Red, Green and Blue: Public Transportation
Editor's note: In today's Red, Green and Blue, our political commentators Jimmy Hogan and Shirley Siluk Gregory take a look at the costs and benefits of public transportation.
Jimmy: Public transportation is a blessing to metropolitan areas where well designed mass transit systems help reduce traffic congestion and related pollution. It's also nice to sip a hot cup of coffee and read the paper while leaving the business of driving to someone else. Planning and management of these systems is the key though in having successful acceptance by a society of car drivers accustomed to the flexibility of operating on their own schedule.
The point that must be kept in mind is that public transportation is a medicine for a specific ailment and that trying to administer this remedy in areas that are more suburban than urban is often costly and unsuccessful; sometimes doing more harm than good. Policy makers must also distinguish between the goal of alleviating traffic(along with its associated ills) and social welfare in the form of subsidized transportation costs because these can sometimes be at odds.
Shirley: The time is fast coming when America will need to radically rethink its approach to transportation, both short- and long-distance. The forces converging to drive such change include rising fuel prices, the growing need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a federal highway trust fund that's falling short of covering infrastructure construction, maintenance and repair needs, and an aging U.S. population in which a growing number of citizens will be unable or unwilling to continue driving in coming years.
Public transit ridership has been increasing in recent years and polls show many Americans want more public transportation options. That trend is only likely to grow as gas prices keep rising (and they will: analysts are already predicting $4 a gallon pump prices as this summer's travel season gets under way). Many cities today are exploring or implementing new programs such as light-rail systems, while some states struggling to make ends meet are considering privately maintained toll roads. As with efforts to curb global warming, it's clear that the federal government is lagging far behind what its citizens want in terms of transportation alternatives. Public transit won't solve all our transportation problems, but it needs to be offered in far more widespread and creative ways than it is at present.
Tags: government, politics, Public Transportation, public+transportation, Red, Green and Blue, subsidies, Transportation
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April 24th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Was there a disagreement there or are both sides on the same page with public transport?
I would like to point out that public transportation isn’t a policy issue so much as a city planning problem. Because of the suburban sprawl surrounding many major metropolitan areas (which have been designed for the car) a mass public transportation simply isn’t feasible.
In Atlanta for example, the city hired a consultant to determine what the best routes for a public transit system (subway/bus) and he told them (after an extensive study and GIS mapping) that becuase of the way the city was laid out it just wasn’t possible to have a system that would benefit a large portion of the population.
I agree that there should be more public transportation options (in the US and in burgeoning cities around the globe) but haphazard and unplanned development on the peripheries of our cities will make that a problem. City governments must step up and plan/zone expansion accordingly with public transport in mind (as well as the anticipated, practical public use of that system.)
April 24th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
I think that when people are surveyed and asked do you like the idea of public transportation they say “yes” without much thought… I’m not aware if they were asked if they like paying for public transportation that they seldom use or if they like subsidizing the use for others.
I would say a market approach would be best but I’m not aware of any public transportation system that is able to pay for itself with fees, etc. Worse, being a government entity it can’t even approach efficiency. I was watching a Nashville Transit Authority meeting recently where they wanted to cut out a few of the light use route times where only one or two people were riding in a huge bus. Wow… I’ve never seen so many advocates in my life. There were poor advocates; women’s advocates; race advocates; church advocates; Metro employee advocates… it’s like canceling one or two bus routes was the same as cutting the arm off of Underprivileged Nashville. Once you’ve been generous you can never be fair, I guess.
Public transportation makes sense in some cases but to advocate it just for the sake of the ‘public transportation cause’ is ridiculous.
April 24th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
I really think it falls apart for two reasons. First it’s administered by an inefficient, often corrupt and politically motivated bureaucracy (AKA Government) and Two it always devolves away from satisfying public transportation needs into just another social welfare program.
April 24th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Thanks for joining the conversation, Amy.
You are correct this is a smaller piece of urban planning as a whole.
Do you think telecommuting and the internet are changing the whole dynamic as well?
April 24th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
I am reading Bill McKibben’s book Hope Human and Wild to review for a post on Thursday. In it, he talks extensively about the city of Curitiba, Brazil, that has undergone radical changes over the past 30 years, mostly due to sustainable urban planning. Public transportation was a vital key to solving the problems that plague urban areas. In Curitiba, they stuck with an extensive bus system instead of investing in subways or light rail. The bus system was privatized, in that a private company owned and maintained the buses, but the city designed the bus lines and set the fares. It was wildly successful, even in the suburban areas, because they basically made it so easy and affordable for almost all residents that it didn’t make sense NOT to take the bus.
Well worth reading, particularly if you are interested in urban planning in general–check out my review on Thursday.
April 24th, 2007 at 8:42 pm
I’ll check it out, Kelli.
April 24th, 2007 at 10:27 pm
Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins also discuss Curitiba's success in Natural Capitalism… the city definitely provides a model for sustainable urban and suburban planning….
_______________________________________
Jeff McIntire-Strasburg
Senior Editor
Green Options
jeff@greenoptions.com
April 25th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
I agree there are serious problems with many public transportation systems in the U.S. today, but how long can you keep a body on a starvation diet (i.e., insufficient public funding) without it eventually suffering?
The shortcomings of our approach to public transit are as much those of political will as anything, often a question of priorities rather than profitability. Construction and maintenance costs for highways for cars (and related transportation tax breaks), for example, are always viewed as an "investment" rather than a subsidy, as are the massive bailouts and restructuring of the airlines.
As far as privatizing goes, ask travelers in the U.K. how happy they are with Thatcher's privatization of their transportation systems (the answer: not). While other systems in Europe might be run well by private entities (there's an ample mix of both private and public success stories), I'm not about to place the same faith in corporations in the U.S. Amtrak doesn't look like nearly as much a boondoggle when compared to, say, Enron. And, when the U.S. was entering its auto heyday, thanks to then-cheap and easily available oil, the federal government proved how very capable it can be by creating the marvel known as the interstate highway system.
Which leads me to the policy vs. city issue. Yes, local public transportation is a city rather than a policy issue, but that still leaves unresolved the question of intercity and interstate travel. Again, how high do gas prices have to rise before we start seriously thinking about de-emphasizing cross-country car and truck travel over rail? This is a long-term challenge we'd be better off thinking about now rather than leaving until regular unleaded climbs to $8 a gallon, which will definitely hurt many segments of the economy (with its mega-fleet of nation-crossing trucks, just imagine the impact on Walmart's "low prices" alone).
At the local level, transit-oriented development and the new urbanism are taking a much more forward-thinking approach toward short-distance transportation needs, creating spaces specifically designed for walking, biking and buses over cars. Curitiba's a great example, as are some of the new developments I'm seeing in areas near where I live, such as Seaside, Florida (though the housing prices there are so high it's more a rental/resort community than a true residential one). There's also the reverse transportation option, which the Internet has helped drive but which can be employed at a more local level as well: i.e., it takes fewer vehicles to deliver goods to consumers' homes, rather than having all those people drive one by one to big-box stores (saves on fuel consumption and reduces greenhouse gas emissions too).
April 25th, 2007 at 3:35 pm
If public transportation is more efficient then why is it more expensive? If it were truly the value you say wouldn’t it be able to stand on its own without subsidy?
Plug in Electrics will make the metropolitan transit pollution problem moot within the next 10 years. (yes, Coal Power Plants… I know). So we are down to transportation as a congestion issue rather than environmental.
I guess we could stop building / repairing roads and it would shunt people onto public transportation. Evidently though given the current attitudes public transportation is simply less desirable than the alternatives.
The best way I’ve found in building systems is to design them to be easier to do right than to do wrong… that way you are not wasting energy on non-value-added controls. I just don’t see a way to align goals in this situation though. I’ve advocated an oil tax before to properly index oil’s cost to it’s environmental and geopolitical cost but I don’t advocate a tax to force people into a public transportation box that they don’t want.
And what do you think about the whole social-justice angle?
April 25th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
Jimmy, I agree wholeheartedly with the concept of an oil tax that, as you say, would properly match the cost of oil with its environmental and geopolitical costs. (Of course, that's as likely to happen in the current political atmosphere as W is likely to put solar panels back on the White House roof.) If citizens had to pay the true cost of oil, they'd be marching in the streets for transportation alternatives.
Yes, every commercial enterprise in our society should stand on its own merits without subsidies, but government serves a purpose other than making a profit. The whole "let's-privatize-everything-because-business-can-do-it-so-much-better-than-government" movement leads to much greater disparities in social justice: when essential services such as, say, police protection and water utilities are privatized by corporations seeking to make a profit, the risk arises that lower-income people ("citizens," not "consumers") will not be able to afford what those in higher income brackets can.
And, unfortunately, we might actually soon be at the point where the federal government stops constructing/maintaining highways, at least as much as needed. The federal highway trust fund hasn't been adjusted to keep up with actual construction/maintenance needs, which is why so many cities and states are looking at farming out their thoroughfares to for-profit corporations that want to convert them to toll roads. There's already plenty of rumbling in large, low-population states out West from residents who have no alternatives to driving (because their areas are so rural) but are outraged that their highways might soon be turned into someone's profit center.
A case in point from my own neck of the woods is the Garcon Point Bridge, which charges drivers a toll of $3.50 each way for a few miles' drive across a bay. It might be the quickest route for many people (and there's a Walmart at the south end that's probably the closest shopping available for those at the north end of the bridge), but I know plenty of folks who choose not to spend $7 per roundtrip so instead end up driving an additional dozen or more miles each way to go around the bay. That's not efficient, practical, just or environmentally sound.