The line got a lot of laughs, but regrettably it's a true description of transportation spending in our state, and certainly in southeastern Wisconsin, where three current examples illustrate the primacy of road building to the detriment of transit services.

1. Waukesha and Milwaukee county governments have failed to come to a cost-sharing agreement to save Route 9, a Milwaukee County bus line that carries about 70 workers daily from Milwaukee to their jobs in Waukesha County.

   The Route 9 problem arose because Waukesha County Executive Dan Vrakas had removed its $100,000 funding from his 2008 budget.

   Granted that 70 riders a day is not an overwhelming number, but in an area with high employment, and a widening geographic separation between Milwaukee workers and suburban job availability, it's been a shock to see that neither local government nor the state Department of Transportation could find the dollars to save Route 9.

   Not the role of state government, you say, to step in with state dollars and resolve what is essentially a local transportation issue?

Well, consider the next example, which comes from much the same area.

2. An upscale shopping mall is on the drawing board at the 1,500-acre planned community in western Waukesha County called Pabst Farms, at the outskirts of the city of Oconomowoc.

   Someone forgot to pencil in an interchange off I-94 so shoppers could drive to the site, so in a matter of weeks this fall -- warp-speed for bureaucracies -- Waukesha County, the city of Oconomowoc, the state Transportation Department and the mall developer all pledged money toward the interchange's $25 million price tag.

   The state will put in $21.9 million, Waukesha County found $1.75 million in unexpended funds, and the developer and the city offered the rest.

   Even though details of the mall's design and makeup are now unsettled, the governments are still pledging their shares -- but couldn't find the relative pittance of $100,000 for Route 9.

   Maybe the workers are supposed to walk from Milwaukee, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps at the same time.

3. Transit also gets the complete brushoff in a massive, seven-county regional freeway system rebuilding and expansion that includes Milwaukee and Waukesha counties.

   The state will spend at least $6.5 billion on a series of upgrades and new lanes, including $1.9 billion to rebuild I-94 and add a lane from Milwaukee south through Racine and Kenosha counties to the Illinois line.

   That's more than twice the $810 million price tag for the Marquette Interchange project, making those 35 miles of I-94 work the most expensive project in state government history -- yet it includes zero dollars for transit.

   And that is despite the existence of a commuter rail plan, years in the making.

   It would connect Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha, roughly paralleling I-94. And it has already won key preliminary approvals and could get started with about $200 million -- or one-tenth of the I-94 road building that will take place from 2008 to 2012.

   While Milwaukee aldermen have begun lobbying actively for a re-budgeting of the I-94 corridor's plan to make the commuter rail project happen, there is no indication from the state that it has any interest in providing commuters and travelers a rail option.

Highway advocates treat budgets as entitlements. They will argue that transit plans, especially rail initiatives, should be funded from new sales taxes through referendums, which can be easily targeted and swamped by well-financed highway interests in our no-new-taxes era.

But budgets for road building, which always dwarf more modest rail plans, are never subject to referendums. They just get funded with relatively automatic increases in vehicle fees, routine state borrowings, and a combination of federal, state and local taxes.

A few pro-forma hearings, and out come the bulldozers.

Bottom line: Billions for freeways. Millions for an interchange to an upscale exurban mall.

And for that one bus line connecting Milwaukee workers to Waukesha and saving 70 jobs: no funding. That's Wisconsin's balanced transportation scheme.
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