Douglas Waggoner wants roads near big cities improved, yet is content to “leave … politicians to decide” how much to spend. Why? Why not leave it to transport users to decide? There are plenty of road providers eager and able to provide congestion-relieving roads to road users willing to pay the costs, either by means of tolls or by topping up dedicated road funds.

Meanwhile Senator Sherrod Brown takes the “political” route and seeks to spend scarce federal funds “to expand public transit and rail services” to please the “environmentalists, domestic-manufacturing advocates, unions, and the transportation community”.

If Douglas leaves transportation decisions to the political class, he is likely to get the results advocated by Senator Brown and the persuasive Laura Barrett. Would not Douglas better achieve his objective by helping to restore the “user pays” tradition to transport?

Incidentally, where is the evidence that “mass transit and rail” … reduce traffic congestion and reduce the carbon-burning toll on the environment”? In Europe, subsidized mass transit co-exists with heavy traffic congestion, while inter-city rail services take traffic from user-funded aviation services, rather than from the user-funded roads.

For us at TEN, the question of whether environmentalists, domestic-manufacturing advocates, unions, and the transportation community can come together to advocate for infrastructure investment isn’t a hard one. It’s practically our reason for being.

TEN represents a grassroots base of tens of thousands of members in 41 states who know that smart infrastructure investments—especially in transit—make sense because they create jobs, spur economic development, expand access to opportunity, and create healthier, more livable communities.

In order to fight for those investments, we’ve built alliances not just within the transportation advocacy community, with national partners like Transportation for America, but with the Amalgamated Transit Union, with civil rights and environmental justice groups, and with public officials like US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, his deputy John Porcari, and Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff, who understand that transportation investments can help build a more just, prosperous, and connected America.

The growing convergence around infrastructure investments even amid a general frenzy of budget-slashing should come as no surprise. One of the most compelling reasons to invest in infrastructure, after all, is to spur economic recovery now and pave the way for our future prosperity. That’s why it may be one of the greatest sources of political accord in the nation at the moment—one that’s already united Sen. Barbara Boxer, Rep. John Mica, U.S Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue, and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

The question of whether Sen. Brown is right about transit as a job creator is also, for us, and easy one. We worked with the Public Policy Research Center in St. Louis to produce a study of exactly this question: What would happen if 20 major metro areas shifted half their current highway spending to transit? It would generate 1,123,674 new transit jobs over a five-year period—for a net gain of 180,150 jobs over five years—without a single dollar of new spending.

We called the study More Transit=More Jobs. It’s a straight-ahead idea that’s won a lot of supporters. We believe there are far more to come.

Much is being made of the differing viewpoints of environmentalists, domestic-manufacturing advocates, unions and the transportation community when it comes to spending on infrastructure, particularly highway infrastructure. But I have a different approach, which, granted, is a direct result of my position as CEO of a shipping logistics company.

The U.S. highway system is crucial to the growth of the country's industry and commerce; more than Dwight Eisenhower could ever have imagined when he created it in the 1950s.

Now, more than 50 years since its establishment, the system's role in allowing for the movement of goods from coast to coast is unrivaled. Every day, hundreds of thousands of trucks crisscross the system, allowing companies of all sizes to successfully conduct business. In fact, in a recent forecast, the Chief Economist of the American Trucking Association said the trucking industry accounted for a staggering 67 percent of tonnage and 81 percent of revenue for the freight transportation industry in 2010. These numbers are only expected to grow, the ATA said, and it predicted that by 2022, trucking will have a 70 percent share of freight and an 81.4 percent share of revenue.

While the system is generally in good shape (in fact, I wrote a few weeks ago that highway spending should actually be directed more towards improving the roadways in and around the country's big cities), at a minimum, the government needs to spend enough to ensure that the system can maintain its current performance. A failure to do that will severely hamper the '18-wheelers' unparalleled ability to effectively and efficiently keep our economy rolling. But just as important, the less efficient the highways are the more shipping companies will have to spend on fuel and maintenance, which ultimately have to be passed along to the customer.

So how much spending? I'll leave that to the politicians to decide. I just want to be sure that the level of spending is enough to keep on truckin' in a way that will be productive and profitable for all.