What is the point of “public transportation” if the public cannot use it? For most folks, socked in because of this recent “Arctic Blast” in the Pacific Northwest, general failure of this glorified “system” is demonstrated notwithstanding its foundation largely built upon ineptitude and waste. MAX stops working at crucial stops. Greyhound shutters its doors. Amtrak decides it is not okay to do business just when people are turning to it. Airlines cancel flights while others remain grounded. Dripping in irony, the reality is that the personal automobile remains the most convenient means of transportation for the individual and the family.
Funny thing is that even while “demon auto” cruises the highways and byways all covered in snow, Tri-Met buses also remain dependable where they are–by heads and shoulders–the most reliable of all these public transportation boondoggles. City buses can hold a large amount of people. They are heavy and relatively maneuverable and as such do well in the snow and the ice. Buses still get people to and from work and places of commerce. The buses even “bail out” the MAX when it stops working. But we continue spending money on light rail and continue to feed and resurrect this form of transportation that largely died by its own sword in 1950s America. It needs to stop.
Not only are buses more important and a vital cog in the public transportation experiment in that they offer utility whereby fixed lines such as light rail, heavy rail and urban ski lifts do not. Buses are significantly cheaper to purchase, maintain, and operate. The MAX, specifically the west side project, has proven to be a gigantic waste of taxpayer money under the guise of better livability and economic vitalization in its proximity. Livability, subjective to say the least, has had little change positive or negative while the economic vitality of the corridor is, by most measures, worse.
The question is, why if this new way of modern life free of individual choice and our feet at the governmental fire–”liberalism” as some choose to call it–is to triumph and the personal automobile is to meet its ultimate demise at an artificial and faster rate, do our communities not buy and use more buses? Utility has nothing to do with the answer. Is not denial of the obvious a counterproductive approach, even for the true believer? The answer is that light rail is “cooler,” buses are “for the poor,” buses aren’t as “green,” light rail goes faster, and so on.
The rub is, however, we build permanent and largely unnecessary infrastructure around the light rail. It is the nature of the beast. With buses, the routes can simply be switched or modified if a particular sector or area is better served.
The call for more light rail and the denunciation of its opponents is purely ridiculous. Instead of spilling money for urban light rail and the massive subsidies that come hand-in-glove with it, why don’t we engineer, retrofit and build roads, bridges, tunnels, overpasses and the like for the specific and more utilitarian function of the automobile? The “Big Dig” public highway project in Boston is roundly considered a gigantic exercise in graft, but it was still money better spent than if it went toward chintzy trains and subsidizing businesses along the tracks.
Portland and its metropolitan area needs to get a grip on reality and–if it is a foregone conclusion that these municipalities are going to spend money anyway–spend their funds on the mandated duty of government which is supposed to provide for the public good… and not just for the entrenched and avaristic class who advocate for light rail, trams, and other melioristic nonsense that requires excessive governmental funding (at the expense of the public at large) for the principles of economics and business to even begin to kick in and function.
