It's a funny thing about Atlanta and the city limit. There are few cities in the world with so much urban sprawl, and no city I've ever lived in has such a vague distinction between inside and outside the city limits. It's all highways and strip malls outside of the immediate downtown area, and for most people, cars are as indispensable inside the city as they are out in the suburbs. And yet, I've never lived in a city where people were so afraid to cross the city limit as they are here.
I admit, I've felt it myself. Somewhere out "OTP"--outside the perimeter--is a world I can scarcely venture into. It can't be a fear of Walmarts or highways or billboards, because we have all those things here in the city too. It's something I can't explain. But the reality is that I hardly ever go outside the city limits.
And people who live in the suburbs are even worse. They think of "ITP"--inside the perimeter--as a haven of traffic, strangers, and crime. Especially crime. The fear is so ingrained that they'll do everything possible to make it hard for people to get from inside the city out to the suburbs, even if it means disadvantages for themselves. Several suburbs (Marietta and Gwinnett, for starters) have voted more than once to refuse MARTA the right to extend rail lines out to them, even though it would make their commutes to the city much easier.
But I'll pass by for a minute the issue of people's fears of others who are different from them, or who live in a different kind of place than they do. It's MARTA I want to talk about. After years of not being allowed to expand service, now MARTA might be forced to decrease service. This week the Georgia Legislature refused to pass a bill that would have allowed MARTA access to its capital reserves in order to tide over its current budget shortfall. Without that money, MARTA will have to make cutbacks, possibly decreasing service to six instead of seven days a week.
On the surface, it seems like an obvious issue: MARTA has money that will enable it to maintain its services, so shouldn't it be allowed to use the money for that? But as the law currently stands, MARTA has to use some of its tax revenues for capital expenses, not operating expenses. And truthfully, that's a good business model: they aren't allowed to spend everything they have in the bank on day-to-day expenses. So the question really isn't whether MARTA should be allowed to use its own money, but whether MARTA's current budget shortfall is a blip in the system or a long-term problem. Because if it's a long-term problem, then they need to balance their budget first.
A lot of people have problems with the fact that MARTA receives public funds. Personally, I think they ought to receive a lot more--public transit is the best investment we can possibly make in the environment and in preparation for peak oil, so why wouldn't we invest public money in that?--but it would still be better if MARTA could make up at least some of the shortfall in the way that any business ought to: with business revenue. And the real problem with MARTA's business revenue is that many people simply aren't willing to ride on it. It's not that they hate public transit, necessarily. It's that they hate and fear the people who ride public transit.
Which means that MARTA's problems are as much social as they are financial.
So what should MARTA do about it? Obviously, it's not the responsibility of a public transit system to break down social barriers that prevent people from riding their system (although breaking down those social barriers is usually a nice side benefit of public transit). But there are ways MARTA could try to bypass the resistance. Some companies have started commuter busses that come in from the suburbs to MARTA stops and business locations; should MARTA consider adding a separate, more plush bus line or train line for commuters? Should they raise their prices in hopes of raising the average social class of riders? Or should they simply keep pushing for more tax money?
How would you fix MARTA's problems?
Thursday, April 9, 2009
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5 comments:
"A lot of people have problems with the fact that MARTA receives public funds. Personally, I think they ought to receive a lot more--public transit is the best investment we can possibly make in the environment and in preparation for peak oil, so why wouldn't we invest public money in that?..."
Of course, it may be that many people who have a problem with MARTA receiving public funds disagree with you on the very point of environmentalism and don't think we're reaching a point of peak oil.
Or, of course, there are those of us who are agnostic on the concept of peak oil, who care for the environment, but also think that a lot of environmentalism has become merely a way for governments to grab more power, and who oppose public funding of transit on libertarian and free market principles. :-P
As a side note, those who hold that sort of opinion also think that, if peak oil is real, the answer is less government control and more allowing the free market to do its thing. Seriously, someone, somewhere, will see enough profit incentive to make a car that doesn't require gas, for example, that will actually be economical and practical to produce/own (as opposed to the ethanol silliness the government has tried to force through).
Regarding the ITP/OTP stuff (it's funny, I've never heard an "OTP"er use those terms), a friend of mine was talking with an ITP coworker who said that the biggest fear issue with ITPers is this:
As long as they're inside the perimeter, they can't get lost for too long. Just keep going in one direction and you're gonna hit 285.
However, once you get outside the perimeter, you could end up in Tennessee.
The desire to prevent the expansion of public transport among outer suburban residents is unfortunately in no way unique to Atlanta.
Here in Melbourne, despite a demonstrably anthropogenic 40 percent decline in rainfall since October 1996, there has been no expansion of the rail system and enormous investment on freeways that make the problem worse. Worse again, Australia's federal government has cut fuel taxes in real terms by as much as fifty percent since 2001. Ecology dictates Australian fuel taxes should easily exceed the combined total of all other OECD nations - in fact they are a fraction of the average!
Despite the catastrophic bushfires that are the inevitable consequence of a government policy that has allowed Australia - whose per capita carbon emissions should be a small fraction the world average - to have the highest emissions in the world, there is still no protest demanding any transfer of road funding to rail or bus services.
People in Melbourne exurbs like Pakenham, Cranbourne, Cragieburn, Sunbury, Melton and Werribee know very well how the affordable housing they enjoy requires appalling public transport. Combine this with a transport planning system where fossil fuel corporations actually make the key decisions, and it is no surprise almost all new projects are unnecessary roads. The bushfires we witnessed two months ago are bound to be repeated on an even larger scale - ultimately turning southern Victoria from a green forest into the dustiest desert.
The one thing that is different from Atlanta is that outer suburbanites do not have to make a solitary protest to ensure they get their intended policy of freeways but no public transit. The control car and fossil fuel industry "greenhouse mafia" possess at the highest echelons of government in Australia sees that such a policy is the only one any Australian government can pursue without severe risk.
What will happen in Australia if petrol supply does go down is that the coal industry will use its power to lobby for expensive projects to convert coal to oil. There is quite simply no doubt that such a policy, whether or not less economic than demanding a reasonable fuel economy standard of 1-3 litres per 100 kilometres, will be pursued during and afetr peak oil.
Wow, jpbenney, thanks for the comment! We Americans definitely tend to imagine that our love affair with the car is unique to our culture. :) Nice to know that other countries are as misdirected as we are...?!?
And Matt, I could argue with you all day on this, but I think we've had this conversation before. :) I'll just remind you that we invest TONS of public money in highways. I'm sure, as a good libertarian, you're opposed to that too. But would you prefer to pay high tolls on every road? Or have a high gas tax that pays for highways? No transit is free.
As far as peak oil, well, I've written a lot about it, but there are much better resources out there than me that prove it's real and it's happening now. At this point, I don't think it's even worth arguing with people who think otherwise. Even the EIA graphs show a peak now.
On the danger of OTP driving, well, you're absolutely right! End up in Tennessee, indeed. Or worse yet--Alabama!
p.s. Matt, my husband says to remind you that you told him in 2007 that there was no housing bubble... ;)
Lisa, it is really true that Australians are not only as bad as people in Atlanta, they are to be blunt much worse. If you read Tom McMahon's Global Runoff, you will see that owing to the very old soils Australian hydrological systems are extremely sensitive. Yet, Australia still has the highest per capita carbon emissions in the world!
To maintain Australia ecosystems it would be necessary to have a government or private owner completely outlaw one cent being wasted on highways or freeways and limit road capacity to below a level at which rail transport can economically compete.
The problem is that this is not only politically unviable in the present system, in a much freer market it would be economically unviable to conserve a fraction of the land that would need to be removed from farming or development. In comparison to the only ecologically comparable region - Africa south of the Zambezi basin or roughly the countries of Angola, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa - Australia lacks the iconic animals needed to make such conservation remotely economic.
Given that for sustainability Australian living costs need to be not only not less than but actually order of magnitude higher than those in Europe or Asia or North America or New Zealand, government involvement becomes inevitable, even if it might not take the form of direct spending except on road demolition and conservation.
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