Who steals the transportation dollars?

Why is more than 20% of the gas tax dollars diverted from road upgrades?  From Ronald Utt at Heritage:

The largest diversion from the $52.7 billion in total spending authorized for fiscal year 2009 from the highway trust fund (including $2.0 billion in general revenues) is the $10.3 billion in direct spending for transit programs (trolleys, buses, commuter rail, etc). Transit riders are also the greatest beneficiary of the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program, which absorbs $1.8 billion of the trust fund. Although transit riders account for only 1.8 percent of surface travel passengers and 5 percent of commuters, they receive a subsidy from the fuel-tax-paying motorists amounting to approximately 20 percent of transportation spending.

HT Peter Gordon
The problem is mainly the Senators, like Oberstar, who want to manage our lives. He creates a problem for transit users, they cannot get the technology they need to upgrade the facilities, because they steal the road dollars and use them for inefficient transit like rail.

We will exit the depression when we implement the intelligent road systems, and that happens when Oberstar leaves office, or when we get a Tea Party rebellion.

Most of the light rail projects are useless, like the Light rail in San Jose CA. For San Jose this will be the second depression in which San Jose rips out steel tracks put in place by nonsensical government planners. Asphalt roads go everywhere and we can make vehicles that pretend to be trains if this is what Oberstar wants.