let’s rebuild the network we had back in the 1950s. All we want to do is get back to what we had.”

Now since this was a political tactics talk, it sorta comes off as putting one over on conservatives wary of public transit.  But looking beneath the “here’s how we get it passed!” rhetoric, there are quite a few facts that are often overlooked in conversations about transit in favor of clinging to old misconceptions.  Examples?  There just happens to be a concise list in the article!

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William Lind writes in The American Conservative that they should.  Here’s a snippet….

The perception that conservatives do not use public transportation is only one of the mistaken notions that has warped the Right’s position on transportation policy. Another is that the dominance of automobiles and highways is a free-market outcome. Nothing could be further from the truth. Were we to drop back 100 years, we would find that Americans were highly mobile. Their mobility was based on a dense, nationwide network of rail transportation: intercity trains, streetcars, and interurbans (the latter two electrically powered). Almost all of these rail systems were privately owned, paid taxes, and were expected to make a profit. But they were wiped out by massive government subsidies to highways. Today’s situation, where “drive or die” is the reality for most Americans, is a product of almost a century of government intervention in the transportation market.

Another misperception is that public transportation does not serve conservative goals.

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