01627871

Component

The authors examine the widely repeated claim that “there are no Democratic roads or Republican roads,” a heavily worn Capitol Hill proverb suggesting that transportation policy is a uniquely bipartisan policy area. While such claims have often been confirmed in studies of Congressional behavior, it is less clear whether this adage also applies to public attitudes about highway and public transit funding, the two leading transportation policy alternatives. In this paper, the authors examine three competing hypotheses about the partisanship of transportation policy: that such attitudes are partisan and ideological, that they are a result of personal pocketbook interests, or that they are driven in some way by voters acting on their local political culture. Using data from the General Social Survey (1984-2014), the authors show that roads and bridges have, indeed, received bipartisan support from the public. However, partisan attitudes towards transit subsidies are correlated with social welfare attitudes, coinciding with larger partisan differences. In an original survey on transportation taxes, the authors find that partisans generally agree on the need to raise gas taxes for highway maintenance, but split on the question of transit funding. In all cases, usage of a transportation mode modestly increases policy support. In sum, the authors find that there is still much truth to the adage that “there are no Democratic roads or Republican roads,” but this is less true of transit’s place in the transportation finance system. At the same time, even for transit, partisan differences smaller than those that appear in other social spending categories.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABE10 Standing Committee on Revenue and Finance.

01618707

17-06606

English

0000-0001-5378-3473

0000-0003-2328-0263

16p

2017

Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References

Attitudes; Financing; Highway maintenance; Highways; Policy making; Political factors; Politics; Public transit; Transportation policy

Social welfare

Bridges and other structures; Construction; Finance; Highways; Maintenance and Preservation; Policy; Public Transportation; Society

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2017 Paper #17-06606

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 8 2016 12:42PM