Thumbs up to funding mass transit
Jay Evensen
If it happens in an art gallery, that's one thing. People can stand a few feet back with their thumbs in the air and quietly take their own measures. But in the arena of politics and public discourse, the differences can affect the way we live.
Lately, I've come to understand that trains and buses belong in the impressionist wing of the political display case. People tend to look at them and either love or hate what they see. And a lot of the ones who hate what they see look at freeways, instead, and see the clarity and sentimentality of a Norman Rockwell.
Last fall, an overwhelming majority of you in Salt Lake and Utah counties voted yourselves a sales tax increase to expand mass transit services. Some state lawmakers think that vote was over highway and transit projects in general, but an opinion poll commissioned by this paper right after the vote showed you had little confusion.
The poll, by Dan Jones & Associates, found that 66 percent of Salt Lake County residents wanted the money to go to transit projects, and 65 percent of those said they wanted it to go specifically for four new TRAX lines. That's what they had in mind when they entered voting booths.
That's when I heard that shrill horn I talked about earlier. Actually, it sounded a bit like a cuckoo clock. I ride TRAX every day and wouldn't exactly call it a rolling palace for the wealthy. But the premise of the question made me think.
Why is it that transit funding is a subsidy but highway funding isn't? Why do some people complain about seeing empty trains or buses in off-peak hours, but they won't complain about freeways that are empty or nearly empty during the same hours? Why do some people never consider that, by funding highways much more than transit through the years, we are forcing people, even ones of meager means, to buy expensive cars and to fill them with expensive gasoline? Why do we consider Americans to be car-crazy, when they really have few other options?
A study a few years ago by noted conservative and transit expert Paul Weyrich determined that when transit becomes truly competitive with highways, it does very well. Some people like to cite figures showing that few daily commuters — about 1 or 2 percent — actually ride transit, but the study showed that, at the time it was written, only slightly less than 30 percent of Americans had a quality transit system available to them. Among those people, ridership was high, similar to the levels seen in the early 20th century when trolleys were everywhere in urban centers.
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