The Conservative case for public transportation (sorta)

Every now and then, you read an interview or speech that just gets right to the heart of stuff you've been trying to say. "Yes!," you think. "Preach it!" But, then, the person you've been cheering on suddenly takes a detour into Crazytown, or reveals some truly vile motives behind a good idea. It's both thrilling and frustrating, and if you haven't yet had this experience, Grist's interview with William Lind, the director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation, is a great place to start. Lind makes some cogent and important arguments for why funding public transit makes financial sense, and why Conservatives ought to get behind it. And, then, just as you're thinking that bipartisanship might work after all, he goes on to explain that by "public transit" he means "trains", because buses are filled with black people who are so violent that white and Asian people are right to fear and avoid them, and thus buses don't attract the right kind of ridership. Sigh. So close, and yet, so far.