The Transit Taliban Respond
Published: August, 2002
Dear Editor:
A whacko tax-the-poor-to-feed-the-rich lunatic here.
First of all, there are incentives for people not to drive as much, ever hear of a carpool?
Second, I scream down the bridge toll because it is a (expletive deleted) plan. Even raising the toll to five dollars won’t solve the financial problem the bridge is facing. The people who were on watch, who let this situation develop, are now the ones coming up with lame proposals to "solve" the problem. That is what I take issue with.
Lastly, the bridge is more than just part of the transportation system of the Bay Area. It is an emblem of the State of California, and for the U.S. as a whole for that matter. Do you have something against all tax payers chipping in to keep it standing and healthy? All citizens from the state benefit from it, after all.
One more thing, most of the people commuting into SF from Marin every day can hardly be considered "poor." On the contrary, buddy.
Daniel L. Orseck
Dear Editor:
The very rich, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, are not like you or I. With a conservative administration in Washington, tax cuts for the wealthy have been quick to follow, but while it is easy to criticize it might be finally time to take a hard look at the special burdens the obscenely rich are forced to bear.
For instance, there’s been a lot of squawk and bother lately about homelessness. Welfare reform has put some people to work at minimum wage and others out on the street. Pause for a moment, however, to consider a more complex problem that society has blithely swept underneath the carpet. So obsessed have we become with folks suffering from financial hardship, drug addictions and abusive backgrounds — in short, those that the system was designed to help — that we have somehow ignored an equally deserving group of social misfits.
As we strive towards tolerance and acceptance of all regardless of faith, color, or wallet size, consider for a brief moment this marginalized minority. Pitifully small in numbers, publicly condemned for their greed and selfishness, forced to seek shelter in penthouses and monster houses, unable through lifestyle commitments to access public transit, they truly suffer in ways that the rest of us cannot comprehend.
Extreme wealth is a predicament in every way as tragic as abject poverty, given that its sufferers gain neither the sympathy afforded those with more dramatic and, if the truth be told, more photogenic hardships. While a cauliflower nose can be picked up for the price of a bottle of cheap wine, a chiseled jaw or an aquiline nose can cost a fortune at today’s plastic surgeon prices. As the law of supply and demand proves, while there are more and more people born every day, sheer volume alone makes them cheaper to feed, but at the same time the cost of caviar and truffles continues to rise as supplies dwindle.
Derided — and to a certain extent abandoned — by a system that focuses on the less privileged, the very rich are forced to turn their backs on society and resort to their own kind simply for succor and security. Take the matter of suitable housing. "The law, in its majesty, allows both rich and poor to beg for bread and to sleep under bridges," wrote Anatole France. Yet while indigents are provided with free flophouses, the filthy rich must frequently cheat on their tax declarations just to put a mansion over their heads and silk sheets on their beds.
While the poor whine endlessly about rent gouging and the more ingenious resort to incarceration at taxpayer’s expense, the cost of sophisticated electronic security systems — never cheap, now in great demand — continue to rise. Unless you’ve checked out the price of wrought iron lately, you have no cause to complain about your grotty garden gate. And have you seen the price of purebred wolfhounds lately?
Transit? On a sunny workday, the marinas are jib-to-jib with harried commodores taking to their yachts just to get from country club to tennis match. Pause for a moment, then, the next time you trudge over the bridge to save bus fare and spare a thought for the social misfits beating their lonely way over the waves in their cabin cruisers. Remember, there but for the grace of God go you or I.
Michael McCarthy
Dear Editor:
I’m from Wisconsin and am not deeply concerned with the perfidy of various interest groups out there by the Bay. I am a little concerned with the author’s characterization of privatization. Privatization, wherein transit "would live and die on its own feet," to quote a hearing speaker, is not the answer.
But there are other forms of privatization! There is competitive contracting in which the government decides what service is to be provided and private sector companies bid on part or all of that service. Note that the bids can be minus numbers which correspond to subsidies. Another key point is the subdivision of the service into as small chunks as feasible. This may increase the number of possible bidders considerably and, therefore, the amount of competition.
Other than that, I am just struck by what a mess things can be in large cities where the high density of population and jobs makes for intractable problems and lots of angry groups of people. I fear new-urbanists, when they try to create density, have this point exactly backwards. I understand that eventually there will be some compromise worked out and people will learn to cope.
Jerry Denise
Dear Editor:
Suggestion: Perhaps your editor could give more thought to writing appropriate headlines. "Tracking the Transit Taliban" isn’t "catchy," it trivializes terrorism. It’s like calling someone who overexercises a "workout Nazi") . . . it’s just plain inappropriate.
Liana King
Dear Editor:
Although "Transit Taliban" might be a bit harsh, people using autos to commute might be interested in data from The 2001 Urban Mobility Report by Shrank and Lomax of the Texas Transportation Institute Urban at Texas A&M University, http://mobility.tamu.edu/. This study tabulates various aspects of traffic congestion conditions in many U.S. urban areas, including the San Francisco Bay Area, for the past few years up until 1999. By looking at the change in vehicle miles traveled on freeways and major arterials and the calculated cost of congestion, we can readily calculate the value of removing a vehicle off a mile of road. In 1999, this was on the order of $294 per vehicle-mile traveled for a vehicle removed every day for a year. By making various assumptions, we can then come up to the value for the other drivers remaining in achieving that removal, (presumably to another mode). Paul Kamen, Bryan Duffty and I present such a calculation for a Berkeley-San Francisco ferry in a recent paper "Ferries for the San Francisco Bay Area: New Paradigms From New Technology," given at the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineer’s Innovations in Marine Technology Pacific Symposium this June in Asilomar. The actual numbers vary according to assumptions of average ridership required to remove a vehicle and similar issues, but we calculate a saving to auto drivers worth $21 per ferry passenger per round-trip. Still more guesses about the cost of such a trip suggest the conclusion that auto drivers would be ahead if the ferry ticket were not only subsidized, but free, and in fact, even if riders were given a ten dollar bill to ride. Auto users should realize that there is a substantial structure of visible and invisible subsidies, and non-market pricing, supporting autos as well. For example, if the Golden Gate bridge were privately owned, the owners would raise prices until they achieved the highest profit. The fact that the bridge is now operating below highest capacity due to congestion suggests that the most profitable price would probably be substantially higher than the current toll. (The most profitable price is probably lower than that which produces the highest capacity.) However, the whole issue about appropriate levels of subsidy, and actual cost (including externalities) of transport is a very difficult one. Persons interested in going deeper into the subject are also referred to the Victoria Transport Policy Institute: http://www.vtpi.org/.
Christopher D. Barry, P.E. Baltimore, MD.
