[PRCo] Re: Pittsburgh - think tank blasts possible new transit taxes

[Fred Schneider]

The problem with this concept is that the people who need the service  
are some of the roughly 300,000 out of the 1.3 million people who  
live inside the city of Pittsburgh and some of the 1.5 million who  
live inside the city of Philadelphia, and no where near the entire  
5.1 million people in the seven-county PAT and SEPTA areas.   Inside  
the city of Philadelphia you will see full buses and streetcars and  
subway trains during peak hours and reasonable loads during off peak  
periods.   However, once you get out into Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware  
and Chester Counties, you have pretty much the same situation you see  
here in Lancaster County ... the buses often run empty or nearly  
so.     You have similar situations in Allegheny County on many of  
the routes outside of the City of Pittsburgh where transit riding is  
simply discretionary.

If you live in a suburban home and commute to a job in a suburban  
industrial park, then go shopping in a mall, or go to church on some  
back road, or to a doctor's office in another neighborhood, you can  
drive there in five to fifteen minutes but even if there is a bus  
option, it can often take hours and you simply don't use it.

Some where in this thread ... and I didn't copy it into this  
rebuttal ... you mentioned San Jose.   I have visited that city four  
times since the first light rail line opened, the last time a month  
ago.   The current population of the City of San Jose is listed as  
974,000.   In 1970 it was around 600,000.   Why?   Because tiny San  
Jose annexed every blooming suburb around it.   But downtown in 1940  
was a city once served by tiny Birney cars.   It was like Lancaster,  
Pennsylvania.  Probably a downtown for a city of about 60,000 or  
70,000 people with almost a million people in suburbs.   They have  
built light rail lines into all those suburbs.   But few people seem  
to use the cars because, like all light lines, the focus is on  
downtown and downtown is a non-destination.   Oh yes, there is a huge  
mall at Milpitas but I've watched more people get off buses than off  
the light rail cars because the buses run directly from the downtown  
whereas the cars make a huge U around from the north like the miners  
on the gold rush to California being forced to go all the way around  
South America on a ship.   San Jose simply impresses me as a  
collection of suburbs looking for an anchor.
It's not at all like San Francisco, roughly 50 miles to the north  
which is a real city.  And it hasn't grown up like Los Angeles.





On Sep 10, 2007, at 2:29 AM, Joshua Dunfield wrote:

>> Subsidized transit service is
>> not available to the majority only an (largely) urban minority.
>
> Looks like a pretty big minority.  Pennsylvania has 12 million  
> people.  The SEPTA
> region has 3.8 million people.  Allegheny County (PAT goes outside  
> the county a
> bit, but not enough to matter) has 1.3 million people.  That's  
> close to half
> already and I haven't started in on Harrisburg, Altoona, etc.