By Alan Gore
Want to know where the public employee union folk live in your area? As this month’s transit vote approaches, it’s easy: just drive around and look for those big green "Yes On #1 and #2" signs on their front lawns. And I do mean drive, because even if this scheme of theirs passes, I see little more chance than today that you will be able to do it by bus.
Yes, we are about to decide whether to throw our money away on this year’s version of the same old mass transit scheme. Instead of getting stuck behind the occasional empty city bus in traffic, we would have the opportunity to get stuck behind a much larger and more frequent number of empty buses. I suppose there is one small good point to the new plan: Jerry Colangelo is, as far as I know, not involved. If he were, we would not be getting the opportunity to vote on it. This monstrosity is being pitched as the latest thing Phoenix has to do to become "world class." Remember when building the Camelback Esplanade was going to make us world class? If we vote Yes, we will get to be world class like Atlanta, which spent several billion for a transit system used by less than three percent of the working population, or like Los Angeles, which is running into such cost overruns drilling tunnels through earthquake-riven bedrock that is doubtful most of the new transit lines will ever actually start operating.
But the Phoenix bus scheme, which will be funded by doubling the expiring stadium tax and having it stay in effect forever, is supposed to be a lot more modest than this; perhaps it’s "county class" or something like that. The premise is that if we provide enough empty buses, people will at some point magically start riding them. In every business ever provided by the free market, the opposite rule holds: if, when you start small on a popular transit route, your vehicles fill up, this proves you are finding customers. You can then expand the business until empty seats start to appear. But this is a government scheme, not subject to any rules of Earthling economics: if the service proves unpopular and the money wasted, you just make it bigger and waste more money.
Polls on the issue show two contradictory trends: people prefer driving their cars to taking the bus, but at the same time support mass transit. Why? Because what people support in polls is mass transit for the other guy. You’re not about to stand on a hot street corner waiting to transfer from the #162 to the #488, but you reason that if other people do that, you will be able to enjoy lighter traffic when you stick to your Bronco. The problem is that any city that grew up around automobile travel is for this very reason a low-density place. This is why we enjoy third-acre lots in Phoenix instead of being jammed into Asian high-rise apartments, and shop in supermarkets where you can carry a week’s groceries home in your trunk. In the years when I lived in Tokyo, I took the trains everywhere. I saw all the places to live and work and shop packed into a dense walking-distance cube next to each transit stop. I didn’t mind jogging a mile or so between my destination and a station, and shopping each day only for what I could carry home by hand, since I was young and wanted the exercise. Now think about how many billions and trillions of dollars it’s going to take to rebuild all of Phoenix to look like that, and whether anyone would still want to live here if we did.
Several years ago there passed a state referendum that totally deregulated all forms of transit service in Arizona, except for ambulances and for taxi service at Sky Harbor, which is by City of Phoenix contract. Ever since then, it has been legal to privately operate any taxi, jitney, bus, or pool van the market can support. If there were a market for more buses in Phoenix, we could have them right away without asking anyone or organizing an election. If we want mass transit, we can have it just by going to a bank or by issuing stock. Why are we sitting around waiting for governments to do it? And why is mass transit something governments have to spend money building? The only part of a mass transit scheme that can only be provided by government is the part it already owns free and clear: public rights of way. If we really want high-tech, world-class transit, why not just lease the air rights over our arterial streets to the highest private bidder for elevated trains? If mass transit gets built on any corridor, it would then be a money source for the city, not a money sink.
If not governmental mass transit, then what can we do about our traffic mess? American Express, which operates ten office buildings in the Valley, and has to keep track of thousands of its own commuters a day, recently studied the cost of office space. What Amex found was that when you sum up the cost of real estate, coffee, telephone service, and all that other overhead, the cost of each Dilbert cubicle on every floor of these buildings comes to $15,000 per year. Suddenly, the idea of telecommuting is no longer a luxury. The company has now dedicated itself to having as many office employees as possible work at home for a portion of each week and not be part of the traffic problem at all. Weighed against that $15K/year, buying a computer workstation and putting in an ISDN digital phone line in each employee’s home is an investment that pays for itself in four months. The same cost calculation applies to most of the high-tech jobs in the Valley. So vote a resounding No on the government transit scheme, then do something real about smog and traffic by asking your boss about telecommuting today. Your family, and the taxpayers, will thank you.