The Working Families Party wants the MTA to stop defunding itself

Streetsblog reports that the "Working Families" Party is at it again. After being completely AWOL in the congestion pricing debates, last year they came out with a "Halt the Hike" campaign that coyly refused to take a position on Dick Ravitch's proposal to toll the "free" bridges. Last May they asked candidates to support Bus Rapid Transit - but not necessarily to fund the buses. This February, in response to the planned service cuts, they targeted first the MTA, then Mayor Bloomberg, and finally Governor Paterson.

Yesterday, Streetsblog's Ben Fried linked to a petition on the Party's website, which is so short I'll just quote it in full:

Another Fare Hike? Tell the MTA No Way

The MTA just announced another round of fare hikes -- including a new, limited ride $100 monthly MetroCard. Enough is enough! Sign our petition to the MTA and help us reach our new goal of 5,000 7,500 signatures:

"Limited unlimited MetroCards for $100? Fuggedaboutit! The MTA needs to stop using fare hikes as a short-term fix and come up with long-term solutions to solve its budget crisis."

There it is again, that weird frame that anti-transit people use to attack government-run transit agencies. The WFP is pretending that the MTA is not a government agency, that its revenue streams aren't determined by state law, and that it has some kind of control over its income, like it can go out and take a second job washing dishes to pay off its debts or something. Congratulations, Dan Cantor! You're using the same kind of rhetorical sleight-of-hand that right-wingers like John McCain and Wendell Cox use to attack Amtrak.

This petition demands the impossible, and because it does so, it sets the MTA up for failure. It's like that stupid bully trick where the bully hits you with your own hand and says, "Stop hitting yourself!" In this case it's a tag team effort where the State Legislature is the bully, and the Working Families Party is the sidekick who gets to play the moronic - but sadistic - mind games. Stop defunding yourself, MTA! Heh, heh! Now make like a tree and leave!

Of course, "the MTA" doesn't have feelings, and Jay Walder probably has a good therapist to help him deal with the stress of running the agency. The bullies' real victims are you and me, the people who actually ride the subways and buses. When the MTA hits itself, we're the ones who get bruised.

Of course, the Legislature has been relying on the public authority structure to hide the fact that the MTA is the state that is us. The WFP knows that if they tried to hold every state legislator accountable for defunding the MTA they'd have nobody left to endorse, and if they don't endorse a large subset of the candidates they risk being seen as irrelevant, so they go along with the lie.

Unfortunately, it seems to be working. The WFP was looking for five thousand signatures, and they had more than that as of this morning. They've now raised their target to 7500 signatures, and they're at 6257 right now.

It may not be much, but I put up a counter-petition asking the WFP to deny its ballot line to those who voted to cut funding for transit. I threw it up in ten minutes, and the Petitionspot site is kind of weird, but I've already gotten 36 signatures today, with just a link on Streetsblog and a single tweet.

The Working Families Party is clearly afraid to deny its ballot line to too many candidates, because they don't want to be seen as irrelevant. I actually think it's the other way around. If they endorse only 10% of the candidates in a given year, they send the message that they've got strong principles - and the ballot line is that much more valuable to those who actually get it. On the other hand, if they endorse a candidate in almost every contest, then it becomes clear that they have no principles, that they just choose the lesser of two evils. That really lowers the bar, because all you have to do to get the ballot line is be slightly less evil than your opponents.

I kinda figured out that the WFP was a craven, spineless organization back in 2000, when a Working Families volunteer handed me a flyer supporting Hillary Clinton for Senate. I keep hoping that some day they'll grow up and figure out that it's okay to have principles and to hold others to them, and that you can wield power without turning yourself into a half-assed version of Ray Harding. Maybe next year.

Transit financing kludges

It's really amazing what you can do for transit when you have consensus. Today, Yonah compares the difficulty that the Obama administration has had in funding transit to the new French national transportation plan, which spends just 5% of its money on roads. This plan comes from the right-wing government of Nicolas Sarkozy, which is genuinely conservative and anti-immigrant on many issues. Unlike the Democrats in the New York State legislature, the French left is very progressive on transportation, and would likely enact an even more ambitious program of transit funding if they win power.

At least twice, Yonah points out that "the state lacks a long-term funding source for the commitment" in this plan. But he goes on to say, "the plan suggests that whatever money that is available will go almost entirely to non-automotive modes of transport." This is the key: if you have a pro-transit consensus, the money will be spent on transit. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. As long as that consensus is intact, France will move steadily away from the car-dominated visions of Le Corbusier and Georges Pompidou towards a car-free future.

What does Yonah mean by "a long-term funding source"? Presumably he means some combination of dedicated taxes and fees, like the versement transport payroll tax that funds 40% of transit in the Paris region, as he described in a previous post. As he discusses, the New York MTA is also funded by a combination of dedicated taxes and tolls, but they are mostly sales taxes of one kind or another, and bring in less money when the economy is down.

The example of France shows that here in New York these dedicated taxes and fees are a kludge. There is no consensus in favor of transit. Local politicians pay lip service to transit, but they show a lot more concern about parking meters and tollbooths than about turnstiles and fareboxes. They constantly piss and moan about how much money the MTA spends on capital projects, but if there is any opposition to large highway widenings it starts at the grassroots, and politicians only jump on the bandwagon when they start to worry they'll be left behind.

Since at least 1968, the elite politicians, planners and bureaucrats of New York have acknowledged the value of transit, but they've been unable or unwilling to forge a true consensus in favor of funding transit, like the one that exists in France. Instead they've relied on kludges like bridge and tunnel tolls, the Mortgage Recording Tax and now the payroll tax that are ostensibly "dedicated" to transit. In that way they were able to provide funding while maintaining the fiction that transit funding was a relatively small part of the state budget.

Kludges never last forever, though, and this one has now broken down. Pataki and Giuliani realized that they could cut the transit budget and borrow money to make up the difference, and they would be long out of office by the time the bills came due. This year, senators like John Sampson and Assemblymembers like Rory Lancman realized that they could actually take money from the "dedicated" transit taxes, and the collective immunity provided by mass voting would protect them - if not, enough people would be clueless or easily distracted by stories of "the unaccountable MTA," and "Walder's $350,000 salary," and lies like "two sets of books," that they would face no consequences for their actions.

Kludges are supposed to be short-term, unsustainable fixes, and not only should they have sunsents, but while they're in place people should be working to build consensus in order to provide long-term support. This was not done under John Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller, it was not done under Dick Ravitch, Mario Cuomo and Ed Koch, and it hasn't been done under Bloomberg and Paterson. The French aren't relying on kludges, and we shouldn't either. We need to get some trustworthy, cooperative people who support in Albany, and then we won't have to worry about funding transit. It will happen because it's what should happen.

A simple solution to the commuter parking crunch

Today, Ben at Second Avenue Sagas linked to a Wall Street Journal article about the MTA's plans to raise parking fees at its commuter railroad stations. He ends on a note of concern that commuters who are priced out of their parking spots will drive all the way to the city instead.

I can reassure Ben here that this will not increase the number of commuters driving to the city. The article's author, Andrew Grossman, also could have reassured Ben if he had provided some important additional information.

The key here is that parking is in high demand along Metro-North and Long Island Railroad stations. Most stations have wait lists for their parking permits, at some stations customers can wait eight years. Fees vary from $200 a year to almost $1000. Some stations have implemented valet parking to try and squeeze more cars into lots.

I don't blame Ben for not knowing this, but I do blame Grossman for not putting it in his article. Don't tell me there's no one at the Wall Street Journal who's on the wait list for a parking spot at a Metro-North station. Grossman didn't bother to ask, possibly because it suited him and his boss, Rupert Murdoch, to have a story about the MTA vs. the unions, possibly because he was under a tight deadline and went with the simplest frame.

There's something else that Grossman left out. He is a transportation reporter, but he works at, you know, the Wall Street Journal, so you'd think that when he's writing an article about money he would ask someone who knows about money. Like WSJ economics reporter Conor Dougherty, who did a nice article three years ago about Donald Shoup and parking pricing. He might have been able to inform Ben that it's possible to set parking prices to keep the lots about 85% full, so that there is always a space for people who want to park.

Sure, some people will be unable to afford the more expensive fees, and maybe they will drive to the city, or maybe they will walk or take a bus to the train station, or even take a bus all the way to the city. Maybe they weren't even using the spots: the Times quotes Rye City Clerk Dawn Nodarse as a witness to all kinds of market distortions:

The problem fuels itself, she said: As the waiting list gets longer and longer, people who have changed jobs or even retired become increasingly reluctant to relinquish their permits, in case they need them again.

“Maybe they go into the city twice a month, but they know that it takes so long to get the permit, so they hang onto it,” Ms. Nodarse said. “We can’t force people to give up their permits.”

Whatever they do, their spots will be taken by those on the waiting list, who may be driving to the city today. At worst, there will be no change in the number of people driving to the city. At best, it may decrease the numbers. And in all cases, it will bring the subsidy level for the commuter railroads down a bit, closer to the level of NYC transit.

Of course, in the end park-and-rides are not the answer, and should have some kind of sunset provision. Maybe the MTA should just keep raising the parking fees past the Shoupian ideal, using the extra money to subsidize local jitneys and building transit-oriented development on the space that gets freed up.

Acting without consensus

As I wrote a few weeks ago, the best way for a community to accomplish anything is through consensus. History is full of "leaders" who just had to Act Now, and couldn't wait for consensus. Interestingly, many of the most dramatic abrogations of consensus involve leaders who were reacting to an existing breakdown in consensus. Think of Caesar crossing the Rubicon: there were already other Roman leaders who were operating as dictators, and he just wanted in on the act.

There have been dictators and strongmen throughout history, and there are areas where people seem to agree that consensus is not a good idea. In theory, the military operates in a top-down fashion, and there's only one captain on a ship, but in practice if you read accounts of the best military commanders and ship captains, they are constantly concerned with getting their crew to buy into the mission. If they fail, history is full of rebellious army officers and naval mutinies.

In practice, strong leaders are not always followed by other strong leaders, so any dictatorship is unsustainable. If democratic institutions promoting consensus are not in place, dictatorships tend to degenerate into corruption once the strong leader has passed from the scene.

Even when consensus-oriented institutions are in place, many people have created competing authoritarian or corrupt institutions. Corporations were one such tool: the Dutch East India Company had the right to rule its ships and colonies without the kind of consensus typically required in the home territory. These state-chartered corporations are the Renaissance ancestors to our modern authorities.

Actions taken without consensus tend to provoke a backlash, which can not only wipe out the original actions but go even further. The reactions to highway-builders like Bob Moses have played out in "freeway revolts" and the livable streets movement.

People who are expected to cooperate with the actions without first consenting can work half-heartedly, if they don't actively undermine the actions; this is probably most obvious when drivers double-park in bicycle lanes. There is also the risk that some of the people involved will not completely understand the rationale, and will thus pervert it in some way. The prime example of this last is the park-and-ride, which started out as a crutch to support transit, but became a means of allowing drivers to use long-distance transit without supporting local transit or walkable neighborhoods.

Deficiency bait-and switch

Today, Transportation Nation breathlessly tweeted that "One quarter of U.S. bridges are deficient, One in FOUR." My god, I thought, that's awful! There are days when I cross at least four bridges; what if one of them falls down? But in all honesty I took it with a grain of salt. I've heard stuff like this before, you see.

If you read the blog post and the full report (PDF), you'll discover that a quarter of all bridges are "structurally deficient or functionally obsolete." Functionally obsolete means "inadequate for today's traffic." Oh.

To give you a sense of the difference, the Throgs Neck Bridge is structurally deficient. Large trucks are only allowed to cross at night when there's very little other traffic, because in 2005 the bridge engineers discovered big cracks in the concrete. By contrast, the Whitestone Bridge is only functionally obsolete: it has relatively narrow lanes and can't carry as much weight as the State DOT thinks it should, but otherwise it's in good shape. In neither case are we talking about something like the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis.

Apparently, though, in the minds of congressional staffers, "a lot of people want to drive over them (usually for free) and that means that sometimes they have to slow down" is exactly equivalent to OMG THE BRIDGE IS FALLING DOWN EVERYBODY PANIC!!!" In this mindset, both are equally deserving of funding, and the fact that together they make up a quarter of the total means that Something Must Be Done. Forget about transit, about unemployment, about global warming, the bridges are going to fall down and we need to spend money now!

If you look at the actual data that went into the report, it's the last line on this table. Out of 603,245 bridges, 71,179 are Structurally Deficient (12%, which is more like one in eight than "one in FOUR") and 78,468 are Functionally Obsolete (13%) for a total of 149,647. The Federal Highway Administration thoughtfully provides area totals as well, so that we can see that the Structurally Deficient bridges only comprise 9% of the total surface area of the country's bridges.

Turns out I'm not the only one who's jaded by this annual "infrastructure madness." Jack Shafer wrote about it last year for Slate. The entire post is worth reading, but my favorite quote is this one:

So credulous is press coverage that reporters almost never ask whether some Rust Belt bridges might be redundant or economically superfluous because industry and population have moved on. And just because a bridge occupied a place on the traffic grid once shouldn't give it a right to eternal service.

I would add that somehow every time a bridge is slated for rehabilitation or rebuilding, it always seems to wind up with a few extra lanes tacked on. So there's actually a triple bait-and-switch going on: you're willing to spend money to prevent heavily used bridges from collapse, but you wind up spending a lot more to (1) add lanes to (2) relatively unimportant bridges that are (3) not in any danger of collapse.

We kind of expect credulous reporting from mainstream outlets like the Star-Tribune. But how about some healthy skepticism from public radio reporters like Andrea Bernstein? Or transit advocates like Veronica Vanterpool? We're counting on you, guys. Don't get taken in.

It still has to be transit-oriented

Planetizen links to a post by Chuck Wolfe that synthesizes recent discussions by Jason King on the rise of "urbanism," Roger Lewis questioning "transit-oriented development," and Liz Dunn on supplementing WalkScore with a "JaneScore." Wolfe puts it all together to come up with "urbandwidth," which is just an awful, horrible word.

I'm trying to figure out just what's so awful about "urbandwidth." I think it's partly the stress mismatch that screams, "I'm a naive neologism!" Combine URBan with BANDwidth and you get the URB clashing with the BAND and you don't know which to stress. Is it some kind of ur-bandwidth, the rate at which Abraham received information? What is "bandwidth" doing in there, anyway? Is Wolfe arguing that information access is the critical measure of the value of a society? If so, why?

King is certainly right that people are using - and modifying - the word "urbanism" in all kinds of ways now, and that's good. I think that Dunn is right about WalkScore not telling you everything you need to know. It tells you about the availability of walking routes to important destinations, but it says nothing about their value, amenities or glamour. Lewis is also right that walkability is important.

There's more to livability than urbanism, though, and Lewis is quite wrong when it comes to discounting transportation-oriented development. I'll start with the "urbanism" issue. I've lived in cities for most of my life, and I love them. I don't believe that it's sustainable for most of the population to live in small towns or suburban sprawl, much less in individual houses in the middle of nowhere, even if that's what they say they want.

I do believe that there is room for some diversity in living styles. No matter how many people live in cities, there will still be some areas that we would consider "country" or even suburban. We can do that in a sustainable way. The key is getting people away from car-dependence, and that means high local density even in a context of low global density: suburbs built around streetcars and commuter rail, and country towns and villages built around train stations and bus stops.

There have been copycat movements for "new suburbanism" and "new ruralism" (PDF). As you would expect from something promoted by Joel Kotkin and Randal O'Toole, "new suburbanism" comes with boatloads of sneering populism and misinformation about cars and the desires of so-called real people. "New ruralism" started as a marketing term for a particular kind of retirement community, but at least it's not divisively attacking latte-sipping strawmen.

I agree that the term "transit-oriented development" is awkward, and I would be happy to drop it and "urbanist," but I can't get completely behind Lewis's walkability. There's no question that walkability is essential, but honestly I take it for granted. It's just the natural way of things, and any built environment that can't be walked in is a sick system. I think that if people manage to see their environment from outside the sick system they realize that, but I don't see any way to convince them other than by showing them. A campaign for walkable neighborhoods seems like a campaign for edible food or breathable air, but then again...

The problem with focusing so much on walkability is that sometimes people do need to go beyond walking distance. If someone lives in a walkable rural village, they can visit their friends, pick up the mail and get a pound of salami, all on foot, but the village probably can't support a clothing store. If someone lives in a walkable suburb with all their daily needs plus a bookstore, a movie theater, some restaurants and a few boutiques, sometimes they want to go to a poetry reading or listen to some reggae. Even in Greenwich Village, where you can be within a short walk of a mind-boggling smorgasbord of dining, shopping, work and entertainment, sometimes you want to go to, say, Carnegie Hall or the Museum of Natural History, or even to Bear Mountain, and you want to get there faster than you can walk.

Bicycles can get you a bit beyond the village: our rural resident can bike to the big town and buy a skirt, our suburbanite can get to the reggae club, and our New Yorker can go anywhere in the city and suburbs. But if the rural resident wants to go to a poetry reading, the suburbanite to a museum, and the urban resident wants to visit another city, it's a bit too far to bike.

Finally, it's great when there are good jobs within walking or bicycling distance, but often times that's not the case, especially for people with relatively specialized occupations. Some jobs involve lots of travel over wide distances, as well.

For everything like that, there's transit. If you focus exclusively on walkability and don't provide transit, there are governments and corporations that are providing all kinds of incentives for people to get to those places by car. Sure, in developing countries and in past centuries people have walked for days to get places, but when the most convenient option is a car, most people will use it.

Living without cars is necessary to sustain our environment. Walkability is necessary for car-free living, but it is not sufficient. We need transit-oriented development. If you don't like the name, feel free to come up with a better one, but you can't get enough people out of their cars without transit.

Consensus, trust and bad faith

Here's the most interesting quote from Alex Blumberg's piece on consensus and the economy in Jamaica and Barbados:

Alex: For Tony Wolcott, it all comes down to one simple thing. Which, when he said it, I couldn't believe what I was hearing:

Tony: Trust and that to me is a key factor in the whole cohesion of the social partnership that we've got here.

Alex: The reason that I'm laughing is that you represent the employers of Barbados, and again, I'm putting this into the American context. It's just sort of hard to imagine an American leader of a business association talking about how much they trust the labor union. It just doesn't seem possible, right?

Part of the problem is simply that so many of the actors are obviously acting in bad faith. Marty Golden sits by and watches as the MTA fails to get proper funding, votes for the budget that strips $143 million from the agency, and then attacks Janele Hyer-Spencer for voting for that same budget. The TWU leaders make a mockery of the overtime rules that earlier labor leaders worked so hard to establish. Real estate mogul Bruce Ratner milks the MTA for all it's worth, even as it's preparing to cut subway and bus service.

How do you build the kind of trust that Tony Wolcott talked about? Well, one difference between Barbados in 1991 and New York in 2010 is that the leaders in Barbados actually seemed to care what happened to the country. I honestly think that on some level Bloomberg cares what happens to the city and state, and Paterson cares, and so does Jay Walder. At the very least, I think they want to be seen to have done a good job.

I have no reason to think that John Sampson cares about the State or even his legacy, and the same with Lloyd Blankfein and John Samuelson. All three of them just seem to be trying to milk the system for as much as it's worth and then retire to Florida. How do you establish trust with someone like that?

Ultimately, the thing to do is to reform the system so that dishonest politicians like Sampson and Richard Brodsky can't get the kind of power that they currently have, and so that greedy unelected business owners like Ratner have limited influence. I'm guessing that if we had trustworthy politicians and trustworthy business leaders, then the TWU - which as far as I know is a fairly democratic institution - would drop its defensive postures and begin to work with the others.

To accomplish this long-term goal, we have to reform campaign finance, ethics and patronage. There are several promising proposals in these directions being floated by Andrew Cuomo, Ed Koch and others; let's hope that at least one of them has some success this year.

At this point, though, reestablishing trust is a long way off, and consensus is even further. In the meantime, we need to use methods that don't rely on consensus, but we can't lose sight of the fact that they're necessary evils, and we need to plan for the day when they're gone.