My comments on the P-G article on the June 8 transit protest

I posted a long comment on this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article:
http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/transportation/protesters-arrested-at-transit-cut-rally-639581/

The comments had less to do with the protest, and more with Port Authority's long-standing funding issues. With only minor corrections, here is my post.

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This is long: ~730 words, excluding this line. So, you can TL;DR it, or actually learn something. Your call.

I have read the article and all 14 comments so far. I see two patterns: One, a set of people who repeat the oft-repeated mantras of PAT mismanagement and union greediness. I can hardly blame them. There is a grain of truth therein, but they are only two factors in a hugely complex equation. The second pattern comes from people who have gotten very closely involved in the situation over the years (I've been in it over 20), and know how complex this equation is. What one commenter said is true: PAT did some serious house-cleaning, and a complete rearrangement of the routing system to make it more cost-effective, an exact response to the demands in the 2005 funding fight, and implemented in Act 44 of 2007. Look at the numbers: Ridership rose 6% despite a 15% service cut. Thus, if all you have to say is to complain about unions and mismanagement, you lose much credibility for any other point you try to make.

While it's true the city has half the population it had 50 years ago (2010=305K, 1960=604K), the county has changed considerably less in comparison (2010=1.2M, 1960=1.6M its peak). The real interesting comparison is to 1930, when all public transit was provided by private, tax-paying companies. County population was much the same, but far more lived in the city itself (city=670K, county 1.37M). The population in these outer areas was in dense communities with their own, smaller, privately run transit systems, which became part of PAT when it was formed. The problem came after suburban sprawl began after WW2, and continues to this day. If PAT made any truly bad decisions, it was to try to serve these sprawly outer areas. People became too spread out to make transit cost-effective, but had enough clout to demand the areas be served, so they got the service, and simply expected the taxpayer to pick up the tab.

If you live in a house built since 1950 or so, on a street that was built since 1950 or so, YOU are the problem. Since you moved 15 to 30 miles out, instead of staying in the city where your (great-)grandparents lived, you are expecting the taxpayer to fund the cost of both transit *and* all those wide, suburban thoroughfares for your cars to travel on. The state cannot afford to fix roads and bridges OR fund transit. Something has to give, and really both are (raising taxes to fix roads is a different argument, though intimately related), but transit is getting the headlines.

What's getting cut now? These outer areas, mainly, though inner ones like Troy Hill and Mount Washington are getting caught in the same net. The bigger problem is that it costs lots more per person to serve the outer areas, much more than can be recovered through fares. While that's where a lot of the people are, the jobs are Downtown. Those jobs provide the income for the people paying the bulk of the STATE's income tax revenue. So it truly is in the state's interest to help underwrite the cost of public transit. But will Governor Corbett and the GOP-led House and Senate do that? I'm guessing no; they're slaves to Grover Norquist, Roger Ailes, and Rush Limbaugh. It won't happen. We're screwed.

Move the jobs from Downtown to the suburbs? That will be an option for some employers, but it causes more problems than it solves. Sure, you can commute from Port Vue to Cranberry, Kennedy to Monroeville, Aspinwall to Southpointe, when your employer moves operations there, but who would want to? And all the resulting traffic from everyone else doing the same thing? No, losing transit service is only the headline grabber of the moment. The real problem will be when decisions are made *because* the buses are cut. People will move. Employers will leave metro Pittsburgh altogether. And surely, any national company looking to set up shop will simply cross Pittsburgh off the list of places to even think about.

Would you like a proposed solution? How about this? It would surely help if the "non-profits" chipped in. UPMC has 54,000 employees. If it just out-and-out paid $1K apiece for an annual bus pass for each of them, that's $54M of PAT's $64M deficit. Play with the numbers, get buy-in from other companies to do something similar, and you've solved the deficit problem without touching taxes. I'm waiting to hear a concrete suggestion from anyone else.

Musings upon my daughter's graduation

Eight hours ago, I was sitting in a football stadium, watching as my little girl, my youngest child, graduated from high school. In three short months, she will be off to college and starting life. But that is a blog post for another day. Right now is to reflect on how she got here.

North Allegheny is a huge suburban school district, with over 8,000 students. Maybe a sub-title for this post might be "Never anything but the car," as that aptly describes how NA works. Every child, every time he or she goes to school, every time a parent needs to visit the school, a car (or school bus) is involved. With almost no exceptions, nobody walks to school. Even those living in houses bordering a school's property are carted to school on four (or six) wheels. No sidewalks, no trail system, no bicycles, no bike racks, no public transit of any sort. It's all done by cars and school buses.

Whatever. It works. Six hundred forty-five graduates. Of them, 158 have grade point averages of 4.0 or better, and it's not grade inflation. These kids are well educated. My own daughter pulled a 3.8 GPA for third-tier, mere "with honors". These are the kids who got 600 on each section of the SAT -- when they took it in seventh grade as a placement test for some other program. This is the school district whose marching band is so good, it played in President Obama's inauguration parade, the only one in Pennsylvania to do so. Night after night for years, we "parental units" were called upon for homework help, and the resources I drew upon to provide that assistance were more what I learned in college than high school.

I look at my daughter and think, "What did we do right?" and the answer is, a lot of things, starting at birth, but even that is not the whole story. It's the district, and the ability for the automobile to provide the backbone of support, from kids who oversleep the alarm clock, to needing to be shuttled home after school, or carting an art project or large musical instrument to and from, to getting kids to another one's house for a study session. It also does not hurt that everyone in this district is well paid, lives in a huge house, and owns three cars apiece.

Nearly every child drives by 17. The district has two high schools, one for 9th and 10th grades, and another for 11th and 12, and the junior high has about 30 designated parking spaces for student parking. Yes, enough 10th graders apparently need to drive to school rather than take the school bus that got them to the same school the prior year, that space is provided for them. That is how embedded the car is in the North Allegheny culture.

I can only wonder if we've reached a peak of sorts. What will happen to this district when it no longer becomes feasible for each family to keep three cars on the road? Are we there already? I don't have to think too hard to come up with a smattering of families who have moved, houses foreclosed upon, or a parent left to take a job after a long period of unemployment. Even in my own case, I muddled through a few years of austere existence, pretty much unable to do little more than provide food, housing and heat, and that only because I had only one car and no car payment. If I had had to replace a car six years ago, I don't know how I would have continued to live here. You have to be rich to live in North Allegheny. I honestly don't know how everyone else manages.

Well, we will see what happens when the frog boils. I've been saying for a while that life will change, big time, when daily use of a car becomes unsupportable. The effects will be felt in areas like this much sooner than in walkable areas. It will be less a matter of "how do we make do with only one car?" and more "why would anyone want to live out here if a car is so necessary?" And when those choices are made on a large scale, the people who have said means will choose not to live here but somewhere else instead, and leave NA for those who have no other choice but to live "out here". This might be a generation away, maybe only 10 years. Thus, I write this down so as to take a snapshot, to preserve a glimpse of how good it was, and how good my daughter had it, when it all still worked.

Multi-modal commuting: Getting the motorcycle inspected

I truly use anything but a car to get around. I have not entirely rid myself of the four-wheeled beast, but I use it as little as possible. Feet, bike, bus, motorcycle -- all of these get me where I'm going, with little to zero help from automobiles.

As an example of how I put this to use, allow me to illustrate the process of getting my motorcycle inspected. It took a bit of planning and a bit of bus fare, but I was able to get the motorcycle to an inspection station, and pick it up from it, without needing to be driven or dropped off, and without unnecessary delays (such as having to walk six miles home or anything like that).

On Friday, I called the inspection shop and arranged to have it inspected on Monday. The problem here is that it is not possible to walk out of the shop and catch a bus into town. Crossing the street is somewhere between impossible and suicidal. You just don't. Nor is there any close bus stop by walking up or down the street. Nor is the bus service there all that great.

Solution! Use a bicycle! Of course, sure, ride the motorcycle TO the shop, and ride a bicycle FROM the shop. OK, fine, how do you get the bicycle TO the shop without using a car, or getting a ride, or walking six miles, or being stranded? One word: Planning.

This was the plan: Saturday, I planned to go on a bike ride in the city. I would ride the bicycle to the bike ride, ride the ride, then ride the bicycle to the motorcycle shop. There I would tie it to a post, and catch a bus home. This actually worked pretty well. Monday, I motorcycled to the shop, dropped it off, hopped on the bicycle, and biked the rest of the way into work. No bus fare necessary.

The motorcycle was inspected, and ready for me to pick up whenever. Note that I did not have to wait hours in a waiting area to get the work done. However, the shop closed before I was able to get it Monday, necessitating biking home. Tuesday, I used a bus to get close to the shop, and walked the rest of the way. This was not all that easy, as there was still a quarter-mile hike from the nearest feasible bus stop to the inspection shop. Nor was it all that pleasant of a walk, as oncoming traffic sped by at 50+ mph, and a parked pickup truck (a man working on a billboard) blocked the shoulder, forcing me into the driving lane, but I managed to live through it.

Once I got the motorcycle, I could then drive it the rest of the way to work.

Thus:
* No extra trips
* No use of a car, ever
* No having to wait anywhere, except small amounts to catch a bus
* I got some exercise
* I was able to work in the drop-off and pick-up along with my regular movements
* I was able to do all the logistics myself, not relying on anyone to help me

Net effect, some simple planning, use of a bicycle, multi-modal travel, and thinking outside the box, allowed me to avoid use of a car where a car and additional help would have been what anyone else would have arranged.

On the new 4-foot bicycle passing law

A few weeks ago, a new state law, HB170, took effect requiring Pennsylvania motorists to allow four feet of room when passing a bicyclist on a roadway. This was met with a large amount of negativity towards bicyclists, from calls to ban them from streets, to outright threats to mow them down. Indeed, we do have police record of one such case of a motorist repeatedly attempting to run down a cyclist on a Pittsburgh city street. Clearly this is a serious matter.

Let us please dispel the hostility. First and foremost, this is about public safety, the ability for all of us to get from A to B, and arriving at B in the same condition as when having left A. I know too many people, several of them personally, who suffered serious injury or were killed, for simply going about their business while on two wheels, following all the rules. Twenty Pennsylvania cyclists died in 2010 after being hit by cars. This law was needed. It was not developed in a vacuum.

Let us please agree on what this law is not about. We are not talking about cyclists who do not obey the rules. We are not talking about cyclists who endanger other users of the roads, be they pedestrians, motorists, or other cyclists. We are not talking about those who blow through red lights and stop signs without a thought or look. A good many of us do follow the rules. Please allow us the respect we deserve, and let law enforcement deal with the rest appropriately.

Note as well that a lot more of us are cycling. Maybe it's the better weather, maybe it's the better economy, maybe it's $4 gas, maybe it's fewer and farther between buses, but a lot more people are on two wheels than there used to be. Really this is a good thing. They're doing you a favor! Every bike you see means one more parking spot available, one less car squeezing into a tunnel, and that much less demand for gasoline to drive your cost that much higher, sooner.

We cyclists do not want to cause you distress any more than we want to be injured. We would all be very happy to let you get by and go on your way, but it would help for you to understand what we are dealing with. The law says, and said already, that cyclists have to stay as far to the right as practicable, but this is subjective. The law also says, and said already, that we do have the right to use the road, and to take the full lane whenever necessary. You may not see the pothole, the pile of loose gravel, the tree branch, the dead raccoon, or the drain grate that can swallow our tires whole, but we can. We may also size up the upcoming curve and decide it is not safe for you even to try passing us, and make that choice for you. Getting in the left half of the lane is our prerogative, and necessary for our own safety. Whether you agree with it or not, you have to accept that, and respect our choices.

A second item you may not be aware of is doors. Many cyclists have been killed or injured because of plowing into a just-opened door of a parked car, or, in trying to avoid them, swerving into the path of a vehicle moving faster. Since parked cars are a hazard for bikes, we get left and take the lane, or should. In a narrow street with a lot of parked cars, as a motorist, you should anticipate this. If you are a cyclist, insist on it. Get left. Take the lane. They can have it when you're done with it, but right now, it's yours, and they are just going to have to wait. Motorists, there is no way to sugarcoat this. Accept it, get used to it, and stop complaining.

In slowing you down for all of five seconds, I appeal to your sense of fairness. The postal worker drives a little delivery truck, the garbage collector drives a big one. While making their rounds, you have to slow for a few seconds, and then get around them. You do not question the need for this. All we are asking is that you give us the same respect you give them.

One reason we do have so many cars is because this law did not already exist. We cyclists hear it all the time: More people would bicycle, if it were not so dangerous. It is dangerous, or is perceived to be, because of the absence of this law. I am 53, but have been riding on the road since I was 6. Your small child should be able to to ride on the road with a level of safety equal to that of an adult. This law seeks to eliminate that fear, at least so other adults can feel empowered to at least try using a bicycle from time to time.

Allow me to address some of the common opposition to the new rule.

• Bicyclists do not pay for the roads, so should not be on them. Bicyclists are taxpayers, and taxes pay for the roads. At the local level -- boroughs, townships, cities and counties -- from paving to plowing to traffic lights, property taxes pay for most road maintenance. At the state and federal levels, there is a fuel tax that should pay for roads, but neither has been raised in years, it has never been indexed to inflation, and needs now far outstrip what those taxes bring in. You are not paying for the roads, either. Cars today also have better fuel economy than when these taxes were implemented, so we have more motorists using the roads, per fuel-tax dollar brought in. If motorists paid for the roads properly, we would likely be looking at a large increase in the gas tax. Taking some of the traffic off the roads lessens the need for taxes to be raised, to accommodate more cars, so each bike you see is actually saving you money.
• Bicycles should be restricted to trails and parks. Allow me to make a comparison here. Should cars be restricted to using only superhighways? We all share that "last mile", so we have to get along.
• Cyclists should have to be licensed and insured, and their vehicles registered. Anyplace this has been tried ends up costing government much more than any benefit obtained or savings gained. Also noteworthy is that the calls for this come from some of the same people who are arguing for smaller government with less interference in private matters.

What would help, however, is if all cyclists were educated in proper use of bicycles and roads, from childhood on up. What would also help is if all motorists were educated on proper use of cars and roads, from childhood on up. We as a country do neither. We do more to promote both bicycles and cars as toys, from toddlerhood on forward, and our driver licensing is the most lenient in the world. Yet we have created a world where we have become dependent on one toy to the exclusion of the other. All we are asking is to level the playing field, at least a little bit.

To reiterate: This is about people, not bicycles. People, and keeping them safe. That is far more important than a moment's inconvenience. Please, let's just get along.

Toward a way to pay for a transit system

For almost half a century, Port Authority of Allegheny County, metro Pittsburgh's public transportation system, annually faces the question of figuring out how to pay the bills for the coming fiscal year. Their accounting staff crunch the numbers, calculating salaries, fuel, pensions, repairs, health care, maintenance, etc., on the expense side, and fares, tax subsidy expected, and the odd nickel and dime from advertisements on buses, on the revenue side. By law they must make ends meet. Some years are easier than others. Recent ones have not been easy.

This year, the hangman's noose awaits. The governor is not going to ride in on a white horse and save the day. This governor and this legislature have decided it is not going to fund transit, and there's precious little hope things will change. "Can't fund your local transit system? Not the state's problem, we can't pay our own bills, let alone yours. Fix it yourself."

So, let's do that. Never mind Harrisburg. I hate to say it, but they might be doing us a favor. Maybe we should figure it out ourselves. That said, I herewith put forth a plan for doing just that.

A review of some facts, with very rough numbers:
* It costs roughly $330 million to run the system the way it was designed.
* There are about 100,000 warm bodies who ride the system, however counted. Call it 110K with the occasional riders, just to make numbers divide nicely.

$330M / 110K people = $3K/year for each of those bodies, if the entire system was paid for strictly out of fares. That is far and away too much for one person to pay to use a transit system. But just for sake of argument, that shows the scope of the problem. If no tax subsidy and no employer or university or company underwrote any cost, each rider would be out $3K. This is still cheaper than owning and maintaining a car, but not by much.

To make clear, I am talking about running the system as it was designed to run, before routes and runs were cut in March 2011. Drivers have the same wages and benefits as what they have under the current contract, or at least that number is the same, for sake of argument here. No cuts to anything.

The goal here is in finding an acceptable balance among fares, tax subsidy, ad revenue, and corporate and university help. Within the realm of tax subsidy, there are various potential levels. Right now it is being done entirely by state and county subsidy. Federal and city/municipal numbers do not enter into it. The problem has been that the state has routinely been asked to kick in 60% or better of the cost, and that isn't going to happen anymore.

Rather orthogonal to this discussion, it would help if more people decided to rely on the transit system on a regular basis. If there were 165K instead of 110K riders, the out-of-pocket expense would be $2K, not $3K, per person, per year. Because demand would be higher, so would expenses, but we'll leave the number crunching to the experts. Just accept that the overall cost per rider would be less, the more potential riders there are. That's a long-range goal.

Now for some bright ideas. I'll start with fare policy, then move on to revenue sources.
* Remove the zone system. Just one zone. It either pays to run a bus to the hinterlands, or it doesn't. (Edit: Port Authority did propose a premium on long-haul trips from the outer suburbs in 2010, and the idea has merit.)
* Revamp transfers to use a timed-expiration system. Pay one fare, use that for two hours, whether you ride one bus or five to get where you're going.
* $2 fare, whether you ride one bus or five in that two hours.
* $6 all-day fare, whether you ride two buses or 10.
* $1,000 annual pass, unlimited riding. $500/6mo, $250/3mo, $85/mo, $25/week.

The point of this is to support using a system which requires multiple trips to get from A to B. Make fare payment a non-issue.

Now for some revenue.
* I am expecting that 1/3 of the cost will come from voluntary fares, whether at the farebox or a prepaid pass. That's not far from reality. Easily within reach, no real change.
* Get another 1/3 from various tax sources. I would do it with real estate taxes, focusing more on land than buildings. That's less than we're getting now. The mix of taxes will have to change, and I'm being intentionally vague, but 33% instead of 65% of the pot from current tax sources.
* For the remaining 1/3, I expect companies to chip in, big time. We already have Pitt and CMU contracting to allow their communities to have unlimited access to the system.

To get this rolling, I would impose an avoidable tax on all companies, assessed on employee headcount. Without avoiding it, companies would pay $500 per year (numbers are negotiable) per employee to the county to help pay for transit; that's about $42/month or $2/workday. This can be avoided by arranging with the transit company to purchase monthly bus passes for their employees, using part of the employees' regular earnings but pre-tax. This way, the employee gets a pre-tax benefit, anyone in the family can use the pass if the employee decides to drive to work every day, and PAT gets the full value of the fare paid. Alternatively, the employer can simply buy the passes outright and give them to employees, taking a tax write-off on the cost of the fare paid. Federal tax law already supports this.

The main thing is to put pre-paid fare out on the streets in large amounts, preferably in the hands of people who might not otherwise use the system. In doing this, companies would come up with $110M. That's only about 110K passes; at least twice that many people work inside city limits each workday.

The real main thing, of course, is to pay for a transit system when the state will not.

This, I think, will get the job done, raising $330M annually.

We all know what we have to lose by NOT doing this.

To the PAT Board, 2012-02-29

February 29 @5:27pm speech to the PAT Board and CEO Steve Bland

Honorable members of the Board, and Mr. Bland, good afternoon, I am Stuart Strickland, from McCandless Township, a regular rider of the O12 McKnight Flyer, 12 McKnight and soon to be cut 2 Mount Royal bus routes. I already lost my Perry Highway routes in the 2011 service cuts and so walk most of a mile each way to get a bus every day.

As every properly informed person in the room knows, PAT didn’t cause this problem, state government did, through its persistent refusal to accept that public transportation does require tax subsidy to run properly. As every properly informed politician knows, spending money on public transit actually earns money for the state in allowing the wheels of commerce to turn efficiently in the denser urban areas that generate most of the state’s revenues. But the misinformed and willfully ignorant are in power at the moment, so here we are.

What can PAT do? The short answer is to convince 50,000 people in Pittsburgh – who do not now use public transit – to drop $990 or $1,430 as I just did to buy an annual bus pass. Selling 50,000 passes would raise the $60 million PAT needs to avoid the cuts. That would do it, that would fix the problem, plain and simple, without any help from government.

This points out the real problem. In the last 30 years or so, 50,000 Pittsburgh families have abandoned transit, choosing instead to spend five times what an annual pass costs, to have a car instead of using a bus system. How do you reverse 30 years of that in two months? You don’t do it by threatening to cut service. But to emphasize, it is not getting 50,000 current riders to drop upwards of a grand on an annual pass, but 50,000 who are not paying fare now. It would also help greatly to reinstate the six-month pass, charging for five-and-a-half months, even three months for two-and-three-quarters, bringing the out-of-pocket cost down to that of an average muffler or brake job. And that’s who you have to sell it to, not riders, but people trying to keep two or three or four cars on the road, and going broke doing so.

In the short run, PAT can and should conduct more than a PR campaign, it needs an anti-BS campaign. There is so much misinformation out there that no rational conversation can take place without first undoing the misinformation, person by person, company by company. Selling thousand-dollar items on a potentially shrinking system requires a leap of faith. I took it, but I was already paying fare. Now to get 50,000 people to do likewise.

Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak.

My letter to Rep. Mike Turzai, and the first ConnectCard

February 17, 2012

House Majority Leader Mike Turzai

Dear Mike,

What good is a job if you can't get to it? I disagree with your views about Port Authority. I speak as a rider and historian, one who studies transit systems worldwide. Contrary to popular belief, Port Authority is not mismanaged, its staff and CEO and union drivers are not overpaid, and it is run efficiently. Five or ten or more years ago you could probably say that, but not today; 10 or 20 years ago you could say their unions were to blame but not today. 

There is a simple way to solve Port Authority's problems and a simpler one. The simple one, which you will oppose, is to hand them the $50M more they need this year and every year. The simpler one requires you to do nothing legislatively, other than change your tune, and that is to encourage 50,000 families in the area who do not now use transit, to spend over $1,000 apiece to buy an annual bus pass (photo attached, with receipt, purchased Feb. 16). 50,000 passes at an average $1,200 apiece = $60 million. Problem solved, you didn't have to do a thing. Every single one of those 50K families will likely halve their transportation expense by using transit instead of a second/third car. In my book, that's pro-family, a major talking point for Republicans.

To get to that, you and the other Republican leadership, and your friends at the Allegheny Institute and KQV 1410 and the Tribune-Review and various talk show hosts, need to stop trash talking the Port Authority. The system works -- I ride it daily -- and it would work better if it didn't have a piano hanging on a thin rope over its head year after year. Their biggest internal problem is not unions but rather a shortage of white collar staff to administer information systems to make it easier for people to use the system to get around. As an example, in the fully operational pre-4/2011 system, I knew how to do a triple transfer from my home in McCandless just off Perry by Perrymont Road -- using a 9 Perry Hwy to O1 Ross Flyer to G2 West Busway to 32 Campbells Run, to get to school at the University of Phoenix campus in Robinson. Most people cannot figure this out, but they could if they had better information, which PAT could provide if they had the computer professionals to implement software systems, which they could hire if they had not had to reduce their I.T. staff in 2001, 2004, 2007, 2010 and 2011, and likely again this year, which they would not have had to do if they had been funded properly. Fund them, let them put the TDP-designed system in place (as required by Act 44, as requested by Republicans in the 2005 budget deal), thus making it convenient for people to get around using transit, and the system can grow itself.

PNC is building yet another skyscraper Downtown. It will house 3,000 workers, many of whom will be your constituents in the North Hills. It will have parking for 300. I don't think a couple hundred people living in your district are going to bicycle up Federal Street at the end of every day. (Try it sometime!) But how else are they going to get there? Already the O12 bus is filling to capacity at Showcase Park & Ride; I know because I'm five bus stops down McKnight from it and I'm already standing going into town, on the longer 60-foot articulated buses. You would cut this further? Privatizing the system will not fix that problem.

This constant fear of cuts, this constant "always going broke", reinforces the idea that transit is not reliable. Stop it! This goes absolutely counter to your efforts at job creation. Kill enough transit, big companies will leave Pittsburgh. Maybe some will go to Cranberry, but some may go to Charlotte or Cleveland.

Your anti-transit talk is NOT helpful. Change your mind or change your tune. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Stuart Strickland