Opinion-Columns.com

HANGING PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION BY THE NECK UNTIL DEAD

Public transportation (in the true meaning of public, instead of road-worthy) is in its usual stage of self-flagellation and it ain’t a pretty thing to watch. New York City’s no more guilty than most of running like mad after the wrong goal, but it’s recently in the news and makes a convenient target.

(NYTimes, William Neuman) July 22, 2008

So Soon? Fares and Tolls Rise in M.T.A. Plan

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority will propose a substantial increase in transit fares and bridge and tunnel tolls next year to help close a widening budget gap of nearly $900 million, according to an official at the authority.

Though the precise amount of the fare and toll increase has yet to be determined, the authority will seek to increase the revenue it gets from those sources by 8 percent. If approved by the authority’s board, the increase would take effect next July and would follow a toll and fare increase in March of this year.

In the more than 100-year history of the subway, the fare has gone up in consecutive years only once before, in 1980 and 1981.

On Wednesday, the authority will unveil a preliminary budget plan for 2009 that calls for the fare and toll increases and outlines other measures to balance its budget, including more than $300 million in additional financing that the authority hopes to get from the city and state.

Contemplate (if you dare) a city that owns and operates the New York City Subway, Staten Island Railway, Long Island Rail Road, and Metro-North Railroad plus a network of 4,500 busses running across 200 routes. Make your head swim? Is there any reason why instead of looking at this mélange as an alternate to choked traffic, board members ought not just throw up their hands and raise fares?

The answer is a resounding yes!

MTA is the largest (and all-time champion) public transportation provider in the Western Hemisphere. 14.5 million people in the pool of actual and possible riders, already sitting on MTA seats almost 3 billion times a year. If, like me, you blur at the shaking of a billion in your face, that’s three thousand million rides a year.

Where do these 8 million a day go? Why are they on buses, trains and metro in the first place?

For the most part, they go to work (and home), shopping (and home) to school (and home) or out to Aqueduct Race Track to watch the ponies run. So, they actually go and come primarily from businesses. Yet business—in the grand, multi borough, 5,000 square mile circumference-of-commuters sense—pays not a dime to get their cleaning-lady or CEO to work.

Well, actually they may send a limo for the CEO, but you get my drift.

The authority faces steadily rising costs, particularly for fuel, as well as sharply declining tax revenues due to a slowdown in the real estate market. Just six months ago, the authority predicted that its shortfall for 2009 would be slightly more than $200 million, less than a quarter of its latest projection.

The budget plan, which the authority is required to produce in July, puts new focus on a state commission created by Gov. David A. Paterson to recommend long-term solutions for the authority’s chronic financial difficulties. The panel, which is headed by Richard Ravitch, a former authority chairman, is to make a report by November. The authority must pass a new budget for next year in December.

Long-term solutions are not the stuff of boards. Boards are good at meeting four times a year, looking at budget shortfalls, raising ticket-prices and adjourning to lunch at GILT over at The New York Palace Hotel. Having $10 billion income and $11 billion in expenses is a slam-dunk. Raise fares, defer capital expenses, reduce maintenance, cut services—meeting adjourned—what’s for lunch?

That’s no doubt unfair to the MTA board, but I’m willing to be unfair to make a point.

The answer to public transportation is not reduced services and increased fares. Crappy rides at more cost is only OK if you live somewhere other than a strap-hanger world. And, let’s face it, every single board member lives in that other world.

Ponder this; there’s $21 billion in retail clothing sales in NYC, another $29 billion in wholesale. It’s almost impossible to find out what the total business take is in NYC and surroundings, but a 20% tax on just the clothing business would run the whole pub-trans system. So, what would it be as a business tax? One percent? One half of one percent? These people are coming to clean your toilets, run your businesses, buy your products.

Nationwide, there are (and have been) two solutions to deteriorating infrastructure;

• Ignore it and hope it      goes away, until collapse occurs on someone else’s watch
• Privatize, selling it to      the Arabs or Chinese

Bill Clinton isn’t the copyright holder of record when it comes to ‘a third way.’ We have got to find a third way out of infrastructure collapse—particularly public transportation—as oil crisis after oil crisis shuts down our ability to rely on automobiles. Cities that can be delightful places to live and work are becoming uninhabitable due to gridlock, grime, diesel fumes, and parking dilemmas. The way forward is not to take a common solution and put it beyond the reach of all but the affluent.

The affluent are not on the bus, metro or light rail—except in Europe.

“We’re not fans of fare hikes,” said Gene Russianoff, staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy group, “but my view about the hikes will turn largely on how much the city and the state will pony up to pay their fair share.”

City and State? That’s another word for the strap-hangers. What about business? How ‘bout GILT over at The New York Palace Hotel, or Madison Avenue, where world-wide advertising revenues grew by $22 billion last year?

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s chief spokesman, Stu Loeser, said in a statement that while the city recognized the authority’s financial problems, “City taxpayers aren’t in a position to increase our subsidy over the billion-dollars-plus we already provide each year.” He added, “That’s why we are looking forward to hearing the Ravitch commission’s findings about how the M.T.A. can find new revenue sources on both the expense and capital sides.”

Anybody want to jump on the bus and go for groceries . . . ?

. . . and pay $4 for the pleasure?

I thought not. And yet isn’t it strange how when tobacco companies are fined hundreds of billions, they just add that to the price of a pack of cigarettes and go on their merry, profit-producing way—and we can’t find a way to provide decent public transportation by similar methods? Make no mistake, the grocery or ad-agency or private university s going to have to pass on that transport cost to you and me and Aunt Mabel.

But the result will be to move closer and closer to the goal of free (in the sense of no-fare) public conveyance, bicycle friendly city streets, outdoor cafes, cleaner air, way less noise and a sense of empowerment over the forces of crud.

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Media comment;

• Bay City Times-Backers of mass transit working to get streetcars they desire
• Associated Press-Renters go downtown to save on gas, commuting
• Santa Rosa Democrat-Report: More cities riding public transit wave
• CNN-Alternet Systems, Inc. Announces Mass Transit Wireless E-Ticket System
• Politicker.com-Mass disappointment

AN ADVOCACY PROBLEM IN THE "WHAT'S NEEDED" DEPARTMENT

It hardly seems normal (or acceptable) to read in separate articles in my morning's Washington Post, that federal facilities right here in our country are running too short-funded to protect themselves. This, while Boeing and Northrop haggle over who is most deserving of a $40 billion contract for refueling planes. Further along in the tanker piece, one must suspend belief to choke down the admission that an end-contract for these planes may well exceed $100 billion.

$100 billion and yet the Federal Protective Service had its budget slashed by--who else?--Homeland Security. These guys (and women) protect nearly 9,000 Federally owned and leased buildings. The FPS used to be part of the GSA (General Services Administration), but that was in the days before this privatizing-crazed administration outsourced everything from V.A. services employees to armed guards and foreign quasi-military thuggery.

Security Provider Cuts Patrols
Federal Protective Service Faces Financial Problems

By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 18, 2008; B01

The police agency in charge of protecting many federal buildings is so short-staffed that it has cut outdoor patrols aimed at detecting suspicious individuals and car bombs, according to a report to be released today.

Well, what the hell, they're only suspicious individuals and suspected car-bombs, so what is that compared to the actual, known and recognized lobbying activity carried on daily in support of weapons. We gotta have weapons, people. Weapons are the only way through this era of planetary discontent.

Which brings up the question of advocacy in a government that has become so diffused and downright opaque in its character that no one knows who is running the show. Congress writhes in the impotence of no longer even knowing whom to subpoena and is forced instead to bore itself and its constituents in waves of meaningless committee hearings.

When it, tremblingly gets itself together, draws itself to its full height, puffs out its chest and actually serves a summons, it is ignored. Not only ignored, but dismissed without penalty. The list of powerful no-shows is long and infamous, running out the clock in the waning days of a presidency as well as a Congress. In circumstance after circumstance, from terror to torture, from collapsing bridges to a deteriorating National Mall, from contracting theft to congressional enabling, we have allowed our nation and its protections to be quietly slid out from under us.

Alarmingly, distracted as we are by American Idol, there is no advocacy for the deteriorating bureaucracy that runs the nation's business. Bureaucrat has become a dirty word and privatize has taken its place, although it is the hardworking Washington bureaucrat who kept us afloat in the years before Ronald Reagan made of him a laughingstock. Consider what privatization has brought us in the way of

• a military that cannot fight and includes bloated weaponry programs designed for wars that will not be waged
• a badly-named and unfortunately directed department of homeland security (I refuse to dignify it with capitals) that wastes money, squanders resources and loses its talented leaders while constantly bumping into the furniture on issue after issue
• a nation where rhetoric replaces reality, where bridges collapse on the way to fiscal responsibility and schools graduate the illiterate while leaving no child behind
• a business community shackled to the vagaries of investor-return, that ravages corporation after corporation in the name of quarterly profit, where no one is left to answer the phone.
• a service-industry oriented society where the taped message "your call is important to us" has replaced any interest in the customer service for which they are named
• the numbing daily assault on our sense of fairness and justice as one after another after another of our cherished values is crushed beneath a ceaseless lack of advocacy

The Washington Post continues;

. . . The protective service provides security for more than 1 million federal employees at about 9,000 buildings in the D.C. area and across the country. Caught in a cash squeeze in recent years, the agency has reduced its staff by about 20 percent, to 1,100 officers, the study said. They oversee about 15,000 contract security guards at the facilities.

. . . The report traces the protective service's difficulties to its absorption by the Department of Homeland Security in 2003. The service lost a $139 million annual subsidy it had received as part of the General Services Administration and slid into financial turmoil. The protective service responded by reducing officers and focusing them on overseeing the contract guards. The service said it would seek help from local police forces in responding to crime at facilities.

The report criticized that strategy, saying that it "has diminished security at GSA facilities and increased the risk of crime or terrorist attacks" at many buildings.

At many facilities, officers no longer patrol to prevent or detect crime, the report said. As a result, "law enforcement personnel cannot effectively monitor individuals surveilling federal buildings, inspect suspicious vehicles (including vehicles that could potentially bomb federal buildings) and detect and deter criminal activity," the report said.

The service also reduced officers' hours at many locations, the study said. Adding to the difficulties, many of the service's security cameras and X-ray machines have been broken "for months or years," the study said.

The report highlighted problems with contract guards, who generally work at fixed posts and do not have arrest powers. Oversight of the guards is inadequate, with some posts inspected less than once a year, it said.

In one incident, armed security guards stood idly by as a shirtless suspect wearing handcuffs on one wrist dashed through the lobby of a federal building with a Federal Protective Service officer in pursuit. The building was not identified in the report, but officers speaking on the condition of anonymity said it was a court-services facility in the District.

This is what neo-conservatism has wrought. Born of a reactionary response to the '60s counter-culture, conservatism panicked and dropped its pants to the likes of Norman Podhoertz and Irving Kristol, these 'new' conservatives who advocated the ignoring of America in an orgasm of foreign intrigue. Between this disguised liberalization of the old wire-rimmed glasses conservatives and the advent of the Harvard Business School's reverence for quarterly profit, America has steadily tanked.

For my own part, I am no teary-eyed liberal. Participant in all or part of eight decades, I believed then as now in being left the hell alone, doing the nation's economic dishes instead of stacking them in the sink and dusting under the beds of infrastructure. I do not believe in

• selling off the country's Interstate highways,
• allowing the airlines to destroy the safety and efficiency of air travel,
• outsourcing our military to Blackwater and Haliburton,
• bribing our congressional representatives
• or holding harmless the thieves and crooks who have hijacked American business for their own gain.

For over three-quarters of my life I held the belief that conservatism depended upon actually conserving something and I hold that belief today, even after the shame that every Republican president since Richard Nixon has brought to the term. Under their tutelage, we no longer have a currency that means anything, have become the largest debtors in the world, lost our manufacturing base, are well on our way to losing agricultural leadership as well and have steadily degraded our society into an orgy of selling each other whatever cheap crap can be imported from China--all in the name of neo-conservatism.

My old daddy taught me that you pay your bills, work hard, treat people fairly and make your way as well as possible through the life you were given to live. How he hated FDR's New Deal, not because the country was stronger than that but because he felt institutionalized charity denigrated and trivialized the private concern we all felt for one another as citizens.

Now his--and my--conservatism has been twisted and perverted into a state where it is no longer recognizable.  We have become the unwilling and unwitting victims of political hype and demagoguery of the worst kind--chained to our fate by the thievery of language. Mistaking the back-slap brand of  compassionate conservatism for something that actually conserved, we have had our roads, bridges, sewers, currency, rights to privacy, ecology, our world reputation, safety and international regard cashed in and traded for a lifetime of debt.

If you think Barack Obama will be able to pull us out of our fifty year slide into irrelevancy, I wish you well and hope you are right. I will vote for him because he is--above all--an advocate.

Amazingly, in this changed world where up has become down, he sounds very much like my old daddy.
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Media comment;

• GovExec.com-Study documents dangerous security gaps at federal buildings

What Sets Them Apart is What Sets Them Off

One of the great attributes that sets Americans apart from most of their world kin is what sets them off. Kate got pissed on an Austin, Texas runway and in no time had 18,000 signatures on a petition holding Congress’s feet to the fire to pass a bill of rights for passengers. She wants regulation and by god, she wants it now, before another passenger sits another hour (or ten) on some dumb runway without so much as a Perrier or an apology.

Automated Targeting, Cruise-Control for What Hitler Had to Do By Hand

I’m mad as hell. I’ve written in as moderate and civilized a manner as is possible (for me) for seven years now about this evil band of co-conspirators we call an administration. No matter, the gloves are off. I am like Howard Beale, the newscaster in the 1976 film Network. Grab some dialogue;

Losing Our Edge on Our Own Home Turf

John McQuaid makes the case in an editorial, The Can’t-Do Nation, that America is losing its knack for getting big things done. It’s an interesting premise.

Getting in the Game, When Representative Government No Longer Works

Every special interest is in the game. Boeing and Microsoft, Wall Street and the pharmaceutical industry, everything from agriculture to zen has its lobby in the halls of the Congress of the United States. On a moment’s notice, the gun lobby or casino of your choice can marshal a quorum of lawmakers to get stuff done.

The Airline Industry, Following Detroit Down the Tube

It’s 200 miles from Washington to New York. A high-speed, Bullet-train, at 200mph, would make the trip, city-center to city-center in something approaching an hour and twenty minutes (figuring the get-up-to-speed and the slow-down times).

Conserving Scenery, Natural Historic Objects and the Wildlife Therein

Woodrow Wilson’s instructions are pretty succinct;

“to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

Carry-On Luggage? Who Needs It?

Come to think of it, flying without any kind of hand baggage might just be a pleasure.