Coyote Blog

Cameron Scott meant this sentence as a withering critique of everything that is wrong with the government, from his point of view:

Transit riders shouldered four times the share of the MTA [Metropolitan Transit Authority] 2008 budget disaster [than] drivers did, but officials promised to seek more revenue from parking.

Holy cr*p!  You mean that transit users shouldered four times more of the transit budget than transit non-users?  Gasp!

The Bay Area where he lives is experiencing light rail disease.  This is the phenomenon where middle class voters along heavy white collar commuting routes push for horrendously expensive light rail lines.  The capital costs of these systems drain transit budgets into the distant future, forcing service cuts, particularly in bus systems that serve the poor.  The result is that the city ends up with bigger transit bills, but less actual transit, and progressives like Scott scratch their head and try to figure out what went wrong.  It must be because non-users of Transit aren't paying enough!

The Thin Green Line has been running a series of articles complaining about price increases and service cuts at the local MTA.  I will leave aside for today the critique I have been putting in the comment section of that blog, which is that if you really care about transit service for the working poor, then you never should have started down the light rail path in the first place.  Light rail is an expensive yuppie toy that inevitably, through its high costs and continuing capital requirements, starves money from the bus services that the working poor actually depend on.

But anyway, I thought it was endemic of a certain type of political outlook that the author could write this with a totally straight face:

Also problematic is that the MTA did not hit drivers and riders equally [with proposed fee and fair increases].

Wow!  You mean a price increase for a service does not hit users and non-users of that service equally?  On what planet does one have to live on to believe that they should?