Some aspects of transit in California will soon be vanishing. They're making major cuts to some of the transit funds, which will send repercussive reverberations all throughout the transit systems up and down the state. These will range in their spectrum and dynamic, but the gist of it is there will be increased costs for are modes of ridership, as well as cut, diminished, curtailed, and basically ignored routes, times of operation and frequency for some if not many stops and destinations. They, of course, claim these will mostly be felt on nights and weekends and, again, mostly in areas of low-ridership. My first reaction to this is one of dismay. I'm not surprised that the state is making cuts in certain areas. What causes me confusion, and to be truthful resentment, are the areas wherein these cuts are being made. We're already hacking away at our public educational systems, which aren't the most superlative in the world to begin with. But with transit, something that has always been viewed as a boon to the environment, to rider and vehicular safety by way of lightening the traffic load on freeways and city streets alike, and not to mention being a cheaper way for commuters to get around, to cut some of these routes, the very same routes, keep in mind, that our politicians and our pundits are encouraging us to take. In point of fact, as California residents we are constantly being encouraged to use mass transit as much as possible in order to cut down on carbon emissions, which is a practice I agree wholeheartedly with and do almost exclusively.
But, I'm sorry, but there's a chasm in logic here. You can't encourage people to do one thing while at the same time making it undesirable for them to do so. Well, you can, but then you simply can't expect them to go ahead and take your advice as anything but abusive and contradictory and as little but the empty political jargon of a class of people who don't need mass transportation like so many American citizens do.
The problem that it seems we have in America is we can't quite seem to decide what kind of nation we want to be. We love our cars. We love our highways. Yet at the same time we hate our traffic and we loathe having to shell out sizable chunks of our paychecks to simply keep our cars running. Thus the medium, one would think, would be to use automobiles as little as possible and only when necessary and to use mass transit for more practical purposes. However, if we want the majority of people who can and are in position to use mass transit more and almost exclusively, then we've got to make it a desirable choice for them; raising costs and cutting routes, times, schedules, and stops altogether is not going to accomplish that. Further, if we want everyone to use mass transit than we've got to be making moves to extend transit systems and routes, not cutting them.
A recent article in San Diego's CityBeat lays out one man's plan for a vast, comprehensive, and most importantly, efficient transit system that would integrate with and overhaul what already exists - tentatively, he calls it the FAST. The system he's designing is one unlike any in our country and draws most comparison's to Brisbane's in Australia, a fully-functioning and widely-used transit system whose increased ridership fares almost cover the costs that went into it, whereas here in America most ridership fares barely cover 1/3 of the costs inlaid, thus forcing them to rely on government subsidies. While there may indeed be claims that Brisbane's system isn't quite as perfect as the article makes it out to be, the argument seems rather clear that Brisbane's system is working much better than many of those that have been attempted here on domestic soil.
I don't quite know what it'll take to get these things going. For whatever reason America has never been able to get the mass transit ball rolling. All across the globe other countries have gone way ahead and tore on an emblazoned path that far surpasses anything we've been able to do here in America, save for a few select cities like New York, Washington, Boston, and San Francisco, all of which have their fair share of shortcomings, as is always to be expected. But here in San Diego, who likes to boast of being the first city to utilize the electric light-rail system way back in the eighties, remains stuck there, in the eighties, in eighties logic, in anachronistic thinking of people moving. What we have here, and what other cities like Los Angeles, and I'm sure many others have, are a number of pet projects, little ideas for transit but none of which connect into a comprehensive system that can move people from all tangental regions around. What we have are a number of small transit systems that meet at many points of disconnection. What have are plenty well-intentioned, nearly successful failures.
Obviously a teetering, nay, a crumbling economy does not seemingly pair well with cities launching wide-ranging transit plans. Or does it? The more people riding transit, the better. My only hope is that in the future, that some time in my lifetime, I'll be able too see a country willing as a whole to adopt a doctrine of mass transit. Who doesn't like being driven around? Who doesn't like sitting down and catching up with the news or a book whilst being carried to wherever it is that the day takes you? Who enjoys traffic? Who enjoys paying for parking? Or for gas? Or constant repairs? Or shitty drivers?
The projects will, of course, not be easy. Since our cities have been designed, year after year, with the idea in mind that we are Driving Americans who love freeways, beltways, open roads, and tons and tons of streets to wind on down, implementing transit lines requires either going underground, going above ground a la monorail, or completely shutting down whole quadrants of city blocks in order to lay down lines, none of which is particularly easy or cost-free. It does, on the other hand, require some level of functional employment, so there is a bright side.
What desperately needs to be done is these projects need to be framed in the proper light. So often what happens is before these projects really get going and before the public gets any genuine whiff of what these programs will involve, who it will benefit and in what ways, they are denigrated and cast in a poor light by the political representatives they've elected to office, who go on to tell their constituents that this program is bad, wasteful, and does not have the public in mind. But if you were to ask these people, I predict, if they had a fully-functioning transit system that could take them from a station close to home to their workplace and back every day of the week would they use it, they'd probably say yes. If you were to honestly approach them and ask them if they had a transit system that could carry them during a busy holiday season from their home to downtown to take care of some shopping instead of driving around endlessly looking for parking, would they use it, I again think they'd say yes.
What the public does not need is its political representatives telling them what's best for them before they've had a chance to really look at it and make a critical decision based off of their own reason. What the public desperately needs is its political representatives to shut their fucking mouths every now and then and listen to its public. If any one thing is clear, it's that people want better, quicker, cheaper, and more efficient ways for getting around and, most importantly, getting to work. I think America owes it to its citizens to give them a mode of transportation that works, the same way it owes us a government that doesn't dissuade us from the real issues at hand by way of lame rhetoric.
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