The MT Position

Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit

Is our nation anti-transit? I know that’s a hard sentence to swallow, and for those of you reading this in transit-rich communities, it’s hard to conceive, but think about it for a minute. How many times have you heard of the American “car culture.” And how often has that been held up as a reason people just won’t try transit. Is it that they won’t try, or is it that they don’t have the option?

Are we as a nation anti-transit? No, no we’re not. But we’ve been ingrained since birth to treasure our material possessions like automobiles as if they were members of the family. So now asking someone to step onto transit is akin to asking them to give up their cars. And that feeling has infested our government from the top level on down, breeding a shortsightedness that is just staggering.

The current administration wants to cut the Amtrak budget by $100 million for FY 2008, not to mention the $300 million the transit funding is falling short. In comparison, it intends to increase highway funding by $500 million.

And yet, the president calls for us to end our addiction to foreign oil. By giving us more roads to drive on?! It is this amazing short-sightedness that struck me as I read an article about the Amtrak shortage this week and how it mirrored activity in my home state of Wisconsin.

The Milwaukee area is looking at revitalizing/expanding its transit system, but somehow no one can decide what the best way to do this is. The short-sightedness comes in when you realize that the city of Milwaukee has $91.5 million dollars to spend…and has had it for 16 years now!

I understand the value of patience, but 16 years?! You would think someone would have been able to come up with a plan by now. Take a look at your transit system and where they were 16 years ago. Sound Transit in Washington, our February/March cover story, didn’t even exist 16 years ago! And the amazing thing is they are still fighting over it.

The current mayor is looking at a plan that includes a downtown tram system, a commuter rail service serving a highly populated corridor, two BRT lines and upgrades and expansions to the current fixed-route service.

Sounds like a pretty good plan? I thought so, but evidently not good enough as the feuding continues with little to nothing being done at all. And herein lies the heart of the problem. It’s not about whether or not the plan is any good. It’s that the mayor stepped up and gave a plan. He suggested doing something, anything with the money the government gave the city for its transit system more than a decade ago.

And so the bickering begins again. And all the while these elected officials are fiddling, Rome is burning. Transit isn’t cheap, we all know that. But it sure isn’t going to have a sudden drop in price in the next year or so.

Actually, I bet the costs from 16 years ago look pretty good right about now.

Thanks for reading the MT Position, updated every Thursday.

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com

Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit

I don’t know about you, but for me news tends to be cyclical. It’s probably the nature of media with someone breaking a story and everyone else running to find a similar story in their neck of the woods. That being the case, you tend to see a bunch of similar stories float to the surface (It’s an epidemic!) and then suddenly fade away as something else catches the public’s eye.

Last year seemed to be the year of the strike. Granted, when the transit system in NYC goes on strike, everyone pays attention — and for good reason. But all of the sudden it seemed as if everyone was going on strike. New York and Denver led the way, but every strike seemed to get national coverage.

This year the big story looks to be funding issues. Sure, funding issues are an omnipresent issue for public transit agencies, but so far this year we’ve heard of severe budget deficits looming for agencies in Newark, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and Chicago among other places.

What has happened to our transit funding? We all know that the government works slowly, it’s the nature of the beast. Even though SAFETEA-LU was passed, the money authorized it still had to filter down through several layers of bureaucracy before it would be seen by local agencies. But now it seems that agencies all over the country are checking out their bank accounts and finding out they’re about to bounce a few checks.

Service cuts and fare increases are being considered by all of these agencies as last ditch efforts to prevent them from shutting down. Are we at a crossroads as an industry where we need to reduce service? Has the general populace turned against public transit? Is the sky falling?

Well, the answer to most of these questions is no. (Still not sure about that last one…) The industry isn’t collapsing in upon itself. APTA ridership numbers show that public transit is up more in recent years. And with gas prices on the rise again, the desire for more transit will increase as well. So is this all the media then? No. The stories are out there, even if they are getting more coverage than they may normally get.

What it is time for is the industry to start looking for new revenue streams. Sure, sales taxes have been and are being used, but maybe more agencies need to look into them and other taxes. How about public/private partnerships? I hear the oil companies are doing real well these days, it may seem against their nature to fund public transit, but who knows.

What I do know is that while it may seem bleak at times with stories of fund shortages and pending service cuts dominating the airwaves, the industry is still strong. It will survive and it will get bigger and better — it has too.

Thanks for reading the MT Position, our weekly blog updated every Thursday!

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com

Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit

It’s been cold here in Wisconsin — real cold. When I woke up Monday morning it was 17° degrees below zero (Fahrenheit). All of the schools were closed and I went out to start up the family vehicles, mainly to make sure they would start. My wife’s car didn’t. I was to be on a plane for a trip for Mass Transit in a few hours, so this became a real issue. Thankfully with the help of a neighbor and his battery charger, we were able to get it running.

This little emergency got me to thinking — actually, it got me to wish for some public transit in my small Midwestern town, but that’s for another day — we look at agencies when they survive catastrophes, but hardly notice those everyday emergencies.

Denver’s RTD suffered one of these last Thursday when an insulator failed on the Southeast Corridor of its light rail line. The failure caused the wire powering the rail line to sag, affecting other insulators (about a half dozen total) and tripping a substation. Suddenly the system was without power in the morning on one of its busier lines.

Luckily, the location without power was near a major bus station and the agency was able to ferry people to other operating stations using platoons of buses until the line could be brought back into operation before the afternoon rush.

This is one of many examples of everyday emergencies agencies face and overcome with little fanfare from us or other media outlets. This is just them going about their day, doing business like clockwork.

Public transit agencies do their jobs so well on a daily basis that we not only don’t pay attention when they overcome outages and delays, we expect it of them. As long as the trains run on time is an old adage, but it’s true. People are only upset when their train or bus is late (or worse yet, early).

It’s time for us to start giving agencies credit for overcoming these everyday emergencies and not just expecting it as part of them “doing their jobs.” As a group, we laud people for going above and beyond the call of duty to help out others, but let’s not let that mean something other than preventing and solving emergencies daily while transporting millions of people a year without fail in this case.

Thanks for reading the MT Position!

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com