[PRCo] Re: Fwd: HELP needed - to explain ridership drop in 7 cities

[Joshua Dunfield]

You can often get almost any "decline" or "increase" in whatever you
like by choosing the baseline carefully.  (Crime stats are a great
example...no one seems to notice even when you compare the first
four months of 2003 or whatever to the first four months of 2007
and act like it means something.)  If you get to choose a subset --
in this case, certain cities that are supposed to implicitly
represent the whole -- as well, you've got it made.  If you're
Randal O'Toole, it's just part of the game.

I'll just point out (if no one has already) that not mentioning
Portland is deliberately misleading, and can't be an honest mistake:
throughout the 1990s, O'Toole was forever screeching about how
terrible it would be to expand MAX.  Fortunately, he was ignored.
(Actually, I'm not all that big a fan of MAX, but for completely
different reasons.)

-j.

> In a talk delivered to a forum sponsored by the extremist-right John
> Locke Foundation in Charlotte on Oct. 10th, O'Toole claimed:
> 
>  >>
> So expensive are rail lines to build, maintain and operate that most
> rail regions have, at some point, been forced to significantly raise
> fares and/or curtail bus services, often leading to a loss of transit
> riders. Thanks in part to the high cost of rails, transit systems in
> Atlanta, Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia,
> Pittsburgh, St.Louis, and the San Francisco Bay Area carried fewer
> riders in 2005 than two decades before.
> <<