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Bus Cuts Drive Americans Back to Cars
The BP oil spill may make people reconsider their dependency on cars – but budget cuts are limiting public transport options
In most countries, one might expect fiscal collapse to lead to more people taking public transport. After all, while buses, trams, light rail, and underground systems are less convenient than private vehicle usage, and while using such systems oftentimes involves sharing one's environs with too many people and too many competing body odours, at least it's cheaper than filling up one's car with gas and driving miles each day. Utilising public transport is a sensible, relatively painless way to penny pinch.
But, in America, at least in part because public transport has not, in recent years, won the hearts and minds of the politically influential classes in many regions of the country, these systems are peculiarly vulnerable to cuts during the down-times. In fact, a poll released in early April by the Economist indicated that, faced with declining government revenues, more than twice as many Americans would want federal public transit subsidies cut versus reductions to highways expenditures. At a local level, too, many Americans' relationship to public transit systems is tendentious at best. And hence the tragic irony: as local governments continue to haemorrhage revenues, and thus have to look for evermore ways to tighten their belts, so public transit systems suffer.
Take Sacramento, California's capital city, for example. For three years now, aid to public transit systems across the state has been slashed by legislators. Now the dollar reductions are hitting home in a big way. In Sacramento, huge service cuts, designed to save the local transit system $12m, are now in effect. Twenty-six weekday bus routes have been entirely eliminated, along with many weekend routes. Late night light rail service has been ended, and earlier evening services slashed. From the peak of the boom times to now, Sacramento's public transit system has shrunk by about a third. The result? A major metropolitan area with no functional public transportation system for workers needing to get to and from jobs late at night or in the dawn hours of the morning.
On the other side of the country, New Jersey recently cut more than 30 trains for commuters. Cleveland cuts services by 12%. And the list goes on.
In the Denver region, where a succession of mayors have been promoting sustainable growth models in recent years that rely heavily on an expanded public transit system being able to bring commuters in from the suburbs, cutbacks are putting the new model at risk. Free shuttle busses are becoming a thing of the past in some 'burbs. Elsewhere, routes are being reduced.
Even cities such as New York, Chicago, DC and Boston – all places where the middle classes use public transportation systems almost as regularly as do their less affluent neighbours, and where mass transit ridership has soared in recent years – are seeing vast cuts to services. Free rides for students were cut last December in New York, where the Metropolitan Transit Authority is facing a stunning $800m shortfall, and the system is laying off large numbers of employees.
Getting serious about America's energy crunch means finding ways to keep public transport systems attractive to users even during the harsh economic years we are currently living through. Bad systems that cover cities inadequately during the daytime and not at all at night simply scare riders back into their cars. And once that relationship of consumers to public transit systems is broken it may well prove impossible to rebuild – even when the economy rebounds.
14 Comments so far
Show AllNot to worry, the "Free Market" and the bailed out Financial system will save everyone.
Yes, the market knows exactly where to invest money...speculating on commodities like food and oil, thereby increasing fuel and fuel costs 30-50% above where supply and demand forces would push them.
We are facing huge cuts to Pittsburgh's once reasonably good and cheap public transportaiton syatem. It is "socialist" you see. Only "losers" ride the bus (or apparently, from the treatment I get, ride scooters too).
Sales of large SUV's and luxuy cars are making a resurbence.
It appeaers to me that there is a huge media-orchetrated public reaction aganist any meaures to address AGW or any other environmental degradation. It is as if the whole of USAn society is a junkie getting their last big fix.
These service cuts could all end tomorrow, and replaced with big service improvements if the states would just start taxing the fucking rich, with the federal govt. following suit, while it dismantled the war industry. We desperatedly need a return to the 70% to 91% top marginal tax rate that prevailed through the 1950's until 1982.
TAX THE FUCKING RICH!!!
Tax?!?!?!?!
Nahhh.... EAT THE RICH!
I hear they go real good with a little Grey Poupon mustard.
I wonder if in the not too distant future, a car pulls up next to one of these "titan's" limos, windows roll down, and the last words the limos occupants ever hear are: "Pardon me would you have any Grey Poupon?"
I'm not promoting violence here just fantasizing bit...
If you think Blackwater and its ilk just work for the US Gov., guess again.
The rich hire Blackwater and other security outfits to protect them and do their dirty work just like the Feds do.
THANK YOU SASHA ! For once, somebody on our side is admitting that busing is broke all the way. I would take a bus instead of having to travel on I-66 or US-50 but busing is a shithole in NoVA. The same is true of the metro trains.
Hats off to Visiting Professor for being sympathetic to those of us who can't get a good transit system. God bless you professor !
Portland Oregon, a city that has earned an international reputation for being in the vanguard of national public transit, has been cutting back some of its vital routes dramatically.
Horizon Airlines, the only provider of commercial flights north to Portland and Seattle for Humboldt County in Northern California (where Greyhound pulled out in the early years of the decade) is leaving all those who would fly northward no other choice than to fly first to San Francisco--a city almost as far to the south from Humboldt's Eureka/Arcata airport as Portland is to the north.
At a time when it is crucial that we conserve fuel and increase public transit options, the lemming mentality seems to have seized us entirely. The modern Diogenes would search for a rational American in vain , it would seem.
Even as Europe faces economic woes, public transportation there is hard to beat. In sharp contrast, in the US public transportation even in the best of times never gets a hearing let alone proper funding. The reason for this is the US believes in too much individualism and little on collective thinking. This opens the doors to favoring autos over public busing and trains. The St Louis area has been undergoing major cuts in funding and service on metro resulting in increased fares for busing and rail. Other cities are probably undergoing a similar crisis despite the public transportation infrastructure all over the country as if languishing for decades wasn't bad enough. Of course, even if the trains are bumpy and sometimes late, when I used to live near a metro station, I would use that over driving. Sadly, the Limbaugh dittoheads attack public transportation as "communism" and even some of the others who aren't like them (be they moderate, liberal, progressive, or whatever) make lame excuses such as "driving is practical whereas taking a bus or train isn't". It is no wonder that other nations who have excellent public transportation are LAUGHING at the US.
"Americans will always do the right thing, but only after exhausting all other options."
- Winston Churchill (rough quotation)
Part of the anti-public transport mentality among many Americans is that the proximity of a metro station to one's home supposedly depresses property values. But in cities overseas, the availability of good public transit nearby is seen as a boost to property values.