And maybe, it is time to put aside extremistic and fundamentalistic thinking, and start working on solutions.

All that needs a political will…

Maybe worthwile to think about that at the next election day…

The inner city services have not grown so much, and the people I know from Philly criticize them as not very good in general. Yes, it’s a bad thing that Philadelphia’s subway is controlled by suburbanites, but consider the alternative. James Carville referred to Pennsylvania as Philly on one side, Pittsburgh on the other side, and Alabama in the middle. You’d much rather have Philadelphia’s transit controlled from King of Prussia than from Harrisburg.

Another example is what has happened in Cleveland. The Ohio Legislature passed enabling legislation for regional transit agencies in 1974, and the Greater Cleveland RTA was created the next year. RTA bought and absorbed most smaller operators, but a few survived as semi-autonomous divisions well into the 90′s. The consistent pattern has been that suburban lines have been eliminated, and the agency has done exactly nothing to work with any of the 60 municipalities in Cuyahoga County (surface area comparable to the city of LA) on dealing with transit-killing sprawl. Not only has RTA largely killed itself, but none of the surrounding counties ever joined the district because–again–they were convinced that suburban sales taxes would be used to run more service in the inner city. That’s why there is no regional rail in Cleveland–none of the suburban counties will accept the reality that the Feds want the designated regional transit operator to at least oversee a rail system. The money has to come through the MPO, and the MPO (NOACA–N.E. Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency) points to RTA as the go-to.

California is very much like the Midwest and much of the East Coast. They are utterly fixated on “local control,” to the point that there are places in California where you can’t figure out just who the hell runs the damn buses. In LA County, the non-MTA services are still MTA-funded. Some of the systems–Santa Monica Municipal Bus, Long Beach Transit, Montebello Bus Lines–long predate MTA/RTD. Some–Antelope Valley Transit, Foothill Transit, LADOT–were created and/or funded to address local concerns, which were perceived to be a lesser concern for MTA. In the Bay Area, there is a strong logic in the scarcity of mergers. Who would merge with Golden Gate Transit? The bus operations are part of the same special district as the Bridge; while there are no other operators in Marin County, there are at least five operators in Sonoma County. Could they be merged with GGT? Maybe. As it is though, the SMART train line follows the same corridor as the trunk GGT routes (up the 101), but somehow SMART is separate from GGT. That is absurd. You have a better point to make in the East Bay. AC Transit serves most (but not all) of the urbanized shoreline, from Richmond south to Milpitas. Within Alameda County, this excludes Union City (small system) and Livermore and the Amador Valley (WHEELS). Contra Costa County is even worse–Walnut Creek and Concord are served by County Connection, Antioch and Pittsburg by Tri-Delta, and Hercules and Pinole by WestCAT. It’s local politics. Same goes when you head north into Napa, Solano and Yolo Counties. Why is it there are five regional rail operators in the Bay Area–CalTrain, BART, Altamont Commuter Express, Capital Corridor JPA, and SMART? Yes, it’s ridiculous, but there’s not much point in criticizing California’s insanity when the Feds do nothing to discourage this fragmentation.

There has to be some way to do away with these “dysfunctional labor contracts” you mentioned, Michael, but I suppose that would mean Congressional legislation, and I wonder if the unions are at the front of the line ahead of the providers and users of public transit as far as Congressional favors are concerned.

Don’t forget contract law.

A collective bargaining agreement is a binding contract between labor and management. They can’t be done away with except through legal or arbitration channels.

Also, virtually all contracts contain a severability provision. If one portion of a contract is found to be invalidated, it doesn’t mean the entire CBA is rendered null and void.

One way to void a CBA wholesale is through bankruptcy. However, deliberately running an entity into bankruptcy for the purpose of shirking an agreement is illegal.

Michael Setty probably witnessed this firsthand. The city of Vallejo, Ca., had to file for bankruptcy protection because it could no longer make the compensation outlays for its workers. The city and its police and firefighters’ unions had signed a plum agreement that provided for very generous pension plans, but the economy made the agreement untenable.

At the same time, as someone who uses public transit, I wonder if any of the people who make the decisions at the public transit system level, or who work for APTA, ever believe in the service enough to actually ride it themselves regularly, and whether such belief in that product, or lack thereof, affects whether they get more money, whether through local tax increase referenda, or state or federal funds lobbying.

Give it a rest.

The nine-county San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose area, and the six-county Los Angeles area, from Ventura to Palm Springs and El Centro, each have dozens of big and small transit systems. If these systems were unified, they would be easier to market, cheaper to administer, be more convenient for customers, and would save money, hopefully enough to make up for the loss of state funds.