[PRCo] Re: PAT's cuts

[Dwight Long]

Fred

It's the old Walt Kelly maxim, isn't it?  (Younger readers may not grasp the reference)

Dwight

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Fred Schneider 
  To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org 
  Sent: Friday, 03 December, 2010 14:48
  Subject: [PRCo] Re: PAT's cuts


  You and I are in the same camp Dwight.   

  I'm simply not in favor of spending and spending and spending in places like far outer reaches of Allegheny County or Lancaster County or providing bus services for slower Delaware.   I would rather see our scarce federal dollars go for things like converting Colfax Avenue in Denver back to rail (the buses move 23,000 people a day).   Or the other railroad tunnel under the Hudson River that a crazy New Jersey governor canceled so that his state could refund the already spent money back to Washington.   

  But I think it will our grandchildren and their kids who might have enough sense (or reason to wake up and smell the coffee).   You and I don't get anywhere arguing with Bill because old farts don't care to understand.   

  We live in a society in which the most important thing we still manufacture is large automobiles that consume prodigious amounts of fuel.   If we don't sell those cars, think how many people we'll have to lay off from car builders and oil companies?   Also the military whose job it is to make sure we have the oil?
  If you don't think about it those people, they'll remind you.   

  Right now:

  Automative manufacturing   about 700,000 jobs.
  Petroleum:  about 115,000
  Chemicals:   About 800,000 and many of those are petro-chemical companies.
  Plastics and rubber:  over 600,000 jobs.
  Motor vehicle and parts dealers:  over 1.6 million jobs.  (The foreign manufacturers employ a lot of sales and repair people here.)
  Gas stations:   over 800,000 jobs.
  Truck transportation:   Under 1.3 million jobs.
  Hospital and food service:   11 million jobs and they will all scream that they are linked to cars, not airplanes.  
  Couriers and messengers:  550,000 jobs.
  Heavy construction:  800,000 jobs (a big chunk of this is highway work)

  It is easy to visualize that 15 percent of our jobs ... maybe even 20% ... are highway related in some way.   The lobbyists will make a point that they all are if you try to make any drastic changes before the oil actually runs out.  

  Frankly, Dwight, the numbers I've crunched tell me the future is bleak sooner than our grandchildren might ever imagine.   If oil supplies have peaked ... and I think they have ... at the same time that China and India want to put 2+ billion people in cars (thats six times our population), I'm happy to be getting older.   I really do not visualize a recovery from the 2008 recession.

  Yes, because we no longer are have a downturn in the GDP, the recession is technically over.   It is definitionally over.   But I doubt that we are ever going to see a recovery like we have had in the past.   A recovery would mean more people would want to drive.   That would spur gasoline sales.   Sales of fuel could or would push prices up again ... back to $4 a gallon or more.  We are already back over $3.00 again with national unemployment more than twice what we would consider normal.    Why might we not see $4?   Because we don't have enough people out there on the roads.

  They told me there were supposed to a record number of drivers on the road Thanksgiving weekend?   Well, maybe I was late.   The turnpike was relatively empty.   Monday there were almost no trucks.        

  On Dec 3, 2010, at 10:27 AM, Dwight Long wrote:

  > Fred
  > 
  > You say the German model cannot be moved here.  
  > 
  > You have seen my rants on Bill's list about our profligate use of finite natural resources, caused, in the pax transport realm largely by our wanton population dispersion;  I won't repeat them here.  Sufficient to say that over time we will have to adopt something like the German model if we are to survive in the form of anything like even a second class nation.  It will be difficult and it will be painful for some folks, but it will have to be done.  It won't be done in our lifetimes, but if not in our grandchildren's lifetimes, their children face a very bleak future.
  > 
  > Intermediate steps towards a reconcentration of population include massive increases in taxes on fuels used for transport purposes and continued--and expanded--provision of public transport to poorly or non-served areas with appropriate subsidation.  
  > 
  > All these wrenching changes require both a futurist outlock and political backbone, commodities which are in scarce supply in our country's governmental process.
  > 
  > Dwight
  > 
  >  ----- Original Message ----- 
  >  From: Fred Schneider 
  >  To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org 
  >  Sent: Friday, 03 December, 2010 09:54
  >  Subject: [PRCo] Re: PAT's cuts
  > 
  > 
  > 
  >  On Dec 3, 2010, at 4:04 AM, Joshua Dunfield wrote:
  > 
  >> On 3 December 2010 04:06, John Swindler <j_swindler at hotmail.com> wrote:
  >>> As for the SEPTA transfer fee, that was just an increase in the existing transfer fee.  I thought the racist charge was when SEPTA tried to do away with transfers.  SEPTA went to discounted transpasses which are swiped across a reader on top of fareboxes.  Transfers, tokens and dollar bills have seemed to almost disappeared in Philadelphia - I've been surprised at how universal the transpasses have become.   Pittsburgh still has transit vehicles sitting at a transit stop while boarding passengers struggle to feed dollar bills into the GFI fare boxes.
  >> 
  >> That wasn't my experience.  Most people on Pittsburgh buses don't pay
  >> cash; they just flash their pass (e.g. university ID).  Since there's
  >> no electronics, it seems much faster than SEPTA.  You can take a PAT
  >> bus from near-empty to nearly full at one stop (which happened
  >> routinely at Forbes & Murray when the universities were in session) at
  >> very close to the speed it would take if no one had to pay at all.
  >> Even the occasional cash rider tends not to hold up the line, because
  >> everyone else squeezes around them.
  >> 
  >> The only advantage SEPTA has here, in terms of time, is that paying
  >> with a token is much faster than paying with $1 bills.  And SEPTA
  >> thinks tokens are the problem...
  >> 
  >> In Montreal, they switched (last year) from Pittsburgh-style
  >> pass-flashing to contactless "smart" cards, which might be slightly
  >> faster than swipe cards but much slower otherwise.  The métro fare
  >> control became a little faster (you had to swipe before) but the bus
  >> fare control became much worse.  I don't buy the rationale that it
  >> needs to be harder to forge passes; is there enough fraud to make up
  >> for the revenue you lose from jacking up all your dwell times?
  >> 
  >  The Maryland Public Service Commission held this very argument about 1950 when Baltimore Transit wanted to convert through service from Ellicott City to Baltimore to a shuttle operation.    BTC argued that it was a weak route into the country.  The PUC held that some routes would be weak at their outer ends.
  > 
  >  I think what has happened in the half century since the PAT take over of the independent bus lines our life styles have changed sufficiently that we need to admit we cannot afford to run those routes.  In 1950 we had one car per family and dad took it to work with him.   In the early 1960s mom was buying a second car.   It went with the women's liberation movement.   Since then every licensed driver in the American suburban family has come to feel they need their own car.  Remember the point I made earlier, Joshua, the people are no longer going to destinations downtown or on transit routes most of the time.  They are going from suburb to suburb.   
  > 
  >  I know you are using my own arguments from 1960 against me but it isn't 1960 any longer.   I wish it were.  
  > 
  >  Wo wohen Sie in Deutschland nun?   
  > 
  >  The difference between German and U. S. cities that I observed even a half century ago was that those European cities had twice the population in the same size foot print that ours would have.   I was stationed (a military term) in the city of Pirmasens, which had a land area which might accommodate about 25,000 Americans but it contained about 50,000 Germans.   Therefore the streetcar line that vanished in 1943 was replaced by an oberleitungs bus (trolley bus).   
  > 
  >  Why did the little city of Innsbruck, Austria buy new streetcars several years ago?   Hell, it's no bigger than Johnstown.   Might have something to do with Johnstown has shrunk from 60,000 to 23,000.   Innsbruck has something like 100,000 packed inside its city boundaries.  
  > 
  >  I remember walking through one German city with Christopf Grimm one Saturday.   I'm having trouble remembering where because Chris worked for German Rail and he's a friend that we have dinner with every year ... somewhere ... Suttgart or Baltimore or Munich or Newark or Nurnburg.   But he was just observing the crowds downtown on a Saturday.   The street vendors.   The Turkish restaurants ... at that point I think we both had sprung for Döner kebabs to ease the noontime hunger pangs.   I think it was that one Saturday a month when all the department stores were open.   Finally Chris just smiled, spread out his arms at whole of the landscape and said, "It's a German thing isn't it?"   
  > 
  >  Yes, it is.   It cannot be moved to the United States because we don't comprehend.   We attempted to make pedestrian malls but they fail because the public wants to put their car where they always did.   Remember how East Liberty failed when they tried to change people's habits back in the 1970s.   Or Biloxi or some other cities.      
  > 
  >> On Fred's statement about rural routes and how they "need to go"
  >> because they're from "a different era": Any real transit *system* is
  >> going to have "low-performing" routes.  We can't all be above average.
  >> Imagine that you want to be "efficient" (funny how being "efficient",
  >> in the context of a government service, so often means screwing over
  >> the people who most need the service) so you cut the
  >> "lowest-performing" route.  Of course that's never enough, so you cut
  >> the *new* "lowest-performing" route.  Eventually you will accomplish
  >> the goal of having no transit service at all, because if you keep
  >> cutting routes that way, ridership will eventually be close to zero
  >> (if there is only one remaining bus route, no one will ride it).
  >> 
  >> I didn't think that was our goal.
  >> 
  >> (I now live in a rather small city in Germany, and while the transit
  >> system is much less developed in absolute terms than, say,
  >> Pittsburgh's, it's far more developed than you'd expect for a North
  >> American city of 100,000.  There aren't many buses on Sundays—there's
  >> not much to do in Germany on Sundays, nearly all the stores are
  >> closed—and most of them could reasonably be considered
  >> "low-performing".  But those "low-performing" routes make it possible,
  >> if not very convenient, to live anywhere in the city and the outlying
  >> villages without driving a car.  If that's "left over from a different
  >> era", so be it.)
  >> 
  >> -j.
  >> 
  >> 
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