During a recession, demand for public transit goes up. People cannot afford cars and still need to find their away around their local communities. Smart public policy would have added funding for public transit, for a variety of reasons. First of all, it would support public transit jobs. Second, it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Third, making it cheaper for folks to get around both increases productivity and makes it easier for someone to take a job outside their immediate area. So there are a lot of wins here.

Unfortunately, we’re in an age of austerity, so we don’t get such wins anymore.

More than half of U.S. public transit agencies may increase fares or trim service this year amid budget shortfalls and a threatened loss of federal funding, according to a study.

Officials at 56 percent of 117 agencies surveyed in March said they were considering cost savings, according to the report released today by the American Public Transportation Association, a Washington-based trade group for transit providers. One in four agencies contemplated a combination of both measures, the study found.

“The overarching trend points toward a public that wants more public transportation,” Art Guzzetti, the group’s vice president of policy, said in a telephone interview. “What’s on hold is public investment.”

This is the type of investment I’m consistently talking about that we need more of. Successful public transit systems help grow communities. Expensive or scattershot public transit systems don’t. We’re moving toward the latter. And this austerity trickles down to those who have to pay more for the same public transit, and then reduce their other purchases.

A perfect example of the madness of decreasing public investment can be seen in the large-scale smear campaign against high speed rail in California. There have been some cost overruns, related to a couple different factors. One of them is that NIMBY communities don’t want HSR going through their areas:

Then, recently, the state issued an environmental impact report for the first leg of the project, the 300-kilometer route between Merced and Bakersfield. This was a more detailed engineering assessment that included subsequent community feedback. Towns like Chowchilla now want the line to bypass them entirely, while Fresno says it would like the trains to run through it on an elevated viaduct, and so on. Taking all that new information into account, the Bakersfield-Merced segment is now expected to cost $10 billion, rather than the $8 billion estimated in 2009. Extrapolating from that hike is how the Mercury News got its projection for the whole system.

You cannot take this out of its political context. Central Valley and SoCal legislators from both parties (actually mainly Dems like Alan Lowenthal and Joe Simitian) want to steal the HSR money and devote it to their own projects. A healthy amount of the cost overruns, as you see above, come from changes demanded by those same local communities (basically NIMBYism) that jacked up the price. And they have engaged in an effective strategy to get the media on their side, so that these changes they demand are seen by the press as evidence of a horrible boondoggle. It’s a clever strategy; oppose high speed rail and then use that opposition to attack high speed rail as too costly.

And yet you have to ask “costly compared to what,” as Matt Yglesias does today. This same state is paying $1 billion to put a carpool lane along 10 miles of the 405, which will over time lead to no change in congestion. This is a 400-mile rail system that would compete with not only autos but planes. Even if the investment in HSR is a bit more than advertised, its ultimate goal is extremely worthwhile to the state’s residents.

Forcing cuts to public transit or abandoning forward-thinking rail projects like this is just self-defeating. It’s eating our seed corn.