Trump's infrastructure "fantasy": Ditch mass transit for self-driving cars, private highways

Trump's infrastructure "fantasy": Ditch mass transit for self-driving cars, private highways
Trump's Project 2025 has a plan: Kill off public transit for self-driving Ubers on private toll roads

By Russell Payne
Staff Reporter
Published December 19, 2024 5:45AM (EST)


(Salon) While President-elect Donald Trump rarely spoke about infrastructure projects during the 2024 campaign, especially compared to the grand promises of his earlier campaigns, Trump's allies plan to revive infrastructure planning from his first administration. But this doesn't meant taking on big new projects. Instead, it's likely to mean reduced funding for public transit, increased investment in autonomous or "self-driving" vehicles and contracting out major infrastructure projects to private investors.

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More detailed policy prescriptions can be found, however, in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which appears to serve as an unofficial agenda for the incoming administration, or perhaps a manifesto for the American conservative agenda in the age of Trump.

In that document, economist Dianna Furchtgott-Roth, who served as an undersecretary at the Department of Transportation in the first Trump administration, lays out what may well be the incoming administration's vision for infrastructure investment, focused on private contractors and investment deals and dramatically scaled-down federal funding for capital improvements. It feels much closer to old-school, small-government Republican politics than to the more ambitious vision Trump has occasionally championed.

Project 2025 specifically mentions the push to eliminate capital investment grants under the first Trump administration. These large grants of federal dollars are used both to build new infrastructure projects and fund maintenance of existing highways, bridges and other crucial infrastructure components in major metropolitan areas. As the spectacular collapse of Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge last March made clear, infrastructure maintenance can become a critical issue. (Given the current budget standoff in Washington, it's unclear whether Congress will fund rebuilding the bridge.) Eliminating these grants could slow down transportation infrastructure projects currently contemplated or underway, or kill them off completely. .................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/12/19/infrastructure-fantasy-ditch-mass-transit-for-self-driving-cars-private-highways/