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ChineseDaily Transit Links Roundup
Contributed by Fred Camino on March 17th, 2008 at 7:51 am
- Gold Line continues its easterly expansion as construction begins on the Pico Aliso station.
- The free market and transportation: is it possible to privatize a socialized transportation system? Is it desirable?
- $300-million streetcar proposed to connect Metrolink station with downtown Santa Ana.
- Metrolink considering 7.5% fare increase in 2009.
- Down south, the new Sprinter nabs 13,000 riders on its first day, and an average of 7,000 people per day through the week.
Discussion
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Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
Privitization of a whole system a joke.
When profit becomes the motive, the first thing to go is any sense of social obligation and common good. Several lines would be cut for not being “profitable” leaving people stranded without a public transit option. Isn’t that what happened when the Redcars were scrapped so that Goodyear could sell more tires?
There is certainly an argument to be made about allowing private competition along side the public system, or contracting out the provision of service out to a private entity. However, the public sector needs to ensure that public goods are met. The private sector would never have provided social security, medicare or universal public education. We have socialized policing and firefighting, and a socialized military.
When privitization is mishandled as the privitization of British Rail was, it is disastrous. I have a Master of Public Administration from Columbia and we studied this issue a lot. There can definitely be benefits to privitization. Sometimes it works well. There are also huge risks. It’s NOT a guarantee of improvement. Private entities cannot be trusted to provide social goods just because their current leadership says they can be.
This whole “government is bad, private enterprise is good” has been discredited under the fundamental incompetence of the Bush administration.
What libertarians really want out of a private system is the automobile — an individualized mode of transportation that doesn’t acknowledge a common good or a common interest. It fits their political philosophy perfectly. Of course, in our modern economic system, it seems that corporations keep all the private gains but socialize the private losses, and shrug their shoulders at the public losses they cause.
That proposed streetcar in Santa Ana is a great idea.
There is confusion with the public that there is a difference between Metrorail and Metrolink. Metrolink is the best kept secret in transit in Los Angeles. Metrolink based development is the best hope for the OC and Inland Empire and far north Los Angeles County. The Gold Line to Montclair is probably the political deal necessary to get the Purple Line to Santa Monica via Century City, and that’s okay. There is still a Metrolink line to develop alongside too.
One sign of hope. My friend John is a professor at Fullerton College and lives on Beacon Hill downtown. He talks Metrolink to work every morning. If the Anaheim Resort Area were better connected into Metrolink that would be a boon for the whole area.
(Side note: There used to be a rail line down Orange County’s coast. It is probably impossible now to rebuild any rail line from Long Beach to San Clemente along the coastal area, but that would be a boon if it were ever possible).
(Side note 2: The reason that the “Orange Line” is in the SF Valley instead of Orange County was because the Board of Supes weren’t interested in participating in Metrorail. (However, since the Valley used to be orange groves — see the superb movie “Chinatown” — it still fits.)
Of course, this is exactly what our socialized transportation system has done. The government chose the automobile as the de-facto form of transportation, markets be damned, provided it in a socialist manner thus birthing and cultivating the entitlement syndrome we see from automobile owners today.
Public transit used to be private. All the interurban railways that we wish had never gone were private operations, run by capitalists. We had over 1,000 miles of rail in Los Angeles created by the market, NOT an interest in the “common good” or “common interest”. After World War II (and the massive socialist auto road building projects of the New Deal) public transit became not a mode of transportation but a mode of welfare. The socialized car-culture robbed people of their natural right of mobility. So the government had to swoop in a create a new welfare option for the people their socialized transportation system left behind. So then, instead of sensible market driven transportation systems, one that gave people choices and allowed them to retain their natural rights to mobility, the government had created TWO government run systems of transportation that were both inadequate and unsustainable. Fast forward to today… look at the mess we are in. 73 miles of rail for the “common good” vs. 1000+ miles for greed and profit in the first half of the last century.
The fact is, we will never have a truly private system again, and we will keep throwing all kinds of money, both public and private, at these socialized systems that government created with lackluster results.
As I’ve said, these aren’t true libertarians. Any true libertarian has to acknowledge the role the federal government played in the adoption of the automobile as a nationalized transportation mode, and the fact that unlike urban rail, automobile transportation has NEVER been a private industry. And it amazes me that any libertarian would embrace a mode of transportation that requires registration with the government, testing by the government, licensing by the government, mandated insurance by the government, and endless government regulations. So much for “living free”.
You make a good point. I hear anti-rail people shout about the evils of “social engineering” when stating all money should go into road/freeway building because of choices made in the 1950s based on variables that have no relevance today.
It never occurs to them that our automobile-based, road-based transportation system was CAUSED by deliberate “social engineering”.
It’s not social engineering they object to in reality. It’s the fact that the government cannot continue to guarantee or subsidize their economically and environmentally unsustainable preferred lifestyle mode of transportation.
It’s amazing how conservatives who rail against the evils of “socialism” often look the other way when it comes to the forms of socialism they are fond of.
Exactly Dan. If socialism works for them, it’s a-okay. The classic example to me is zoning laws. Any libertarian should be against zoning laws… it’s your land, you should be able to do whatever the hell you want to with it, right? But then someone proposes limiting parking requirements or allowing mixed-used zoning (which are clearly reductions in the laws), and then suddenly conservatives are all in a fit. It’s like how somehow eminent domain is okay for road building, but for everything else it’s the government abusing power.
PS - if you’re interested in reading a blog by a libertarian transit advocate, check out Adron’s blog, Transit Sleuth. One of my new faves.
Dan, I also think the Santa Ana streetcar seems like a great idea. Steetcars would be a great way for taking short trips within cities. For example, a streetcar in Pasadena that ran up and down Lake Ave and Colorado to the Gold Line would be quite useful.
In San Francisco, the wonderful streetcars that go from the Castro to Fisherman’s Wharf via Market Street and the Embarcadero are not only used by locals, they are as charming as the Cable Cars used to be. Seeing all those old street cars from around the world is fun.