Ray LaHood: Goodbye and good riddance

Ray LaHood's legacy: a lot of wasted money on rail projects, including potentially the biggest money pit in the country, California's high-speed rail project.

Randal O'Toole gets it right:

 

Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood has announced his intention to leave office as soon as a replacement can be found. Aside from an admirable emphasis on safety, LaHood’s main legacy will be a weakening of the cost-effectiveness requirements for transit grants so that now the most ridiculously expensive transit projects can get federal funding. As a result, more than 100 metropolitan areas are lining up with proposals for insanely expensive rail projects. While this is good news to snobs who think that the only real transit is on rails, it is bad news for taxpayers as every rail project funded means money is being wasted that could otherwise have been put to good use.

Streetsblog is of course worried that LaHood's successor won't be as big a bike nut and as anti-car as LaHood.