Fred Camino’s Recent Comments

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  re: Mass transit Government

  Highly misleading. Cable companies purchased franchices from governments along public roads and right of ways.(They also sometimes purchased private rights of way, but these were trivial compared to the public ones.) Often they were granted for a fraction of their value.  I think this was a good deal for cities - even though there were periodic scandals associated with streetcar franchises. However to pretend that the streetcars were purely public entities is nonsense.

  So private companies worked with governments to get land at a discount along public right-of-ways... they still built and paid for the "roads", aka tracks, that supported the transportation mode.  So maybe not a "purely" private venture...but still not the same as government sponsored transportation system.

  MetroRiderLA - The Los Angeles Transit Oriented Lifestyle Blog

  On Transit investment should and will be a part of the peak oil solution posted 1 year, 8 months ago 39 Responses

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  mass transit once flourished without government

  I'm beginning to think that a major impediment may be ideological.  Transit must involve the government, to build the systems, obviously.  Even though it can be argued that the times are ripe for arguing for greater government involvement in the economy,, transit is too government-oriented for the current conventional wisdom, apparently in the environmental arena as well.

  But what is so insane about that statement is that mass transit requires no more government involvement than car-culture, and in fact, at least historically, it involved significantly less.

  If you recall, before the auto, the United States had a much smaller government.  Cities also had extensive urban rail, run by private companies.  Los Angeles, the current hub of everything car-culture for the last 60 years, used to have the largest urban rail system in the world, over 1,100 miles of it.  And it was all the product of private enterprise - government at any level was not involved.  The right-of-ways were purchased, the tracks were built, and the service was operated all without public monies.

  Then came the Great Depression, and the New Deal, and the government decided to make automobiles the de-facto national mode of transportation.  Thousand upon thousands of miles of auto-roadways were built, not by private companies, but by Federal and Local governments, using public monies.  Not surprisingly, by the end of the 1950's, private interurban rail transit in the United States was dead.  How could it survive in the face of heavily subsidized competition in the form of the government sponsored car-culture?

  Mass transit did return, as subsidized "public transit", to meet the needs of those who could not afford the high cost of entry  into the car culture.  Thus mass transit became not a mode of transportation, but a mode of mobility welfare. To put things in perspective, whereas Los Angeles used to have 1,100+ miles of urban rail before the government got involved, we now have 73 miles of urban rail.  And it costs untold billions in tax payer money.

  So what happened was we went from a completely private and functional transportation system to an inefficient and completely government run transportation system.  Do not be fooled when car-culture wonks tell you that the automobile is not subsidized, for it has always been subsidized.  Mass transit, on the other hand, was born and functioned off the American ideals of private enterprise, and the subsidization of the car mutated transit into the form we see today.

  People will say, "the interurbans died because they could not be profitable in the marketplace".  Well, number one, it was not a fair marketplace and, number two, when is that last time you saw a profit-loss report for an auto-roadway? Was the Arroyo-Seco Parkway - the first freeway built in the US - profitable? Of course not.

  The question is, can our transportation system ever return to its roots?  I'm doubtful.  Things will only get more convoluted as everyone vies for a tiny piece of that shrinking funding pie.  But, imagine if you will, had the government not intervened in the first half of the 20th century.  Imagine had our transit system been allowed to grow naturally.  I picture a balanced system where cities remained compact, the most economical modes of walking, bicycling, and mass transit were used on a daily basis, and personal automobiles were used for weekend journeys on private roads out to the nearby low-density countryside.

  A man can dream, can't he?

  MetroRiderLA - The Los Angeles Transit Oriented Lifestyle Blog

  On Transit investment should and will be a part of the peak oil solution posted 1 year, 8 months ago 39 Responses