One can break down the US's political order into two crude but still meaningful parts. On one side, you have a mix of educated or cosmopolitan white men, white women, and sexual/religious/cultural/racial minorities; on the other, you just got white men. This is the left and right of the American electorate. And the arrangement we find at the political level is reproduced in other levels of our society, such as transportation.

A post on Streetblog explains that a recent survey conducted by ABC News and the Washington Post found that 54 percent of US inhabitants wanted federal funding to provide "more public transportation options,” and only 41 percent wanted more of the same, more roads, more of what has not worked out well, more of what is leading us to an ecological nightmare. The not surprising thing is that the figure for those in favor of public transportation options rose to 61 percent when the survey isolated urban inhabitants; and the very surprising thing is it only dropped to 48 percent when rural inhabitants were isolated. It appears that lots of people in the middle of nowhere want the socialism of public transportation. But this is just a bunch of bad dreaming. This is not how it works in reality. The rural people must stick with their dying roads. If you live in the country, you live with your cars. You can't have it both ways. Public transportation is only meaningful in dense locations.

Finally, the survey showed that support for public transportation options is found among educated whites and the rainbow of minorities; and those who want roads, wider roads, longer than hell roads are mostly conservative, Christian, white, and male.