One of the best op-eds I've seen in a while that really attacks much of the so-called "conventional wisdom" about rail & transit.  The author is the President of the Midwest High Speed Rail Association.

 

Make no mistake... this has meaning for Ohio too.

 

 

 

chicagotribune.com

The realities of transit

By Richard F. Harnish

 

 

October 7, 2007

 

Why have Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the Illinois General Assembly had such a difficult time agreeing on a transit budget?

 

When a dispute turns deep, bitter, personal and prolonged, something more than just disagreement over ways and means and outcomes is going on. Mere negotiation—"You give me a little more of this and I'll demand less of that"—doesn't work anymore. The parties are out of touch with reality—probably because it changed while they weren't looking. To help get our leaders back in touch, here's the transit reality check they've been missing.

 

New Reality No. 1: Transit is not a business but a public service.

 

The only time transit made money as a private business was in its earliest days, when it enjoyed a monopoly and had no competition from automobiles or publicly subsidized highways. That brief 19th Century anomaly is long gone. Transit is a public service, like highways, airports, schools, streetlights, garbage collection, sewage treatment and other collective benefits that cannot be sold at a profit. The sooner our elected officials shed their nostalgia for transit as a business and own it as a public service, the sooner they will face their public duty and fund it properly.

 

More at:

www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-071007transit-oped-story,0,1268544.story

OUTSTANDING. Harnish hits one out of the park! Too bad he wasn't batting for the Indians tonight...

Good article.

It's the Friday before Memorial day and I haven't really been feeling motivated today so I've been playing on the internet a bit. On another site I ran into someone with some really ignorant views of public transit and since I wasn't really working hard anyway I decided to go off on a rant at him. This seems like the most appropriate thread to share it in.

 

I am a regular user of public transit. I take the bus daily from a block north of my house to downtown Cleveland (15 miles away) where I work. I also take the bus every week from my home to the college (4 miles away) where I’m working on my degree.

 

In what many people would consider a rip-off, you as a taxpayer, pay part of my cost. According to records from the agency running the bus service in the county I live in, my bus ride costs about $2 more than I pay each time I ride. That means that taxpayers are paying $2 toward giving me a ride each time I step on the bus.

 

Where does that $2 come from? By my calculations based upon the latest available data (from 2007), about $.31 came from the federal government, about $.04 came from the state of Ohio, and $1.27 came from local sales tax. (A remaining few cents came from things like advertising on the sides of busses and other miscellaneous sources) So that’s $2 that you as taxpayers pay, every single time I get a ride to work.

 

Is it fair that you should have to pay to give me a ride to work? Shouldn’t I pay my own way? Lots of people like to ask these questions, in fact virtually every time that there’s a serious discussion of increasing funding for public transit in Ohio, the question is asked “Why should I have to pay for your ride?”

 

I agree that these are fair questions. In fact I wouldn’t mind paying my fair share each way. It’s the responsible thing to ask of me.

 

But here’s where I get to make my point. If you ask me to stop accepting your help paying for my ride to work, I have the right to ask the same of you.

 

What’s that you say? You don’t think I pay for your ride to work? Let’s do a little fact checking here and see if that’s true.

 

Roads

 

You do own a car right? True, no one helped you pay for that (though if you buy one this year, Uncle Sam will let you right off the cost on your taxes next spring), but last time I checked most people that own cars like to drive them on roads, and who do you think pays for the roads? That’s right, taxes pay for roads, both my taxes and your taxes, even though I share my use of the road with my fellow transit riders. Why don’t I get a discount?

 

What’s that you say? You pay gasoline taxes and that’s what pays for your roads. Ha ha ha. Apparently you haven’t paid attention to the federal budget lately. In FY 2009 the Federal Government will pay $40.7 Billion to fund Federal Highways, but only $5 Billion of that will come from gasoline taxes. Where did the rest come from? You guessed it, federal income taxes, which I pay just like you.

 

Oh, and who built most of our roads to begin with? Not just pouring the cement, but buying the land that the road sits on. The vast majority of the time, we did. Or more accurately, our elected officials used our tax dollars for this. I’d call that freeway I see out my office window that you’ll take home from work a form of transportation that I’m paying for on your behalf.

 

Parking

 

Then what do you do with your car when you get to work, or to a store to do some shopping? Do you fold it up, ala George Jetson, and take it with you? I’d guess probably not. Most people leave their car outside in a parking lot. And in most cases, unless you work in a downtown area like me, you don’t pay for parking. So who pays for that parking space? After all it needs to be paved, painted, and snowplowed in the winter. Guess who, the consumer pays for it with higher prices. Shouldn’t I get a discount if I got to the store and don’t require a parking space? If I could get a quarter back for every time I’ve gone to Wal-Mart, and didn’t use their parking lot, I wouldn’t need to shop at Wal-Mart.

 

Congestion

 

The last time I traveled East on Interstate 90 out of Cleveland, I got stuck in a traffic jam. While this is an isolated incident, it’s endemic of a larger issue. Namely, that your driving causes traffic jams, that I end up paying for.

 

What’s that you say? Traffic jams only affect drivers and don’t cost me anything. I beg to differ. I said I was traveling on I-90, I didn’t say I was driving. In fact I was sitting in the middle of a bus along with 43 other people (yes I was so bored that I counted) that weren’t contributing to the traffic jam on this 8 lane freeway, but were still stuck in it because so many of my fellow Northeast Ohioans were driving. So right off the bat, you’ve inconvenienced me. On top of that, if it weren’t for that traffic jam, I could’ve stayed an extra half hour at work, gotten overtime pay for it, and still gotten home at the same time. So now your driving is costing me a half hour of pay at time and a half each time I get stuck in traffic.

 

Highway Patrol

 

Have you ever noticed that there are people in uniforms sitting on the side of a lot of highways waiting to catch you doing something stupid while driving? Whether they’re from the local police department, the county sheriff’s department, the state highway patrol, or some other department or agency, they are there to keep us safe and make sure that you’re driving safely. The thing about them I’m concerned with though is, who pays for them? Some of their funding comes from the tickets that they write, and some comes from fees when you register your car, or get a new license, but a good portion also comes from state and local taxes. Now, please don’t misunderstand, I am not complaining in the least about paying my portion of the police budget that goes toward preventing and reacting to non-vehicular crime in my community. I’m complaining that a good portion of the time of my local police department is dedicated to making sure you drive safely. Why should I have to pay for someone to keep your driving under control? In 2008, the state of Ohio paid about $20 million to the Ohio Highway Patrol out of its general funds, that’s taxpayer dollars coming from people like me.

 

Safer

 

So I’m going to assume you’ve been driving for a while. That means you’ve probably seen an accident or two on the side of the road. Haven’t we all? Did you happen to notice some vehicles showed up at the accident that didn’t happen to be police? Most likely they were EMS or Firefighters right? Again, I’m not going to complain about paying taxes to provide for the budget of EMS or Firefighters, they provide a necessary service that I’d hate to live without. With that being said, I do want to point something out to you though. Studies have shown repeatedly that per passenger per mile, you are 10 times more likely to be killed on a highway in a car than while riding on public transit. When you include injuries in the mix, you’re even more likely to need someone with flashing lights on the roof than I am, so why should I be expected to pay for an ambulance to come scrape you off the pavement when I was responsible enough to ride in a vehicle large enough to survive a fender bender?

 

Greener

 

In case you haven’t checked your car is burning gasoline. Now, I don’t know if you happen to be driving a Hummer that gets 15mpg or a Prius that gets 50mpg, but either way, you’re burning gasoline. Now, before you point it out, the bus I took to work this morning only got 4mpg, which of course is worse than whatever you took to work. But consider this, I shared that bus with 50 other people. If you consider the passengers driven per mile per gallon, my bus got about 200 pmpg, while your vehicle whatever it happened to be, probably got far worse. To get that in a Prius you’d have to jam 4 people inside and duct tape some whomever happens to be the worst at rock paper scissors to the roof. Now while this doesn’t directly cost me anything, it means that you’re needlessly polluting the world I and my children live in. Besides that, your wasting of gasoline is causing the price per gallon to increase worldwide, which causes my ride to be more expensive. It also leads me to my final point.

 

Our defense of Oil Rich Nations

 

I’m very hesitant to even bring this up, but I don’t think it can be completely ignored. There’s another cost to your driving that is costing our government, which is quite simply, the Middle East. Many people have and will argue about the motivation of the war in Iraq, and the Gulf War before it. I don’t really want to get into that other than to say this. With the exception of Israel, if the countries of the Middle East didn’t have oil in them, we wouldn’t be allies with any of them. We probably would ignore them the way we do with most of the countries of the world. If we were ignoring them completely over the decades and didn’t have close ties to any of their governments, we wouldn’t have felt the need to get involved in the first gulf war. If we hadn’t been involved in that, there’s a good chance that we’d have never fought the current war in Iraq.

 

Sure this is all hypothetical speculation, but there’s a very real argument that your daily commute is part of the reason that I spent 2005 living in Baghdad, and our government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars fighting two wars, defending ships in the Persian Gulf, providing weapons to countries that have oil to keep the peace there…

 

Conclusion

 

In conclusion, it certainly looks like I’m supporting your ride to work about as much as you’re supporting mine. So the next time I, my transit agency, or my state representative asks for more money for public transit, please give me a more logical response than “Why should I pay for your ride?” since I’m paying for your ride too.

I think I enjoyed that more than the article!

Just as CTA and Metra are experiencing increased travel for shopping and recreation, South Shore does a land-office business on weekends; service is frequent and many trains are nearly full, with many riders on board for the entire distance between South Bend and downtown Chicago.

 

Rush-hour weekday trains are full with standees between Hammond or Hegewisch and the loop, and South Shore has been able to make a good enough case for high demand that they've been funded for 14 new bi-level gallery cars. I haven't seen them yet, but I hope to get a chance soon.

 

 

I wonder why Metra and the South Short haven't gone for the true bi-level (or tri-level, more accurately) cars used by NJ Transit, MARC, and others? It seems like those cars offer significantly greater capacity than the old-style bilevels being used by Metra.

I wonder why Metra and the South Short haven't gone for the true bi-level (or tri-level, more accurately) cars used by NJ Transit, MARC, and others? It seems like those cars offer significantly greater capacity than the old-style bilevels being used by Metra.

 

I'm not familiar with those cars (Although MARC bought some used Metra gallery cars to help accomodate heavy loads on some of their trains). There could be various factors in the decision; are the cars you describe built as MU electrics with control cabs so they can be operated as married pairs or combined in longer trains, or are they all locomotive-hauled?

 

There may be clearance issues overhead or on curves, especially in the underground facilities at Randolph Street/Millennium Park. I'm confident that there are sound economic and operational reasons for the choices Metra and South Shore have made, and South Shore did save some money by piggy-backing on the already-proven Metra design, with a few modifications to suit their operation; they have restrooms, and in addition to the high-level center doors they have end doors for use at low-level platforms at some of the smaller outlying stations.

 

The tri-level cars can either be EMU or push-pulled by locomotives. The NJ Transit tri-levels are actually shorter than the Metra gallery cars, since they need to be able to fit into NYC's Penn Station.

Highway Patrol

 

Have you ever noticed that there are people in uniforms sitting on the side of a lot of highways waiting to catch you doing something stupid while driving? Whether theyre from the local police department, the county sheriffs department, the state highway patrol, or some other department or agency, they are there to keep us safe and make sure that youre driving safely. The thing about them Im concerned with though is, who pays for them? Some of their funding comes from the tickets that they write, and some comes from fees when you register your car, or get a new license, but a good portion also comes from state and local taxes. Now, please dont misunderstand, I am not complaining in the least about paying my portion of the police budget that goes toward preventing and reacting to non-vehicular crime in my community. Im complaining that a good portion of the time of my local police department is dedicated to making sure you drive safely. Why should I have to pay for someone to keep your driving under control? In 2008, the state of Ohio paid about $20 million to the Ohio Highway Patrol out of its general funds, thats taxpayer dollars coming from people like me.

 

The highway patrol was paid for by gas taxes until just a few years ago. But the highway lobby wanted more money for highway construction, so it lobbied not only for increase of six cents per gallon in gas tax, but also for the highway patrol to be taken off the gas tax and instead onto the general fund.

 

So not only has the state's addiction to more pavement put the safety enforcement of the roadway system at whim of the legislative/budgetary process, but it increased that cost to the general taxpayer, as you noted. Moreso, the need for highway contractors to continually expand the highway system in order to enrich itself has been dependent on the expectation that people will continually drive more, consume more gasoline and therefore pay more gas taxes to keep that feedback loop in circulation. But that expectation has been on a collision course with reality for a long time. It cannot be expected to last forever.

 

Last year came the collision.

 

In Ohio and nationwide, the plateauing demand for driving and increased fuel efficiency of cars has caused revenues from the gas tax to flatten. They could no longer meet the rising costs of an aging, bloated highway system. In Ohio, gas tax revenues are falling short of highway obligations at a cumulative rate. ODOT would have to increase the gas tax by seven cents per gallon every year just to keep with this shortfall and we're already seven cents in the hole as of 2008. By 2015, ODOT's funding deficit will be $3.5 billion.

 

Yet we continue to increase the amount of pavement that has to be owned and maintained by government, rather than increase the amount of railroad infrastructure which is owned and maintained by private industry. I love our so-called "free market."