With Gas at $4 a Gallon, We Need Public Transportation, But Why We Can't Get It
I've never been a big one for buses or subways. I've never been able to organize myself around their schedules, at least when it comes to getting to work. So I usually end up taking my car (or, now that I'm in sunny Berkeley, walking, and not worrying about getting anywhere on time). Now that gas is $4 a gallon, I'm avoiding my car altogether.
For years, policymakers have wondered just how high gas prices would have to go before drivers switch to public transportation. The answer has been assumed to be very high because Americans supposedly are in love with our cars. Yet now we know there's a tipping point, and it's not quite as high as policymakers have guessed. It's around $4 a gallon. We know that's the tipping piont because suddenly millions of Americans are switching to buses, trains and subways to go to work.
Rather than bemoaning this remarkable turnaround we should be celebrating it because public transit not only reduces congestion but also reduces the nation’s energy needs and cuts carbon emissions that bring on global warming.
Problem is, the nation doesn't have nearly enough public transportation to handle the new demand. Even more absurdly, right now when it's needed the most, public transportation across the land is being cut back. This is because transit costs are soaring by the same skyrocketing fuel prices that are forcing people out of their cars, at the same time transit revenues are shrinking because most transit systems depend largely on sales taxes, now dwindling as consumer purchases decline in this recession. A survey of the nation's public transit agencies released last Friday showed 21 percent of rail operators now cutting back and 19 percent of bus operators.
Even though it’s a hundred times more efficient for each of us to stop driving and use trains and buses, there’s not enough money in the public kitty for us to do so.
This is nuts. If officials need more money to cover the extra fuel costs of public transit, they can raise ticket prices a bit without reducing demand; most of us would still find public transit cheaper than driving our cars. But officials shouldn't stop there. They should add services and expand whole systems -- more buses, more trains, more light rail. If they can’t finance this by floating bonds, they should go to Congress and ensure that public transportation is a major part of the next stimulus package.
Public transit has always been the poor stepchild of infrastructure development. America's usual answer to traffic congestion has been to add more lanes on highways, or more highways, or more bridges and tunnels for more cars. America hasn’t been really serious about public transit for almost a century. Most of New York City’s subway system was built over a hundred years ago. Los Angeles ripped out its trams long ago. Boston's Big Dig, one of the biggest infrastructure projects in modern American history, was designed entirely for cars. In recent years, only a few farsighted and ambitious cities, like Portland, Oregon, have invested in light rail.
But now that gas is $4 a gallon, all this may change. And what better way to get the economy going, and save energy and the environment in years to come, than to create a modern, efficient system of public transportation in America?
For years, policymakers have wondered just how high gas prices would have to go before drivers switch to public transportation. The answer has been assumed to be very high because Americans supposedly are in love with our cars. Yet now we know there's a tipping point, and it's not quite as high as policymakers have guessed. It's around $4 a gallon. We know that's the tipping piont because suddenly millions of Americans are switching to buses, trains and subways to go to work.
Rather than bemoaning this remarkable turnaround we should be celebrating it because public transit not only reduces congestion but also reduces the nation’s energy needs and cuts carbon emissions that bring on global warming.
Problem is, the nation doesn't have nearly enough public transportation to handle the new demand. Even more absurdly, right now when it's needed the most, public transportation across the land is being cut back. This is because transit costs are soaring by the same skyrocketing fuel prices that are forcing people out of their cars, at the same time transit revenues are shrinking because most transit systems depend largely on sales taxes, now dwindling as consumer purchases decline in this recession. A survey of the nation's public transit agencies released last Friday showed 21 percent of rail operators now cutting back and 19 percent of bus operators.
Even though it’s a hundred times more efficient for each of us to stop driving and use trains and buses, there’s not enough money in the public kitty for us to do so.
This is nuts. If officials need more money to cover the extra fuel costs of public transit, they can raise ticket prices a bit without reducing demand; most of us would still find public transit cheaper than driving our cars. But officials shouldn't stop there. They should add services and expand whole systems -- more buses, more trains, more light rail. If they can’t finance this by floating bonds, they should go to Congress and ensure that public transportation is a major part of the next stimulus package.
Public transit has always been the poor stepchild of infrastructure development. America's usual answer to traffic congestion has been to add more lanes on highways, or more highways, or more bridges and tunnels for more cars. America hasn’t been really serious about public transit for almost a century. Most of New York City’s subway system was built over a hundred years ago. Los Angeles ripped out its trams long ago. Boston's Big Dig, one of the biggest infrastructure projects in modern American history, was designed entirely for cars. In recent years, only a few farsighted and ambitious cities, like Portland, Oregon, have invested in light rail.
But now that gas is $4 a gallon, all this may change. And what better way to get the economy going, and save energy and the environment in years to come, than to create a modern, efficient system of public transportation in America?
posted by Robert Reich | 4:26 PM
59 Comments:
Hey Robert,
How about hopping on a bike? Good for you, good for everyone else too!
Professor Reich,
As a fellow Berkeleyan, I take the buses and BART whenever I can and am happy that Americans are finally having the sense to do what was right all along.
What I've never understood is the American public's willingness to live far from their places of work. I know it often means trading miles for square footage, but the savings in time was always worth it for me. Plus, having the option of either walking or biking to work means I don't have to go to a gym.
The tipping point was somewhat lower. If you look at the FHA total vehicle miles traveled, the per capita miles driven started to drop in 2005. So there was a measurable change at $3/gallon. $4/gallon is showing a much larger change.
Money will not be the only problem for transit. Manufacturing lead times will be another. It takes several years to turn an order for transit or railroad cars into a delivered car. There has been enough buying for various reasons to keep the factories busy with a couple year order backlog.
Los Angeles did, indeed, rip out their electric transit system, but they are, at least, putting some of it back. Their Blue Line light rail service has been back in service for nearly 20 years and is *very* popular. So popular, in fact, that it carries 50,000+ riders per day.
The problem is we don't have enough of these alternatives, primarily because we have a Department of Transportation that pushes "bus rapid transit" and HOV lanes in place of the electric trains that have been shown to work in cities like St Louis, Dallas, San Diego, and Denver.
Don't hold ur breath waiting for the bike explosion unless you're taking "selective" samples and guess-extrapolating from there. The nation's auto-driven land-use patterns have led to incredible distances between home, services, and work. We need to hear a lot less such advocacy from cloistered seasoned cartilage-endowed bike enthusiasts in compact cities with mild climates and dedicated lanes. We need more reality checks from the flabby aging newbies in the humid South, sun-baked Southwest, and frozen tundras of the Midwest and parts northeast. Bikers in milder climes tend to dubiously underestimate the impact of horrid weather. And finally, the baby boomers are aging, w/bad cartilage, bad knees, and pitiful respiration and muscle-tones. And Gen X is already hitting their flabby pallid 40s. Moderate biking will help both demographic groups for sure, but forget about regular year-round commuting en masse. For many 10s of millions, that remains out of the question. Then there's the psychology of sharing fast-moving lanes w/cell-phone gabbing and coffee-swigging distracted drivers, while being ‘protected’ from them by a painted yellow line. As much as I loved casual biking 8 months out of the year in Chicago, I doubt we’ll see an uptick of more than 5% in national median bike-usage outside of dense locales in moderate climes w/ dedicated bike lanes.
If we want to create the conditions that will promote the density which will support quality and frequent public transportation, we need to move to land value taxation as a replacement for the conventional property tax, and, going beyond that, as a substitute for some of our other perverse taxes.
Doing so will reverse our tendency to sprawl outwards, producing long commutes in cars; create the density that produces the environment in which good public transportation will flourish.
It will have other benefits, too. But its effects on redirecting sprawl back into the central cities, which already have significant infrastructure, are reason enough to pursue this reform
And with housing in a long-term funk and mortgages as hard-to-find as $3/gal gas, many would-be bike converts cant sale their homes and buy closer to work & other services.
As for mass-transit, has any major or mid-size American city implemented a new light rail line in under 10 years from concept to grand opening? Lets revisit this circa 2018, only earlier if people want to include in their analysis why it takes 10 years+ to do light rail. Enuff with the 'fel good' whimsy of pro-bike and pro-transit blogs.
You forgot DC, which (finally) had the brains to put in Metro 30-40 years ago (Lord, can it have been that long?) and now nobody can imagine the city without it. It's fashionable to whine about Metro but imagine if they hadn't built it.
IMO public transit reaches the tipping point of effectiveness when it runs frequently enough that you can be reasonably confident that catching a bus or subway will actually be faster than walking for relatively short trips, and that for longer trips it will get you almost as close to your destination as driving, with almost as good door-to-door time, plus saving you the time and hassle of finding a parking space.
If using public transportation means that you have to go out there and stand at the bus stop for fifteen or twenty minutes staring into space, and that if you miss your intended bus or train the next one doesn't come for half an hour or longer, then nobody who has any choice at all about it is going to do it.
Which, of course, is the actual reality in most of this great nation of ours.
avl is right about biking ... and (I gather he lives in Chicago, so the oversight is understandable) he should add HILLS to his list of disincentives for bike commuting.
Unfortunately, also, arriving at work in a lather of sweat has serious negatives in polite society.
Take a look at cities like Amsterdam, Paris and Copenhagen: bike-friendlier by the minute.
There's a point in this article:
http://news.goldseek.com/bullnotbull/1212503424.php
My husband grew up in England, attended scholl by riding public buses. There are no yellow school buses.
What about having children and their working parents board the same school bus in the morning and ride them together? Then keep the school buses on the road all day to serve their town's/city's transportation needs? One school parking lot is full of parked, idle school buses during weekends. The school buses could be providing transit around town on weekends.
North Carolina has a few school buses that transfer the friction from the brakes to the engine for extra energy.
Ever since we had a "Peace Dividend" I've been sending an illustrated plan for a national mass transportation system to presidential candidates. It would basically follow the Interstate Highway System using the median when possible. It would save energy, prevent deaths, create jobs benefit ecology — no one has ever responded and obviously has done nothing about it. I live in a city of 150,000 where we have practically no public transport except busing kids for "racial balance."
The Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel project was not designed for cars only. It was built for cars only because of massive federal funding deficits.
The multiple transit projects that were part of the overall plan to minimize the environmental impact of the CA/T project failed to materialize because the transit money pledged to the entire project was diverted to cover the hole when the federal government failed to step up with the promised levels of funding.
Republican governors and their appointed lackeys delayed and/or canceled transit projects like the red/blue connector at MGH, the completion of the "silver line," the long planned but largely fantasy north-south rail link, the extension of the green line, and the extension of the blue line.
Now lawsuits and a change of administration are starting to move these projects forward again, but the money problems are still there in spades. We recently had a fare increase of about 50% for all transit.
On the upside, we did successfully reactivate the final old colony line recently, and there's renewed talk about a multi-state pact to build the north south link and extend the commuter system north into new hampshire and further south. Several of the lines have received substantial station rehabs (as part of the accessibility project, which is largely completed but should have been done years ago as well), and the green line was dropped underground near the arena. The new green line extension looks like it will actually happen, and the state is now under court order to complete the red blue connector.
Ideally all of this would have been done by now, or would have been approaching completion. In retrospect, this was in large part due not only to federal failures, but to state politicians and administrations engaging in a complicated shell game to hide expenditures in places they didn't belong in an effort to show a balanced budget.
The question now is how we're going to fund completion of all of this and move forward.
"I've never been able to organize myself around their schedules, at least when it comes to getting to work."
Well, that's the trick, isn't it? Like Big Mama says. In New York and Paris and London and Tokyo -- heck, in Basel, where I am now -- the trains and buses run frequently enough that you don't really have to plan.
It's even true in San Francisco if you're lucky enough to live near the N Judah or the 38 Geary. BART from San Francisco to Berkeley, though, or vice versa, or CalTrain up the Peninsula -- that's a day trip and you can count on a half-hour wait somewhere.
(Or, as a friend of mine who lives in Brooklyn and works in the Flatiron Building put it: New Yorkers don't take the subway because they're Communists, they take it because it's the fastest way for them to get to work.)
How come every time I read something about how we need more mass transit, people lament not using it? Whether you personally use it or not, that's not the point. The point is, every dollar we spend making it more viable for somebody at this point is more intelligent than any dollar we put into highways and automobile transporation systems at this point.
That said, I think US cities have more decent transit than they get credit for (they're still not great, though), but we're missing transit in medium-sized cities, national passenger rail infrastructure, high-speed city-to-city rail, and good land use. We basically need to kill, very soon, euclidean zoning and start making the norm, not the exception, these dubiously-marketed "lifestyle centers" better known as mixed-use developments. (How screwed up is that, by the way, that US automobile subsidies and bad municipal planning took away the city you can walk around in as the cultural center of American life, and now it's being sold back to us at a premium by developers?)
Part of the problem, here in California, is that even the revenues that are supposed to be dedicated to transportation get diverted by our Governor and Legislature by exploiting loopholes in the allocation laws. Sadly, one source of those revenues -- the sales tax collected on gasoline sales -- is virtually the only one allowed to be used for transit operations.
The expansion of a system does not depend solely on funds for construction and rolling stock acquisition. There has to be money available to run the rail lines you build or the buses you add to the street.
Sadly, with fuel prices rising, the amount of that sales tax revenue is too tempting a "takeover target" by the politicians, most of whom neither know nor care that they are limiting the ability of the state's public transit agencies to provide relief to the consumer.
Americans have spent the last 50 years moving to the "burbs" to get their own piece of land and a backyard for their kids.
This sprawling also allowed families to form neighborhoods based on economic status and let families move near school districts that fit there status.
Americans have sprawled as a silent form of economic, religious, racial, and social segregation.
The economic scale is now tipping due to the US recession, the global appetite for all natural resources, the de-valuing of the dollar, the high cost of oil, and the impending drop in US standard of living.
The largest wealth transfer in the history of the world is making the middle eastern countries all world super powers.
Please use public transportation and reduce our country's dependency on oil and help cleanup the world for our children.
Hey Reich,
What about rural America where the infrastructure for mass transit isn't there? What should they do? And what do you make of the pollution the farming industry puts out, which some say is more than CO2 emissions from autos?
Yeah, living in Korea for the last year has definitely opened my eyes to the possibilities of public transportation, though even here the car is a status symbol that most people aspire to. Thus, the traffic is even worse than my hometown Atlanta (Spaghetti Junction, god have mercy on us all) despite an impeccable bus, rail, and subway system with wait times on each of less than 7 minutes a stop.
There is a pretty in-depth discussion about American transportation on deeb.at from a while back.
http://deeb.at/discussion/comments.php?DiscussionID=47
I work in the California Environmental Protection Agency which promotes everything environmental. We have a "bike to work day" promoting bicycling as legitimate transport (not "alternative" but AS transport). The Carbon issue always surfaces. More transit, hydrogen fueled cars etc. This is all well and good but still (A). Consumes fuel which costs $. And (b) contributes to the carbon problem. Even electric vehicles, which just shuffle the carbon from the driver in the vehicle to the driver CHARGING the vehicle as the power plant makes the carbon and load on the power grid. Increasing bicycle infrastructure solves BOTH problems. "Bicycle Freeways" through the right areas, along light rail corridors and such would eliminate carbon excess and fuel consumption. I ride 20 miles to work (one way) along our river parkway. The same point-to-point distance is 9 miles by car. If I had a bicycle freeway that linked the same route, I could be to work in 20 minutes instead of the 45 to 55 minutes along our river parkway. Bicycles were taken seriously in 1898 and they even had a 9-mile bikeway in LA which is now the Pasadena Freeway. bicycles or HPV travel needs to be developed more. Dubai is putting in a 37-mile covered mist-cooled elevated bikeway. Why can't we????
When I met with Gov. Bill Richardson, early in his presidential campaign, he touted the rail link he funded between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and how that's been a key component of his great popularity as governor.
I'd hoped the necessity of massive federal investment in rail would become a key campaign issue.
Well, thanks at least for helping keep the issue alive. It should be in the top ten of everyone's 2008 campaign issues, and inexplicably ignored, even though it would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the short-term, and save millions of barrels of oil in the long-term!
As always, you are right on Mr. Reich. I hope Mr. Obama includes you in his administration next February. Things are looking up.
In Phoenix, Arizona, the kids (most people) are fat. The kids (most people) are fat because for 5 months out of the year there is no realistic way to get exercise outdoors. (There are basketball leagues that meet in parks at 10PM to start.)
Land is cheap and gas was cheap and we have the biggest nuclear power plant in the country (worse safety record too) so A/C was cheap and so we have enormous houses and bad public transportation (bus stops only got covered waiting areas last year).
What else is there for kids to do but hang out at malls?
In the meantime, while I am not fond of nuclear power, I do look forward to Heinleinian slidewalks (just with better safety features than in "The Roads must roll.") These could be powered by nuke, wind, solar, .... or even bicycle.
Public transit is a top priority, and only a nation which had fallen into a philosophy of suicidal selfishness like ours has been led to neglect it. We not only need massive public transit investment, we need to revitalize the concept of the "Public Good."
I'm proving that it's possible to live CarFree in Dallas, TX and I haven't taken a bus yet:
CarFree in Big D
As part of an experiment to determine how far along Dallas downtown revitalization has come with the presumption that a city is fully mature when one has the freedom of mobility aka democratic accessibility to live the way one pleases. I've calculated that I am saving over $6,000 a year.
From a big picture perspective, public transit infrastructure actually generates a return on investment in terms of real estate values, revitalization, and tax base whereas highway infrastructure undermines it.
----
P.S.
Actually, it hasn't always been that public transit was neglected. Our Cities largely boomed in the early 20th century around street car development. In fact, Dallas had the most amount of street car tract by linear distance in the country...and then it was all ripped out. Some of the best neighborhoods around the country, and most insulated from the housing bubble, are these street car inner ring suburbs.
How come every time I read a post or an article about public transit or alternative transit, I see all the excuses why people CAN'T use the bus or bike or walk to work?
You're right Avl and Big Mama--biking is absolutely impossible in all but the flattest, most mild places on earth. That's why I bike in Albq. year round down AND uphill. You don't have to be in a lather of sweat after you bike--just slow down a little. And if you are a little sweaty, bring along a washcloth. Now, indeed, there are some places with terrible weather at some times of the year, but many municipalities are now adding bike racks to the front of their buses. So, too crappy to ride? Put your bike on the bus and go ahead with your bad self. Or you say your commute is too far to do by bike? Could you bike to where a bus could pick you up and let the bus help you out?
Really, people. Instead of coming up with reasons why you CAN'T try alternative transport, how about just trying once to think of how you might be able to do it? I have a mental picture of all these naysayers sitting in their cars on the road, unable to move because they can't afford gas, saying over and over "but I CAN'T take the bus/walk/ride the bike/carpool."
"Dubai is putting in a 37-mile covered mist-cooled elevated bikeway. Why can't we????"
Umm... because Dubai is rolling in dough?
The Bay Area is losing about $250 million of state money that was going to go to public transportation here, under our lovely governor's new plans.
I predict that the public transportation infrastructure in the bay area is going to get dramatically worse over the next four years, as more people use it without us pumping any reasonable amount of new money into it. (In fact, it seems likely that the state is going to use it to 'balance their budget', which means even less money to spend on more people.)
Once Reagan -- er, I mean Ahnold -- is out of office in 2010, we can start thinking about spending money on it again, and another couple of years after that it might start getting better. That is, assuming we don't end up electing someone just as bad for us as our current governor.
-fred
Mr. Reich. Thanks for your blog. Everyone who values public transit in its many forms should look at Oklahoma City as to how not to do it. OKC is undoubtedly the only state in the Union to attempt destroying its natural and long time 11 sets of tracks hub to make room for a new 10-lane, 4 mile re-route of I-40 thru the center of the City's downtown.
Stupid? You bet. It is taking citizen court action in an attempt to stop their effort.
Be sure to tell everyone planning a trip to OKC to be sure and bring their automobile.
Although it certainly seems likelier to me that society will contract back to the cities, I sort of have this hope that at least in the information based economy people can telecommute. My vision is more than just working from home -- rather I'm hoping to see office space on Main St. populated with workers who chose to settle in a town, but who work for widely heterogeneous companies. I foresee a franchise offering office space, mail facilities, and office management services to employees of client companies. Local economies would benefit too, because workers who may have been leaving town all day are now having lunch and running errands during the day.
Wild fantasy, I know.
Although public transport makes sense in highly concentrated areas, it is useless in dispersally populated areas like most cities in Florida. Say I take the bus from a central point A to another central point B. I will still need a car to drop me off at A and somehow pick me up at B to drive me at work, which can still be a few miles away.
If you examine closely the way the Tampa Bay area has been designed and built, you will see that that public transport will get you nowhere.
The problem in America is that we have astro-turf groups funded by auto, oil, and real estate interests that openly subvert any transit projects. The Cato institute, the "public purpose",a nd the "american dream coalition" to name a few. Those who take money from these groups to keep Americans addicted to foreign oil (Randall O'Toole, Wendell Cox, and others) are TRAITORS to the American people.
I live in Tucson, Arizona and bike to work (2 and 1/2 miles each way) about 4 days a week, 12 months a year. Even in June, when the highs can regularly get to 100, it really isn't that bad. About the worst it gets is a 105 degree day when I leave work at 5 or 6, but even then the discomfort is pretty mild and it's over in 15 minutes. You get used to it. I have a good hat and sunglasses. My bike rides are one of my favorite parts of the day. The anonymous poster is right--people always talk about why they can't do it, but if they gave it a try they might actually find that they enjoy their lives more.
Oh please. In JOKELAHOMA?!? We're the ONLY state in the Union destroying their train station for a bigger highway with today's gas prices. Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson called us foolish. Dallas DART leaders warned us as well but we're hell bent on refusing their advice and continuing on pretending we live in the days of Route 66 and cheap gas. No wonder we'll remain on the bottom of every conceivable rating. It's what happens when you let corporations destroy everything to keep themselves in business. You're broke, they're rich.
Why public transit doesn’t work
I live in Kensington, near Berkeley. Twice a week I travel 17 miles to downtown Oakland and back to work out at the YMCA. My car gets roughly 25 miles to the gallon of mid-range gas, which around here now costs $4.60/gallon. Thus, my cost for each round trip is about 0.68 x 4.6 = $3.13, plus $1.00 to park the car in Oakland, for a total of $4.13.
For the same trip, BART costs $1.95 each way, but I still have to drive 1.5 miles each way to the BART station from my home at the top of the Berkeley hills. At today’s gas prices, this adds another $0.55, for a total of $4.45.
Thus, driving cost $0.32 less than using public transportation, not to mention the extra convenience of taking my car. Yes, I know this does not include vehicle maintenance costs and depreciation, but I think these are negligible in this case.
So Mark: You have no car payments, insurance, and pay nothing for registration, maintenance or parking fees?
Thanks for illustrating this. So many people count only the cost of gasoline when comparing costs.
I dumped my pickup 3 years ago and save about $20K since then. This is money now in my savings accounts and NOT in the hands of car dealers and oil companies. At least to mone I spend on transit fares and subsidies goes into something I can complain about at public meetings - and sometimes influence decisions. How much influence do you have over oil companies and car dealers?
" Mark said...
I live in Kensington, near Berkeley. Twice a week I travel 17 miles to downtown Oakland and back to work out at the YMCA. My car gets roughly 25 miles to the gallon of mid-range gas, which around here now costs $4.60/gallon."
We'll know for sure that the oil spot market is being manipulated if the price of gasoline has peaked and falls slightly between now and the November election. If it continues upward past $5, very few Republicans will be re-elected. If it falls, they'll have a chance.
During the late '60s, the peace movement experienced coalition, the joining together of many different groups with one purpose in mind, to end the Vietnam war. It seems that a similar coalition is forming right now. Its evolution reduces the power of K street, corporations and especially the main stream media. It's what the citizens want and it's powerful.
Riding a bike to work is great if you live close enough, and I realize that is a big if. We traded a large house for a small one so we could be close enough to the jobs for walking and biking. I also remember the 70s when everyone had small cars and carpooled or took public transportation because gas was rationed and you had to wait in line to fill up. But, we didn't have hybrids back then so maybe we are making progress slowly.
As a grad student in Transportation Planning, may I recommend that the federal government reduce the appropriated funds to highways and roads and transfer them to transit as well as mandate that states do the same thing. In the state of Missouri, transit receives a net of zero dollars from the state after fuel taxes and unlike other states like North Carolina which contributed 25% of Charlotte's new light rail financing, Missouri has contributed zero dollars to Metrolink in St. Louis. Successful light rail and transit systems like the one in St. Louis seek expansion, but lack the necessary local and state funds to do so without the federa government enacting a nine-to-one funding ratio like the feds did back in 1956 for the national highway act.
Robert... you are a sensible guy. You should contribute to these:
http://frepubtra.blogspot.com
http://www.freepublictransit.org
Good question "Why can't we get it". Here in Wisconsin despite auto use actually declining for the first time in what 3o years and the price of gas now being predicted to soon hit $5 a gallon the Wisconsin DOT intends to spend $1.9 Billion to add a lane to I94 from Milwaukee to the Illinois border. All the while not funding a train line to support that same corridor at a cost of $200.
Seriously why can't we get it?
The logical way to fund public transport improvements is to divert the money we are currently spending on highway expansion to public transit. The problem is that most states (including, I believe, California) have state constitutional amendments mandating that gas taxes and toll revenues must be spent on highways. These amendments were forced on states during the 1920s and 30's by the federal government and due to lobbying from the likes of General motors. As a result, there is a huge pool of revenue for highway building but nothing for transit.
We need to either start a campaign to amend state constitutions to allow state gas tax revenues and tolls to be used "flexibly" on transit or develop other vehicle tax schemes like the recent road pricing proposal in New York City, or the one currently in place in London and other foreign cities.
In Minnesota, the state highway agency pleads poverty to get a gas tax increase to repair the state's bridges ...but, prior to the bridge collapse it was spending over 3 times more money on expansion projects versus maintenance and operations. Even now, they are spending 30% of their revenues, just in the Twin Cities metro area, on highway expansion projects (expanded lane and intersection capacity ...and even some brand new roads). State wide they are probably spending an even higher percentage on new roads versus repairing existing roads and briges. Meanwhile getting funding for commuter rail and a second LRT line has been an epic 7 year battle, and will only happen (if it ultimately does happen) due to a large infusion of federal funds from the SAFETEA-LU new starts program.
So the solution to state transit funding problems lies in changing state constitutions and state laws to allow existing state gas taxes and tolls to be spent flexibly on transit ...as is currently possible with federal funds.
To get people on public transit for good, public transit needs to get a lot more convenient. It needs to run with such frequency that it doesn't completely ruin your day if you miss your bus/trolley/train.
To get people to bike, it needs to be a lot safer and much more pleasant. Bikes shouldn't have to share the road with cars everywhere, and cyclists shouldn't have to stop all the time (it takes a lot of energy to start again). Take a page from the Dutch book - in the '80s they realized that people were moving to cars, and they spent more on bike trails than freeway improvements (more direct routes, bike only, no stopping, traffic light triggers and even bike only traffic light cycles). Whaddaya know, the Dutch got back on their bikes.
I am so glad that I put that "cycling reality check" comment in on June 3rd. Many have responded with sobering insight into what works and what clearly doesn't work despite the 'cheerleading' by well-meaning physically-fit biking enthusiasts in moderate-climed locales.
So here’s an idea to increase the quality & volume of feedback from the over-20 sedentary workforce of voters & taxpayers who remain stuck with homes, stores, schools and jobs in auto-centric locales: Push/Demand that ur locale establish a cycling-only event for half-a-day on a VERY major thoroughfare that bans vehicles and thus allows moms, dads, kids, and seniors to experience bicycling that thoroughfare for miles without fear of vehicles or cycling gear-heads zooming by. Chicago has “Bike-the-Drive” where annually they ban vehicles from 20 miles of Lake Shore Drive to vehicles for half-a-day annually, allowing the south and north sides of the city to reach downtown. Mistakenly, they force you to pay to participate.
A free event of sufficient magnitude will give workers & families in ur locale the hands-on experience they need in tackling how to make cycling work for them and other changes to make it successful for that locale, its topography and climate, and its pattern of land-use. Such local hands-on feedback from local voters & taxpayers will be far more useful than the well-intended cheerleading from gearheads in Albuquerque, Berkeley or Portland. Note: do not let ur Bike-the-Drive turn into an event mainly for gearheads; they wont ‘change the world’. It has to be for regular people who make up the majority of the workforce, schools, and voter & taxpayer rolls.
Just imagine how these voters & taxpayers will then be able to give good feedback to expand cycling as an alternative in hilly, hot, cold, wintry climes that lack mass transit, or have infrequent bus runs that ban bikes as carry-ons, or lack dedicated cycling lanes.
I see some readers still dismiss these reality-checks as whining, but they're shrinking into a blind minority here; many readers have offered ideas on fixes...and its comments like mine and others that stimulate the fixes that are needed.
Dont have money put your mind to work there is possible free energy out there...
Come join the fight.
http://infringer.freeforums.org
With all of this new emphasis on working people using public transportation to get to and from work, everyone always overlooks one thing: if you have kids in school-based day care before and/or after the school day, you need to know that they are maniacal about opening time and closing time, so you can't drop off your kids or pick them up even 5 minutes difference in either the morning or night. If you have public transit (or even car pooling), parents with young kids most likely won't be able to use it because it cannot guarantee that parents can get to the day care on time. (buses are often late, too few on the schedule so it's not possible, even in the best conditions, to get to the day care on time, etc.). If that is the case, there goes the public transit. Parents are forced, absolutely forced, to use their cars if they don't get day care buy in. And schools refuse to extend the hours, and because they usually provide the pre and post day care and there are often no other alternatives available, that is the end of public transportation for working parents.
The comment on child-care is on mark.
What too many biking and public trans advocates don’t "get" is that they possess no feel for family structures that do not resemble their own family, or built environments, with inadequate or non-existent bus lines, that don’t resemble their own city.
The concept of adapting cycling and mass transit to make it work for more people outside of pristine environments (NM, Berkeley, blah blah) is a legitimate one.
However, some of these guys & gals posting here are counter-productive as 'public faces' for the movement...they’re deaf, blind, argumentative, and out-of-touch with people who simply don’t live like them or live with them. Too many posters think spewing resentment at non-cyclers is the answer. Cmon folks.
That's why the movement needs fresh advocates cut from the real world.
Couldn't agree more. On some level gas prices sky rocking is a blessing for this country. Check out my blog, I discuss this subject exactly.
www.dumpitinthepump.com
I agree with the last post that these horrendous gas prices can be a blessing in disguise, if it forces Americans to fundamentally change how we live from a economically based segregation to economically hetergenous neighborhoods. Before the hegemony of the car -- say, prior to WWII -- most neighborhoods consisted of some very old housing, some newer housing, and some luxury housing, with apartments and private homes large and small. You had apartments over stores, you had walk-ups, and elevator buildings; you had multi-generation Americans who raised families there, eccentric intellectuals and artist, new immigrants, single working people, old and young and everything in between (except racially integrated, unfortuately; but that would not happen now as it did then), but to some significant degree, people from different walks of life lived side by side together and were forced to find a way to manage together since they lived side by side -- they could not escape to their cars and drive away. They worked a short bus ride or subway ride from their homes, and shopped in their neighboods, and went about their day to day business in their neighborhoods. You knew the grocer and the grocer knew you. You also knew the troublemakers in your neighborhood, and the troublemakers knew that people knew who they were. If you read the essay, "Here is New York" by E.B. White, this gives you insight into how NY City was (and lots of other cities too, I think), prior to the dominance of the car.
I hope we go close to that way again. Goodbye to the cul de sacs. Goodbye to the soccer Moms. Goodbye to the big box stores and their endless parking lots. If the unaffordable gas prices force us as a society to go back to densely populated living arrangements -- apartments mostly -- in walking distance from workplaces and stores -- where the rich and poor and in-between can build a life together, we will not only a greener society, but a less class-based, less racist, more tolerant and less arrogant one.
Public transportation brings people together; private transporation (cars) separate.
It's good to see people thinking about this stuff. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, anyway, seems that necessity has arrived...
great article. If you look at other major cities other than the north and northeast, there is no form of mass transit at all!! It is a shame the short sightnessed of our leaders.
It's a shame that more thought wasn't put into public transit after the last fuel crisis. I guess we'll all be visiting www.gascashadvance.com pretty soon.
Good Job! :)
I would like to know how high oil is going to get? I've heard speculation of 200 $/bbl, but I can"t (hope) believe it will get there. I mean, how sustainable would 200 $/bbl (1 yr, 5 yrs)? At what price does the gov't step in and finally do something dramatic? At what price do we finally make the 100% committment towards alternative energy? I know these questions have been asked before, but I feel the future isn't going to wait for us to find an answer.
OK OK... The gas is drop down now... You do not have to arguing about high price of gas any more... The question now is: Who have the benefit of this big difference in gas rices??????? On 11 July, 2008 the average price in US was $4.11 p/g now six months later we get the gallon for only $1.43 p/g. Is this a huge promotion or somebody just make couple Bil's? Some of the prognoses says that in 2009 Gas price will hit the bottom of near $1 p/g.
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