Mass Transit or Mass Travesty?

Great Debates
81

**

Which is exactly what I suggested you do, so I’m glad to have made a positive influence on you.

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All of which were shown by myself and others to be erroneous in the context in which you posted them.

**

You did not say “the current mass transit system is a horrible solution.” Do you not even READ your own posts?

You said it should not exist, and when asked several times for viable alternatives, first you claimed that it should not exist and finally you said you don’t have any.

**

The condescend in that statement was in your own ears, pal. I meant exactly what was said. You are entitled to your own opinion AND YOU CAN STATE IT ON THE CAR THEY SENT YOU, which was my full thought.

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It was called sarcasm to make a point. The way you called them “unfortunates” to start things off was an overgeneralization which was inflammatory and I responded in kind. I am not the only person to call you on this, you know.

**

We’ve been through this, Sparky. You don’t provide info and when I respond saying I don’t know the details you respond with, “yes, you don’t” instead of giving more details. This would be a character flaw of yours, not mine.

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And as myself and at least one other Doper pointed out, big fucking whoop. It’s a public board son.

**

Yes, and (s)he did so in a reasonable manner and clearly stated as such. Which is why nobody here jumped on that poster for not being able to communicate what they really wanted.

I think everyone here would say that if you have ideas to improve, or even replace what you have, please share them with the class! (And more importantly, with the folks who run your PT system and make the decisions on it.) But again, and I do so hate to belabor the point here, YOU NEVER SAID THIS WAS YOUR INTENTION IN THE OP!!

**

Yes, I did and I admitted as much. That said, you have yet to answer anything else in my summation there. I wonder why…

**

You also aren’t too keen on knowing how to make the point you want to or admitting you might be a tad wrong on something.

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Right. You mean like, “tear the bus system down!” followed by “I mean reform it” followed by “I have no altertative ideas for the bus system,” right?

**

I do not recall saying anywhere in my posts that you had to operate as NYC does. I do recall using NYC (and Washington DC and Montgomery) as examples to make points, however, none of which is sullied by the fact that NYC is big.

In fact, do please point out as much. I’ll bet you cannot.

You tried to use Minneapolis to make your point. The difference is that someone shot you down.

Well, you can stand by whatever comment you want. However, the evidence as gatehred above says that all of your reasons have been refuted, and you do not have any idea for what to do with the people who rely on PT who would suddenly be found to not have PT because you dismantled it.

Provide some evidence that it is a good idea to dismantle it, and I’ll beata path to your door to agree with you. Come up with an idea as far as what to do with the displaced people by this decision that works and I’ll nod my head like a good puppy dog in aggreement to your wonderful plan.

Thus far, none of this happened, and as such your only argument is, “It should be dismantled because I said it and I stand by it,” which is not very convincing if you want to tell your local government officials your ideas, now is it?

Yer pal,
Satan

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82

Satan said:

…in reference to me! (BTW, ‘he’ is the appropriate pronoun)

All right! Having read and admired MANY of Satan’s posts, I consider this the nicest thing anybody’s said to me so far today. Thanks Satan!

Again, BTW, this is not at all meant to be sarcastic. Pathetic maybe, but not sarcastic! :wink:

grem

83

In re, the following exchange:

You may be leaving yourself open to a valid rebuke from Southern Style, on this one. The way he worded it, it’s reasonably clear that he responded to the transit authority’s survey before he originated this thread. Thus, your positive influence is not demonstrated through the above.

I would like to point out that I posted the Talahassee information as essentially a simulpost with you and Slithy Tove, on the first day of the debate. Not noticing this fact at the time, however, my subsequent views of this thread tended to begin with my contribution, and I didn’t notice until today that Slithy Tove had expressed my economics-oriented arguments about sixty seconds before I did. So it may be understandable that you missed my post. By this late date, of course, bringing up the issue of Southern Style obscuring this particular information that would tend to shed more light on the subject strikes me as wasted energy. There are so many more relevant and valid issues to raise (and you’ve been doing a pretty thorough job of that; it’s just that topping off salient points with tangential ones tends to make one’s overall case look weaker, and actually be more vulnerable to counter-argument).

grem, if I could get some clarification on conditions and policies in Florida, I’d appreciate it. See, here in California, gasoline taxes tend to be levied by the federal and state governments; any municipal taxes on the pump are strictly sales taxes, and arise from the fact that merchandise (in this case, gasoline) is being sold; and thus is not separable from the sales tax that would be paid on the pack of cigarettes that you buy inside the mini-mart while the gas is pumping. To the extent that municipal monies are being used in subsidizing the municipal transit system, therefore, the buyer of a carton of cigarettes is contributing as much as the buyer of a tank of gasoline (roughly; around here, a carton of cigs can go for over $30.00, while only an SUV or a Hummer will spend that much to gas up – at least, so far :wink: ).

Are things different in Florida?

84

Lib, I’ll tackle your question of why there is public transportation for city dwellers but not for those who live out in the great beyond.

First let’s pretend that we live in a society where we have agreed to surrender a portion of our income to an agency responsible for providing transportation for us. Since this agency operates a network of roads for free, it saves money by also subsidizing busses and subways that reduce the traffic (and thus wear and tear) on these roads. Since its income is derived from the incomes of the people for whom it provides these services, it is also to its benefit to subsidize a method for people to earn more money.

Subsidizing a portion of the costs of public transportation in a rural area is far less economically feasible idea. Imagine I have two brothers, one a philatelist and one a numismatist. If I worked in a coin shop with a generous employee discount, would it be a big surprise if I gave more valuable Christmas presents to the numismatist?

All that said, I believe (no surprise) that mass transit should be privately run. However, if the roads remain a government institution, then this is not nearly as feasible an idea to implement.

85

Please forgive my lapse in grammar:

Obviously, the challenge, when working in run-on sentences, is to keep the number consistent.
</self-imposed grammar troll OFF>

86

WaterJ

Let me ask you two questions about your hypothetical: (1) By “we” agreeing to pay taxes for services, did you mean all of us? and (2) Do the rural people pay their taxes?

87

In my hypothetical, each of us has freely consented to the present government, just like the statists tell us we have. In return for a portion of our income (and/or a surcharge on our purchases, and/or a tax on the income of our corporations) we are provided with transportation.

It is prohibitively expensive to subsidize mass transit for people in rural areas. They pay taxes and get transportation in return. Due to economy of scale and other factors, city dwellers get a larger variety of transportation options for a similar per capita cost. I’m not saying it’s right, just that that’s the way it works. Just because it’s provided by the government doesn’t mean that market forces are not applicable.

88

Okaaaaay…

Is that basically “yes” to both questions?

89

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by oldscratch *
**God forbid if SF got rid of public transport. About 700,000 people ride Muni every day. This in a city of 800,000. That doesn’t even include BART. It already takes two hours to get into the city from the suburbs. During the bart strike that time doubled. You can’t find a parking space to save your life. If we got rid of public transport it would be impossible. Studies have shown that MUNI is much less polluting that cars (you don’t want to give cites, I won’t either).
**

Please don’t confuse city population with metro population; metro San Francisco includes a lot more municipalities besides San Francisco proper, and I suspect a large number of transit users are travelling into or out of San Francisco across municipal lines.

90

Kaylasdad,

The taxes levied on gas here are about the same as in CA (i.e they are generally sales taxes), however, how the Legislature handles the money is a little different. In general (and this is, of course, subject to all kinds of exceptions!), the FL Legislature tries to keep the money within category. The amount collected from the sale of gas, automobiles, etc generally determines the starting point for DOT funding.

I guess my point is also that:
I live, work, eat, etc so I buy all the stuff necessary to do these things (as does anyone). Some of those taxes go to fund roads and infrastructure and public transportation.
I own a car, therefore I buy EVEN more stuff which is taxed and those taxes go to <etc., etc.>.
There are also special fees associated with owning an autmobile (the aforementioned license and registration), some of those fees go toward <etc., etc.>.

There’s pretty much no way around the fact that all other things being equal the owner of an automobile “contributes” more in taxes than a non-onwer.

grem

91

I’m not sure I really understand. I wan’t confusing the two or implying that only city people ride Muni. It’s just that when you have a popultaion almost equal to the cities riding the bus everyday, it makes perfect sense to keep it around. Also there is no metro SF. There is only “The City”. Outside of that you have the Bay Area with other cities with their own forms of transport. MUNI doesn’t leave the city, except for a few small exceptions. AC Transit acts as one of the big feeders into the city from the metro bay area, as does BART. The majority of the people that come into the city using those two methods do not also ride MUNI. Oh yeah, there are also the ferries, SamTrans, and Golden Gate Transit for people who come into the city.

92

…has everyone calmed down just an eensy-weensy? Satan? Lib? SouthernStyle? (I almost abbreviated that “SS,” but that wouldn’t have been very helpful…)

Good.

SouthernStyle’s provocative (provoking?) OP does nevertheless hit a really difficult issue: how do we devise tansportation systems in low-density areas, especially so that low-income people can (literally) escape poverty?

This affects so many parts of the country. I was born in Seattle, spent my later teens in the DC 'burbs, attended college in small-town Minnesota, taught English in a small city near Osaka and, for nine years, have lived in New York. Each had its own transportation problems.

Seattle is currently in the most dramatic straits, and AFAIK it’s largely because of a city-wide case of denial. I recall living there in the early 80s, when everyone argued “We must avoid Manhattanization!” In Seattle’s case that meant restricting height and density. They succeeded, and bravo. What Seattle now has instead is Los Angelization, with some of the country’s most horrendous traffic. The buses (could we agree it’s one s, not two? Busses with two s’s are kisses!) have run well, but there’s a limit to what they can handle. Plus, like most cities in the late 1900’s, Seattle didn’t grow in an 1800’s spoke-and-wheel fashion with everyone commuting downtown. People commute from suburb to suburb, and the sheer entropy makes it very difficult to design any effective transit. Rail is absolutely prohibitive, although that won’t prevent local politicians from supporting it. This is also the case with Washington, DC, where the Metrorail was designed for 50’s traffic patterns, built in the 70s and 80s, and now is only marginally useful for people like my dad, who commutes from a distant suburb to a closer-in suburb. I’ll bet that’s also the case with Tallahassee (sp?).

So you put in a few buses and hope. But the trouble is that until a system becomes very expensive, it’s never quick enough, frequent enough or ubiquitous enough to provide a convenience advantage over cars. It takes a San Francisco, Chicago or New York to have that kind of density. Without it, you run a fair number of empty buses hoping people will use them, pissing of taxpayers who feel like they’re paying for their cars and the buses besides – even though it’ll never be practical for them to use them.

When you really come down to it, transportation problems always boil down to housing problems, of which two are important: 1) People in this country are used to living in detached houses with yards, and 2) jobs tend not to be created in economically depressed areas. The former means that it takes a helluva lot of land to house not very many people. Density, again. I grew up immune to this particular ambition (dear old dad saddled me with mandatory yard care and I’ve hated it since), so I now live happily in a 450 s.f. apartment in Chelsea. But I know that in this culture I’m an oddity. In Japan, of course, there really isn’t a choice. 85% of Japan is too mountainous to build on, so most people learn to live in much less space. It’s remarkably doable. But just look at my parents and how they functioned in my apartment. I was out of town when they came so it was just two of them, and although they liked the apartment they couldn’t believe I could live there. They and the vast majority of Americans like them would never give up their yards and privacy without a struggle. And if you want yards, you need space, and roads, and cars.

The second is that jobs aren’t usually created near poor people. This is a really obvious point, worth making only because its power is undeniable. New York City still suffers from a 9% unemployment rate, while in the suburbs jobs go wanting, or McDonalds raises wages to $7.50 an hour. It’s ridiculous, when there are people with kids who’d be happy for the work. But the key is transportation.

A look at New York’s history demonstrates just how critical transportation can be to fighting poverty. The building of the subway in 1900-1920, which connected downtown quickly and cheaply to new, clean, cheap apartments in the suburbs, enabled the wholesale emptying of the Lower East Side. Up to then perhaps a million people were crammed into a couple of square miles of the most hideous slum this country has ever seen, with stench and disease and filth unlike you or I can imagine. But the subway let people leave.

So we could enable people to move nearer the work. But there are a couple of problems. First of all, many suburbs have intentionally zoned less-expensive housing out of existence, through minimum-lot sizes, unbelievably restrictive requirements for multifamily housing, restrictions on trailer parks, and the like. Second, inner-city poor often depend on a web of support, both formal and informal, that disappears once they leave. Can our parent find a doctor in suburbia who will take medicaid? If Auntie still lives in the city, who will look after the kids if both parents shifts are at the same time?

So that means we’re stuck.

I’m not terribly hopeful about a solution, since the solutions all depend on changing people’s aspirations. My fear is that cities are going to become more and more unlivable until people do accept density. And that may not be for several more generations.

93

I think one factors that elicited SouthernStyle’ OP rant stems from the age of the busses used in the system. I went to Durham, NC, a few years back, and the public busses there were exactly just I remebered them 22 years ago! They are pushing easily over 40 then, and were polluting and slow. Southern, do you know of the age of the busses in Tallahassee?

Another factor might be the roads in Tallahassee, that they may not have been adjusted for bus use. A lot of cobblestone roads do not contribute to an efficient bus system. However, if you are driving behind a bus going down a three-lane street, with two of the lanes covered by parked cars, well, you should turn on the next light.

94
      • In the US, mass-transit is only successful in places where “planning” has made it necessary. As such, any claims of success are dubious. - MC
95

This webpage belongs to a friend of mine. I’d not thought about it 'til recently and decided it might be good to inject into the discussion. Enjoy!

Follow this link

96

As I work in downtown Chicago, I wouldn’t even consider commuting by car, although I do have one. Thus, the transit situation is much different here than in Talahasse, FL. Here’s a couple suggestions (short of dismantling) that Southern Style may wish to comment on:

  1. Prohibit parking on major bus routes into downtown, and create another traffic lane.

  2. Have the buses stop every 2 blocks instead of every block. In Chicago, they usually stop every block (i.e., furlong or 1/8 mile).

Either of these could be done off-peak only, and the 2nd could be done outside of the downtown area only.