Obama’s Stimulus: Too Much Emphasis on Roads and Bridges?

There’s a lot of reaction from members of the the Streetsblog Network to President-elect Obama’s address this weekend. Some transit advocates, like The Transport Politic, are putting a positive spin on it, and Ryan Avent at The Bellows says, “it’s really amazing to see the wave of public intellectual criticism [for] Obama’s potential stimulus plan.” Avent adds, in another post:

I have yet to see is any evidence that Obama intends to embark on a
major program of new road construction. And until we see definitive
evidence of something like that, transit supporters really ought to
calm down.

But others — like Cap’n Transit — are hearing the refrain “roads and bridges” way too many times. Trains for America puts it this way:

We here at TFA, along with practically every other blog about non-auto
transportation, have been holding our breaths waiting for anything at
all substantive about how the Obama administration is going to take
advantage of this unique time to refocus attention on our overcrowded
and underfunded transit systems.

What do you think?

Also on Streetsblog.net today, a post from The Overhead Wire about the lack of transit power brokers with the political will of Robert Moses.