Why Conservatives Should Care About Transit

When President Obama nominated Congressman Ray LaHood as his Secretary of Transportation, most media outlets paid attention long enough to note only that LaHood was a Republican from Illinois and the single pro-life member of Obama’s cabinet. Social conservatives, for their part, would rather have had an ally in the Department of Justice or the National Institute for Health. No one mentioned that it might be particularly appropriate that the cabinet’s one committed social conservative leads the Department of Transportation.

It might seem as if nothing could be less important to social conservatives than transportation. The Department of Health and Human Services crafts policies that affect abortion, the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission play crucial roles in determining how prevalent obscenity is in our society, but the Department of Transportation just funds highways, airports, and railroads, or so the usual thinking goes. But decisions about these projects and how to fund them have dramatic and far-reaching consequences for how Americans go about their lives on a day-to-day basis. Transportation decisions have the power to shape how we form communities, families, religious congregations, and even how we start small businesses. Bad transportation decisions can destroy communities, and good transportation decisions can help create them.[IMAGE '347' /]

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By David Schaengold, research associate at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ and assistant editor of Public Discourse.