Ben Cunningham, founder of the Nashville Tea Party, detailed how transit projects across the nation are widely “bottomless pits for money” during Tuesday’s Blue City Blues segment on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Cunningham, who has frequently spoken out against the multi-billion dollar transit plan proposed by Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell for both legal and practical reasons, pointed out that Memphis is also experiencing a transit problem. Its Memphis Area Transit Authority (MATA) is considering cutting hundreds of jobs after the service revealed a $60 million deficit in its budget earlier this year.
“In Memphis, they did an audit of the transit authority over there, and lo and behold, $60 million turned up missing. Literally missing,” Cunningham explained.
“The mayor now, there’s been so much pressure, has decided to do an audit, a forensic audit he calls it, to discover where this money has gone, and there’s no telling where this money has gone,” Cunningham added.
Cunningham said the deficit surrounding the transit service is not limited to Memphis, noting how projects and services across the country that receive federal funding are subject to failure as public transit has “never recovered” from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It is so typical of these transit agencies because they get a lot of money from the federal government. And right now, [Transportation Secretary] Pete Buttigieg is, because it’s an election year, handing out literally billions upon billions of dollars to these transit agencies around the country and it’s political, he’s buying votes, it’s obvious, because transit has never recovered from COVID. There’s a transit expert that I follow that looks at transit ridership, and it is not even back to 70 percent of what it was pre-COVID,” Cunningham explained.
“People are abandoning transit,” Cunningham added.
Another example Cunningham gave of transit being a “bottomless pit” for money is the publicly funded California High-Speed Rail, which was originally slated to cost upwards of $40 billion in 2008 but is now estimated to cost more than $100 billion to complete.
“Democrats are not [looking forward] when there is money involved…Look at the bullet train out in California… It’s nowhere near completion and costs are over $100 billion, and there is no end in sight. And yet, politicians, including Pete Buttigieg, continue funneling money to that ridiculous boondoggle out there. Transit is just one of those things that’s a bottomless pit,” Cunningham said.
“There’s no self awareness about past failures. It’s just full steam ahead into future failures,” Cunningham added.
In theory, Cunningham said with the money being funneled into the “bottomless pits” known as public transit, individuals who rely on public transportation services could be given a subsidy to purchase their own vehicles.
“We talk about affordable housing and how we’ve got to give people ‘affordable housing.’ These lefties never talk about affordable cars. Let’s subsidize the purchase of a car so these poor people can have a car. Public transit, the statistics indicate that it takes twice as long to get somewhere on public transit, and the buses are the worst of all public transit in terms of that delay,” Cunningham said.
Watch the full interview:
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
