Smashed Metro Bus Windows

[elfs]

Smashed Metro Bus Windows

The other day I took the bus home from work, and saw that the two windows behind the driver's seat had been smashed. "I guess some people just don't like the bus," he told me. Even worse, it turned out that Metro knew about the problem and didn't have a bus to spare, so they pressed this broken bus into service, taping up the damage to warn people away from the potential harm.

Man, those are my tax dollars someone just smashed. His own, too.

I've always wondered why the most rabid anti-tax Republican is pro-road but not pro-transit. If the goal as "someone who governs" is to provide people-moving capabilities from one place to another, the mix of roads and mass transit would seem to be ideal: both are supplmented by non-transit, non-auto fees of some kind. I think roads are just so ubiquitous and seemingly invulnerable that we just see them, we don't think about them. It's the fragility and daily maintenence that gnaws on the conscience.

Metro just raised all prices by 25¢ to 50¢ depending on the route and time of day. The state's budget is taking a huge hit in the next two-year cycle; I hope that our county gets the mix right, because there's a lot of commuter pain coming down.

Comments

[resonant.livejournal.com]

The Ontario provincial government created a Crown Corporation[1] called UTDC in 1973 to employ people and make money by making transit vehicles. The corporation was originally funded with taxpayer money, but was expected to survive on its own after startup. It eventually grew and thrived, and was then sold 13 years later. The former taxpayer-funded business is now part of Bombardier, the world's largest manufacturer of rolling stock, and one of the largest employers (and sources of tax revenue) in Canada.

Taxes aren't zero-sum. In addition to shuffling pieces of paper around, you can also CREATE value.

[1] "Crown Corporations" are when the Canadian government sees entrepreneurs and venture capitalists getting rich, and decides to join in the fun.

[fallenpegasus]

The problem with such corporations is that they very strongly tend to capitalize on their government contacts over their ability to create value.

Bluntly, they use their government links to get powers and privileges that cannot be bought by their competition (public rights of way, various legal immunities, forced patent pools, deep capital reserves, and so forth) and also use their relationship to the government to, ehem, "discourage" competators.

Imagine some random Crown Corporation, that is doing reasonably well, is reasonably profitable, and is only reasonably slow and beurucratic. Then comes along some new hungry upstart startup that has a hungry staff and some new ideas, and starts doing the same job better, and starts taking profit away from the Crown Corporation (and thus away from "the public and common good"). What is the natural reaction of the managers of the crown corporation, thier government backers, and on the people who like to say they "prmot the public good" and "people over profits".

It's very simple. They will use the tools they have at hand to defeat the competition, and use their government connections to "reign in" this new upstart. They will impose new regulations, increase some key tax that the crown corp is exempted from, or obtain some government monopoly that the upstart can't access.

That's the way it works.

Just about the only way to compete with a "crown corporation" entity is to do it across national borders. Which is, I strongly believe, a driver of why there is so much pressure to try to set up "international agreement frameworks" to impose random business regulations across national boundaries. The proponents my claim they are doing it for good reasons, but at the end of the day, it's to impose costs on competitors to protect themselves.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

That's exactly what every other business out there is doing, too. If you have friends in government, things go your way.

Trentway-Wagar (a for-profit non-government business) just used its political connections to get PickupPal shut down.

Bell Canada (a for-profit non-government business) just used its political connections in the CRTC to justify its sabotage of competitor's internet bandwidth.

http://www.thestar.com/business/article/535185

http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5jLxqkhAVRuRJ1VTeFBqUd6ADrpzw

Which has nothing to do with the original topic of public transit.