Transportation: More Important than Perceived!

Before I write any more, you should look at the following comic because you might not yet understand the gravity of transportation in the United States. Any little thing that happens here, could effect the outcome of the WHOLE WORLD! No joke!

This is super serial guise!

SO PEOPLE! Leave your cars at home, take the bus, and force congress to legislate in favor of public transportation. As much as you Americans hate it, just do it! Okay now, I'm going to show you a bunch of numbers that corroborate the point I just made. 

Everyone knows that transportation is quite a national issue that encompasses thousands of interest groups because of everything it covers, so you get all kinds of groups that range from conductors unions, to automobile manufacturers, bus transit line companies. Therefore, you can expect a lot of charts and graphs to display the amounts of money that go into lobbying for different transportation causes, thanks to this wonderful website. 

In 2012, the total contributions ran up to about $78,042,053 with about 76% alone going to Republicans! Over $14,047,545 have already been 'invested' in the 2014 election cycle, so you see that people are getting a move on already. In the last 24 years, this issue has seen donations of $545,446,347, so as I said, transportation is no joke. 

A list of the top recipients of those donations. Maybe I should go into politics.

Of course, we also can't forget the top contributors, and as I said, there are various groups with widely different interests, that all have to do with transportation. As you can see, the groups predominantly donate to the republicans.

A chart displaying the top contributors and which parties they contributed to.

There are literally thousands (again) of iron triangles that exist in regards to transportation. I'll just use the example that I used for my tests. The three corners of the triangle are the Federal Railroad Administration (Bureaucracy), the House committee on Infrastructure and Transportation (Congress), and GE, a train manufacturer (interest group). It's quite obvious how the support and control flows from corner to corner, but with GE, they most likely would support the republicans as they would want less regulations and taxes on their products. 

Multimedia References

Singer, Andy. "No Exit." Comic strip. PEAK TRAFFIC: Planning NAFTA Superhighways at the End of the Age of Oil - Part One. N.p., 10 May 2006. Web. 14 Nov. 2013. <http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/051006_peak_traffic.shtml>.

"Transportation." OpenSecrets.org. The Center for Responsive Politics, 28 Oct. 2013. Web. 14 Nov. 2013. <http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?Ind=M>.