Hartford CT - From The Advocate paper, a story regarding a coalition of transit operators as well as business and environmental agencies who have formed a group called Transit for Connecticut. The Transit for Connecticut group is doing am 8 week, $50,000 study on ways to increase service and the costs involved.
The group is seeking to have transit subsidies increased so that bus service can be increased. Over the years, the subsidies have remained stagnant while costs have increased which has led to many service cuts.
While it's laudable for wanting to increase service, I certainly hope the group looks at the waste occurring in what service is currently running as well as waste that occurs within the administration.
Simply giving more money to public transit if the operations are loaded with waste is not the answer to improve service. Pittsburgh is a prime example of what can happen when you simply pump more money into an operation that has massive internal waste. For over a decade, the more money you gave them, the more new ways to waste it were found by the spendthrift administration.
I have not run across a transit system serving a medium to large city yet that is not loaded with internal waste. Waste that costs millions each year that, if eliminated, could go towards increasing service where it's needed.
In my opinion, simply doing a study that says "we need more bus service and this is what it will cost you" is not exactly the type of study needed. What is needed is a study that examines existing service and the administration and operating areas looking for ways to trim costs first. Once that is done, then you present the cause for more service.
Sadly, most transit advocates don't want to look at the internal waste that is helping to keep service from expanding. As the advocacy group in Pittsburgh as well as many others across the country show me, they are more interested in just getting more money tossed at the service while burying their head in the sand over the bleeding of money from inefficient operations and management of the transit system they want so badly.
The other aspect they seem to be shooting for isn't so much about the fact that transit can save people money but instead are pulling out the environmentalist card which has failed just about every time it's been tried. The fact of the matter is that you could double the transit fleet, have it all powered by electricity and the impact would still be negligible on the environment. Transit for the wrong reason, such as environmentalism, is more costly and wasteful than a well planned operation that focuses on moving people from where they are to where they want to go.
While I hope the Transit for Connecticut group succeeds in obtaining additional funding, they'll be in the same position in a few years from now if they don't address the internal waste which will only drain off that money.
2 comments:
How does an independant citizen go about measuring the waste of a transit system?
Much of how I measure the waste of a transit system is simply paying attention to news stories and observing what the transit system is doing. I also have varous contacts in the industry which the average person doesn't have to provide additional information.
For example, with my local transit system. There were numerous news reports over the years regarding questionable expenditures. At the same time, the system was screaming for more money as well as threatening massive route cuts and fare hikes. During all of this, they were painting the buses in every color found in the DuPont paint catalog, ordering buses with every available option, building an unneeded subway extention (in a subway that can barely handle the flow of LRV's now) creating new procedures that just generated paperwork and finally, placing service secondary to the "image" that the system was trying to create.
I've observed the same trend at many transit operations across North America. Transit systems crying for money and threatening to cut service and raise fares but rushing to build costly projects that they ultimately can't afford to operate as well as creating more administrative proceedures that do little more than shuffle paper and focusing on their marketing image more than the actual service.
Transit is expensive to operate, even at peak efficiency. The problem as I see it is that there are too many systems that aren't anywhere close to being efficient and when they get more money, they go on a spending spree.
In Pennsylvania, you can see the difference between the wasteful transit systems and the efficient transit systems. Just read the papers and see how the various systems are responding to the funding crisis in the state. While PAT and SEPTA are crying the blues, many smaller systems which have to split about 2% of the total transit funding in the state are expanding service. One must ask, why are two systems that take 98% of the funding in such dire straits while smaller operations that get a fraction of 2% of the rest of the funding doing so well. The big part of the answer is that they aren't loaded with an administration that goes out of its way to find new ways to spend money and they are focused on providing service, not frills.
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