Deteriorating infrastructure no surprise to anyone.

Geez no surprise here.

A couple things to note:

-Simply spending on highway/road maintenance equates to nothing less then a regressive tax on the poor.

- A fix it only approach hardly adds mobility for anybody. For every $1 spent on road maintenance, $1.50 should be spent on new infrastructure.

-Unfortunate to say, but politics will get in the way of any attempt at a high speed rail network in the U.S. Do I hear 2 term limit for congressman.
-And for gosh sake, increase the federal gas tax while slowly transitioning to a VMT tax.

Deregulation doesnt work

As was demonstrated in our recent financial meltdown, deregulation not only is not the solution, it's one of the greatest accelerators to complete chaos. Deregulated transportation systems benefits nobody. Not the operators and especially not the user. Strict network, fair, route and design regulation is needed to ensure greater accessibility, which is one of the primary purposes for public transit to begin with. If there was a level of compatibility between competing operators, this could alleviate some of the network discrepancies.

On the same topic but a whole new level, transit cards across cities should be completely compatible. Why is it that I can't my CTA Chicago transit card and use it on the Metro System in D.C.? You would think this is something Visa or Mastercard would be getting behind. They have the capability and capacity to implement such a solution.

http://www.humantransit.org/2011/07/an-oxford-innovation-take-the-bus-that-comes.html