Joseph R. Biden Jr. Quotes

The gas tax has been the backbone of the transportation system since the inception of the Interstate highway system in the 1950s.

The war on driving includes calls for carbon and gas taxes, tens of billions of gas tax money diverted to inefficient and little-used mass transit projects, and opposition to building new roads and highways.

The Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board is established in 1946 in an effort to discover the cause of the brown cloud hanging over the city and decide how to combat and disperse it. In 1949, after intense lobbying from both the automobile and oil industries, and against the recommendations and position of the Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board, the public rail system, which at one time was the largest in the world, and still serves a majority of the city's population, is decommissioned and torn out. It is replaced by a small fleet of buses.

How we fund transportation in this country is broken. You all pay a gasoline tax, right? Well, cars go farther, we get electric cars, and so on. And then we do more with the money than just build roads. We do bike lanes and mass transit.

We continue to subsidize highways and aviation, but when it comes to our passenger rail system, we refuse to provide the money Amtrak needs to survive.

Both Republicans and Democrats can agree that more choices and lower prices in transportation would benefit consumers. Democrats would consider it 'smart government' and Republicans 'limited government.'

A healthy national infrastructure requires not just competent engineers but also a government—and a public—willing to pay for it.

Design our world so that we have positive social and environmental side effects.

Every president, Democrat or Republican, every Congress, has gotten behind the idea that we have to invest in our highways, our bridges, our roads, our airports. The idea that now this is somehow a partisan issue, it boggles the mind.

We could live in a much better society if there was less personal car ownership.

Public transportation is like a magnifying glass that shows you civilization up close.

I'm not married to a 45-cent gas tax.

We are not opposed to public transportation. We are opposed to wasteful boondoggles.

We are building a truly integrated, efficient, and modern transit network across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. Commuters deserve nothing less than the full support of our next federal government.

In March 2005, I was appointed to the board of the Santa Barbara metro transit district. I was incredibly optimistic about how public transportation can be the solution to help people live in the city and not need a car.

The federal government has invested billions in Metro, yet the system is not safe and is not reliable.

It should be noted that the EPA's banning of methanol is categorically absurd from the point of view of environmental protection.

America faces a mounting transportation crisis, and the primary culprit is road congestion. Traffic makes us unhealthy, wastes enormous amounts of time, and cripples national productivity. America needs expanded roads and transportation infrastructure, but traditional gas tax funding is no longer available.

An active and vibrant railway system confers many benefits on the society.

They banned DDT, not because it was necessarily bad, but because it was a great way to help the population control.

Any friend of fossil is a friend of mine... We’ve got to do everything we can to get people out of their automobiles and into mass transit.

Carbon dioxide is natural, it is not harmful, it is a part of Earth's lifecycle. And yet we're being told that we have to reduce this natural substance, reduce the American standard of living, to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occurring in Earth.

The failure to invest in our public transportation and public life, I think, is a scandal and a shame, and it should be a national embarrassment.

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.

We need to be rid of the insane policy of environmentalism. No more 'green', anti-growth, anti-science environmental policy.