Nothing can stop the money train.
After hundreds of thousands of black women, black men, white women and white “dudes” raised millions of dollars for Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign in online telethons, traffic enthusiasts gathered virtually on Thursday night to blow the whistle 12,000 times.
Pro-transit members of Congress, state legislators and activists headlined the 90-minute “Train Lovers for Harris Walz” Zoom call to bring attention to the least strange thing of all: good public transit.
“We don’t need people making buses and bikes part of a silly culture war,” said Beth Osborne, director of Transportation For America, who attended in a private capacity. “We need to go out and campaign, reach out to voters, text people, knock on doors and we need to donate to the campaign.”
Harris and Walz have only just begun to develop their economic plan, less than a month after President Biden announced he would not seek re-election, but they have not yet addressed their transportation agenda. But that did not stop Democratic lawmakers on the call from extrapolating what the Harris administration could — or at least should — do starting Jan. 20, 2025.
Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia of California told the roughly 400 participants on the conference call that Vice President Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz know how important it is to wean the country off fossil fuels and expand public transportation. He also touted his own achievement as mayor of Long Beach, when he built dedicated bike lanes and converted the gasoline-powered bus fleet to electric vehicles.
“We’ve had a progressive model in Long Beach for a long time and many of us have lived through those big fights, but today we’re at a different point,” he said. “More people understand how to build bike lanes, fight NIMBYs, that everyone has to drive, and that we have a future based only on cars, and that’s not the case.”
Elected officials from Harris’ and Walz’s hometowns also expressed confidence that the two would continue to fund infrastructure projects that promote multimodal transportation while reducing America’s reliance on patrol vehicles.
Minnesota State Rep. Larry Kraft, who represents St. Louis Park, mentioned the state’s groundbreaking law that directed the state Department of Transportation to consider the impacts of new road construction projects on greenhouse gas emissions and miles driven — and, more importantly, to abandon them if they are harmful.
We know which governor signed The Invoice.
“The new policy is a critical building block in Governor Tim Walz’s plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050,” the Star-Tribune reported.
John Bauters, a former mayor of Emeryville, California, and a legend in the field of livable streets, pointed out that Alameda County, where Harris began her career, has one of the highest rates of pedestrian deaths in the Bay Area, but a federal grant helped him make 28 crossings near schools and hospitals safer.
And California State Senator Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco and is also very active on Train Twitter, has been committed to keeping the Bay Area’s transit systems solvent after the pandemic. He hopes to stabilize BART and MUNI by 2026 and is working on a ballot proposal to fund mass transit in the region.
“I’ve known Harris for 22 years. I know she supports public transit,” he said. “The U.S. spends so much less of its GDP on rail than other countries. I want high-speed rail in California, but I want it across the country, in addition to great bus service. We know how to do it, and with this administration we can make real progress in that direction.”
It wasn’t the only online event for Harris that took place that evening. Thousands of people attended a Zoom event hosted by “Jewish Women for Kamala,” which also featured a performance by Barbra Streisand. Housing activists also plan to host a livestreamed call by “YIMBYs for Harris” on August 28.
Wiener, who also participated in YIMBY’s conference call, was encouraged that Harris had promised during the campaign to work with the real estate industry to build three million new homes and remove barriers to development at the state and local levels.
“It used to be pretty lonely being a YIMBY elected official. That era is over,” he tweeted Friday.
