Transit Comment Website

Do You Have an Opinion?

Are you a dedicated transit user and think that your system could be better? Do you have an opinion that you would like to share about how it is? Do you know how to make your system better? THEN here is your chance to tell it like it is. Are you a transportation manager, driver, supervisor? Then what is your view of the industry in which you work? Board Members, Consumer Advisory Committee Members - your comments make others view Mass Transit in a different light.

Rural America

People who live in the rural counties of this country have a two part challenge to overcome. First, they have fewer business and human services close to where they dwell. Second, there are fewer of them to pool funding and their percapita incomes are typically lower. This means that they must travel farther than their urban counterparts AND spend a greater portion of their incomes on transportation. The traditional design standards of our society and the landscape favor the automobile. With more people depending on fixed retirement incomes, this dominant mode of transportation is failing us.

Economic Recession

The economic recession that followed the collapse of global banking institutions has decreased the values of most houses in the US. Most local government budgets are funded with tax revenues based on the assessed values of local real estate. These revenues are significantly down and the services provided with that money are in danger of being reduced or eliminated. A collateral impact has been the high unemployment level resulting from businesses not being able to sell their goods and services. With unemployment high, state and local payroll tax revenues are low. TRANSPORTATION, even though an essential service, is an easy target of the budget cutters. Their need to balance the budget ignores that everything else is heavily dependent on people being able to get where they need to go. Communities across the nation are faced with prospects of losing much of their Middle-class.

Who Is Transit Dependent?

In large metropolitan areas 100% of the daily commuters are transit dependent. Whether they board a subway train, city bus, paratransit vehicle, drive their private automobiles, cross water on a ferry, or even take a taxicab, they are fully dependent upon the functioning of the mass transit systems to make it possible to arrive at work at all. Those people who feel that they should not fund mass transit projects with fuel taxes because they drive their own automobile erroneously discount the value of not having the hundreds of thousands of other commuters on the highway competing for "their lane space" and their parking space at the office. Consider this: the 200,000 daily rides that the Long Island Railroad carries into and out of Mahattan every day would require an additional 12 lanes of freeway along with 12 lanes of tunnel or bridge, in each direction to accomodate the same volume of people carried on the three tracks that cross into Manhattan. Let's try to pay for that with fuel taxes and see how long it would take to complete that "big dig."