Recently, there was an article published in The Badger Herald (“Amtrak proposal unrealistic,” March 2, 2009) that suggested using money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (or as it’s more commonly known the stimulus package) on public transit would be bad for the state. The author of the article suggested that it would be a travesty to plan to spend government funds that do not benefit every citizen in Wisconsin. He thought that a better way forward would be to distribute the money from the ARRA to city governments so that they might spend it on whatever they see fit. While this may sound good in principle, Wisconsin needs a more focused and coherent approach in response to the dual threats of the failing economy and the increasingly dire transit situation.

Public transit — or more specifically, the establishment of a high-speed rail throughout the state of Wisconsin — would provide an enormous amount of benefits. From an economic perspective, a train would create many jobs (in fact 19 percent more jobs than building new highways) while increasing tourism revenue in many different parts of the state. At the moment, citizens spend 20 percent of their household budgets on transportation cost. Switching to cheaper alternatives would allow these people to reinvest in and rejuvenate our state and national economies. The easy sell is to give people government money and let them have total freedom in using that money, but that leaves Wisconsin with no guarantee of either economic progress or an improved transit system.

Another major focus in the shift to public transit is the environment. As much as it may seem like old news, climate change is an important issue on local and state levels as well as on a national level. Switching toward public transit would reduce our dependence on fossil fuels (especially foreign oil), reduce our carbon footprint and reduce our utter helplessness in the face of sporadic changes in gas prices.

Varied public projects on a local level may sound like an intelligible idea, but these projects would not do nearly as much for our future as the establishment of local and statewide high-speed rail system. I am encouraging people to support a viable, technologically sound alternative to the same old ideas and urging Wisconsinites to support 21st-century public transit in any way they can.

Jonah Bromwich

Sophomore, political science

WISPIRG Public Transit Campaign

[email protected]