Oh how the liberals love to extoll the virtues of mass transit. We need to quit building roads and get people out of their cars and on to buses and light rail they say. If we can only do that, we won't use so much oil and we will clean up the air. Let us sing paeans of praise for mass transit. There's only one thing wrong. It's bullshit. At least in Atlanta it is.
The problem with mass transit is it needs to be subsidized to work. In Atlanta it needs to really be subsidized. Part of the problem is the incompetent management that MARTA is known for. For example, they once put a woman who lived in public housing on the board. Her qualifications? She rode MARTA.
I wrote this post about all the money MARTA wasted on computers they will never use. Go read it and see just how much money MARTA wasted.
MARTA was once again in the news and made the front page of Thursday's Atlanta Urinal and Constipation.
MARTA plans to cut bus service by 15 percent this summer.
They can't do that! That will force more people to drive cars. And what about the poor? They depend on MARTA. How heartless can they be?
In restructuring the bus routes, the transit authority expects to eliminate 304 jobs and $11 million in expenses in the most sweeping change to MARTA service in more than 20 years.And the cuts may be only the beginning of the public transit system's efforts to stem the flow of red ink in its $308 million operating budget.
But ... but ... I thought we needed more mass transit. I thought mass transit was the solution to traffic congestion. Get 'em out of their cars and into buses and trains.
Well obviously the problem is that gummint is not giving MARTA enough money.
MARTA also may consider increasing the current $1.75 basic fare if the system continues to lose money past fiscal 2006, the chairman said.
As the fares go up, ridership goes down. It's a vicious cycle. I've seen it happen in other cities. It seems mass transit only works if it is heavily subsidized. Of course, since MARTA is a gummint agency it already suffers from incompetent management. For example.
"A lot of those buses run empty," said Thelma Purnell, MARTA director of transit planning. Running empty buses costs $1.32 per mile, or $31 an hour, she added.
Wouldn't you think they could hire some transportation engineers (or whatever you would call them) to figger out routes that people actually use? Are you listening Thelma? You are incompetent! Can you hear me now?
Atlanta has a very nice light rail system, but in many cases it doesn't go where people want it to go. For example, I only use it to go to the airport. When they were building the light rail system they had to make some tradeoffs on routes to get the funding required.
Even transit advocates acknowledge that MARTA's route structure is long overdue for an overhaul.
No shit! In the private sector this would have been done long ago and it would be done on a yearly basis. Not that the private sector would want to run mass transit. It's too expensive.
On April 1, Citizens for Progressive Transit will launch what it's calling a "Save MARTA" campaign with a 6 p.m. meeting in the old City Council chambers at Atlanta City Hall. The organization is calling for new state or regional operating funds for MARTA, which receives no such revenue from the state.
The one cent sales tax from Fulton and DeKalb counties is not enough to subsidize MARTA. That means they are gonna go to the state and beg for funds. Or maybe they're gonna ask John Lewis and Denise Majette to try and get some money from the feds.
The rest of the article contains sob stories about how people are gonna be affected by the route changes and route eliminations. And there are gonna be a lot of people laid off. If only we would throw more money at the problem it would magically be fixed. Everyone knows that mass transit is good. Cars are bad.
"We can't continue to go in the hole until all our reserves are gone," Walls said. "I hope the local metropolitan political establishment will let this be a wake-up call for what needs to be done to give MARTA adequate funding."
In other words, hold on to your wallet. One way or another Georgia taxpayers are gonna have to pay more money for a mismanaged transit system.
You can depend on it.