03.15.07
Transportation Issues
No, this is not a post about employees with junker vehicles. That will come later.
Here in Southern California, a major issue that affects everyone is the transportation situation. Simply put, there are so many people, scattered over such a large area, who have to travel to get to work and to school, that our current reliance on individual transportation is choking us to death.
During a period of employment at a certain federal agency, I had to drive more than 90 miles to work every morning, and the same distance back each evening. Starting time was 7:00 AM, so I needed to leave at 4:30 AM, which put me arriving in the parking structure around 6:00 AM. Why did I leave so early? Because there was a place 17 miles from my destination where another freeway met the one I was on. If I did not pass that point before 5:50 AM, it would take over an hour to travel the remaining distance to work.
In the evening, at 6:00 PM, when I left to return home, the freeways were congested all the way home. It frequently took three hours to drive home. On Friday evenings, when many people were heading for Las Vegas, it often took four hours.
The thing about this is that it does not have to be this way. If California and the counties in the vicinity of Los Angeles (Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, San Diego, and Ventura counties) could agree on it, it would take only a few years to put high-speed underground rail transportation connecting regional hubs (with associated “park and ride” lots) throughout the area.
The investment would be huge, but it would mean that road congestion would be greatly decreased. It would also mean that there would be large enough volumes of riders to enable most lines to operate from early morning to late night. Much of our current fuel consumption is spent sitting in jammed-up traffic heading to or from work. This would have the coincidental effect of reducing gasoline demand (and the high prices that go along with that) as well as reducing air pollution.
Other benefits:
- Auto insurance rates reduced because fewer people are driving.
- Road rage incidents reduced.
- Short walks from local stops to workplace will help to reduce our waistlines.
- Paranoid government agencies could install video cameras on the trains so they could watch us all more easily.
- The people who like to hold phones while they drive will be able to hold on safely while sitting or standing on the trains.
- Likewise for putting on makeup or other distracting activities.
- Newspaper circulation will rise. People who would otherwise be watching the rear of the vehicle in front of them (and listening to their 37th home loan commercial of the morning) will instead flip through the paper. In the process, they will learn something about what is happening in their local communities.
- For many people, the time it takes to commute will be shortened. They will have time to attend Little League games, city council meetings, and those all-important school board meetings. As a result, some of those people who have been on the board for twenty years without making a single decision in favor of students will be replaced by people who are actually trying to help students.
- People will have time and energy to actually choose entertainment that stimulates their brains. A number of people will choose to play board games or word puzzles instead of watching another repetitive reality show.
The impact of this on smaller businesses:
- Taxes will initially be higher–building these things will be expensive. As the system goes into service, some of the revenue it brings in will go toward bond repayments, which would tend to reduce taxes, but DMV fees and fuel tax collections will be reduced.
- Insurance rates will drop, and that will have an effect on businesses that require motor vehicles.
- People arriving home earlier (and with more energy left over) could mean more patrons for local retail businesses.
- Fixed-price travel passes could mean that employees could be recruited from a wider area. This would make it possible to attract more highly skilled people.
- Many of the big malls and shopping areas are located near major freeways and especially near places where major freeways cross one another. Without the heavy freeway traffic to support concentrating mega-stores in one location, locally-owned businesses will have a better shot at getting a larger slice of the market.
- Anything that benefits consumers and individuals ultimately benefits small business.
The idea that I am advocating here is that both individuals and smaller businesses (as well as larger businesses) will benefit if our governmental agencies will take action to fix the transportation mess. No one wants to be the one to say “let’s spend X billion dollars over the next five years” to build it, so we have done nothing since the topic first came up in the late 1970s. Nearly thirty years later and Californians are even more wedded to the automobile than we were before the first oil crisis.
I would pay for it myself if I could. I believe the benefits for all of us are worth that. For any aspiring politicians out there, we the voters are tired of sound bites and pollsters. Sit down and have an honest talk with us. Tell us that things will not get better unless we embrace change and then tell us what change you are proposing. The time for political games is over.
