Mayor Daley says that the proposed CTA fare hikes and service cuts are "very ugly", but offers no alternative or solution to the the agency's budget problems.
Strange- Da Mare had the funds ($86 Million) to buy the Michael Reese hospital property to be redeveloped as the Olympic Village, but can't find the funds for one of the city's most essential services?
Daley has always considered the CTA to be something of a "frill", and now that the Olympic Games are off the table, he has no interest in repairing or expanding Chicago's once-excellent service, thus condemning our city to second-tier status in the future. There has even been talk of cutting Owl service, which would put at least another 50,000 cars on the streets and put Chicago on the same steep downhill path as other formerly great Midwestern cities such as St. Louis and Detroit, both of whom deteriorated rapidly after all-night transit was eliminated. In St. Louis, the last "owl" ran in 1965, and what had been a gentle glide downhill became a cliff dive into depopulation, disinvestment, and poverty.
Daley was originally opposed to free rides for seniors, but now has nothing to say about this absurdity, and there is no discussion of raising the city's funding contribution to the agency to reflect inflation since the early 80s. Now that we won't need to spend $500 Million or more on costs related to the Games, could we direct some of the TIF slush funds towards our essential services? Our transit, our police department, our schools, and our essential sewer and water infrastructure are in tatters. We need to be replacing 80-year-old water mains, we need to put more police on the street, and we badly need improved transit and to get those improvements in place before the next round of gasoline price hikes, which are coming very soon, and which may come sooner than anyone was figuring if oil ceases to be denominated in the dollar.
While Chicago's transit and that of other large cities is starving, it's competition, auto transit, is more lavishly funded than ever, and at the expense of our largest cities and their needs. Over 60% of the road-building stimulus money being doled out by the Feds is being allocated to the most lightly populated areas of the country to build unnecessary highways. Why are these funds being so allocated? 65% of this country's population lives in the 100 largest urban areas, and 75% of the country's economic activity takes place in them, yet our tax money is being allocated for mega-highways through semi-desert wastes with the lowest population densities in the country. This has been the funding pattern for the past 60 years, to the great destruction of Chicago and other cities.
Chicago is one of the country's largest net taxpayers, behind only NYC and Los Angeles, yet ranks near-to-last in federal givebacks. In other words, we are being taxed to fund mega-highways and heroic water diversion projects in the middle of the Big Nowhere, the better to lure millions of denizens out of livable Midwestern cities to mega-cities in the middle of the high desert that are bound to fail catastrophically as water problems deepen and as the massive water infrastructure becomes impossible to maintian in a fuel-short future- while our services deteriorate and our city, which is one of the world's greatest metropolises, is decimated to pay for all of that. And electing a Chicago machine politician as our president has not helped us get our share.
It's time to get our share of the tens of billions of dollars, or at least get benefits that equal the taxes we send to Washington on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Same thing goes for the State of Illinois- why is the state's largest city treated like a poor, unwanted cousin in Springfield? We need to demand the end of free senior fares and demand that our state and city governments give us something of value in return for our taxes- and adequately fund and manage conscientiously this essential service.
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Showing posts with label public transit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label public transit. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Sunday, June 29, 2008
The Cost of Our Cars: Are Private Autos the Nation's Major Welfare Recipients?
Those who are not living at the bottom of a well may have noticed that oil is now quickly approaching $150 a barrel, and some prognosticators and oil geologists are predicting $200 per barrel by next year. Events are moving more quickly than even I expected, for even I had not expected the $100 threshold to be breached before next year, earliest.
The galloping fuel prices are deeply frightening in their implications and their effect on every cost of day to day life, as anyone shopping for a family of three or four can attest.
Yet, while there has been some 'demand destruction', Americans have not begun to alter their habits, and, most ominous of all, our political and business leaders haven't altered our disastrous public policies that are so slanted toward the support and promotion of private automobiles, to the funding of the public transit and intercontinental railways we will desperately need when 70% or more of our population will no longer be able to afford to run an auto, and will be hard put to it just to keep the house tolerably warm and put food on the table, as the costs of food and utilities are driven remorselessly northward by the escalation of fuel prices.
So, this is a good time to consider just what our cars are costing the public. The linked essay puts to rest whatever notions some people out here have considering the cost of transit to the public, and who is really subsidizing what.
The bald truth of the matter is that if all the costs of procuring and securing our oil supplies, and the costs of maintaining our massive network of roads and highways to the standard required by heavy auto use were passed directly to the user, gasoline would have cost $9 a gallon by 2005. The fact is that car ownership is much more extensively subsidized than public transit, and airlines are subsidized at the expense of over-regulated and over-taxed railroads.
As a libertarian, I believe that if the citizens were, jointly and severally, to make their choices regarding their modes of transportation strictly on economics, and if these choices were not massively subsidized for the past 80 years, that most people would have given up car ownership as impractical and unaffordable even before the interstate highway system was built in order to wreck our cities and decant our populations into auto suburbs.
Public transit would prosper on its own were we not forced to subsidize it's competition as we have been doing for the past 85 years. Let's pull the massive subsidies from private autos, and bureaucratic, government-controlled, inefficient public transit, and see who wins.
My bet is, that within seven years, we would have profitable, efficient public transit, owned wholly by private entities, available to the rapidly growing population of dispossessed former car owners, and that we would be able to reduce our energy consumption by at least 40%.
The galloping fuel prices are deeply frightening in their implications and their effect on every cost of day to day life, as anyone shopping for a family of three or four can attest.
Yet, while there has been some 'demand destruction', Americans have not begun to alter their habits, and, most ominous of all, our political and business leaders haven't altered our disastrous public policies that are so slanted toward the support and promotion of private automobiles, to the funding of the public transit and intercontinental railways we will desperately need when 70% or more of our population will no longer be able to afford to run an auto, and will be hard put to it just to keep the house tolerably warm and put food on the table, as the costs of food and utilities are driven remorselessly northward by the escalation of fuel prices.
So, this is a good time to consider just what our cars are costing the public. The linked essay puts to rest whatever notions some people out here have considering the cost of transit to the public, and who is really subsidizing what.
The bald truth of the matter is that if all the costs of procuring and securing our oil supplies, and the costs of maintaining our massive network of roads and highways to the standard required by heavy auto use were passed directly to the user, gasoline would have cost $9 a gallon by 2005. The fact is that car ownership is much more extensively subsidized than public transit, and airlines are subsidized at the expense of over-regulated and over-taxed railroads.
As a libertarian, I believe that if the citizens were, jointly and severally, to make their choices regarding their modes of transportation strictly on economics, and if these choices were not massively subsidized for the past 80 years, that most people would have given up car ownership as impractical and unaffordable even before the interstate highway system was built in order to wreck our cities and decant our populations into auto suburbs.
Public transit would prosper on its own were we not forced to subsidize it's competition as we have been doing for the past 85 years. Let's pull the massive subsidies from private autos, and bureaucratic, government-controlled, inefficient public transit, and see who wins.
My bet is, that within seven years, we would have profitable, efficient public transit, owned wholly by private entities, available to the rapidly growing population of dispossessed former car owners, and that we would be able to reduce our energy consumption by at least 40%.
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