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

[Fred Schneider]

I think, Joshua, that you are missing my point.   My point is that  
whether or not you provide service to Oakland or Downtown, the vast  
majority of the 1 million people who live outside of Pittsburgh are  
not going to use that service.  And whether or not you provide  
service to University City or Temple University in Philadelphia, the  
overwhelming majority of those people outside Philadelphia County  
will not ride SEPTA's Broad Street Subway or the D bus or the 11 or  
13 trolleys to get there.

They may, fifty years from now, but are not doing today.

And they are certainly not riding from PIT airport to Carnegie on the  
bus.  There are vast numbers of PAT and SEPTA suburban bus services  
that are holdovers from companies they absorbed in the in the  
1960s.   Those routes may have been valid at one time but  
demographics change.   The private companies would have abandoned  
them because no one was riding.   But subsidized transit keeps right  
on running them even if no one rides because it is easier than  
defending yourself when someone complains to the newspaper.   Most of  
those routes existed when we got on a bus and rode into downtown to  
shop.   We rode into Swissvale to go to the doctor.   We went to East  
Liberty to go to church.   We went to Wilkinsburg to eat.   We don't  
do that anymore.   Today everything is in the suburbs for us.

Look at my comments about riders in Lancaster ... one person in every  
other family in 1915 to one person in every 50 families today.    
Would it not just cheaper to send a taxi to pick up the guy?  Yes,  
but there are those who argue that we cannot do that because that  
would be discriminating.

What is wrong with a society that discriminates against you and me by  
charging us to run a 35 foot bus for two people?

On Sep 10, 2007, at 4:17 PM, Joshua Dunfield wrote:

>
> Fred Schneider wrote:
>> 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.
>
> That's true, but you don't have to ride (much less need to ride) to
> benefit.  Downtown and Oakland would waste a lot more space for
> parking (and the streets would be parking lots, too) if PAT didn't
> run.  Plus, as I mentioned in a response to Bill Robb, you have
> people who are employed only because there's a bus to get them to
> work.  Everyone's bottom line is better because those folks can
> hold down a job.
>
>> Some where in this thread ... and I didn't copy it into this
>> rebuttal ... you mentioned San Jose.
>
> That wasn't me...I wouldn't know San Jose if it bit me.
>
> -j.
>