breaking gridlock between ears

beyondcongestionbetwenears is admitedly a play on MovingBeyondCongestion, the transit agencies push for mucho moola. But this is a commentary yours truly penned several years ago on a bicycle riders conference.

BREAKING THE GRIDLOCK BETWEEN THE EARS
What will it take to sharply reduce the role of the automobile in American life? Or just in Chicago? Something more drastic, say, than simply "sustaining activism," the theme of the Break the Gridlock conference, which, in this town for the past fifteen years or so, has amounted to little more than a kid pestering daddy for more allowance. Rather than playing neglected little kid to the unsympathetic governmental parent, activists will have to play parent, or even child psychologist, to wayward, wasteful government.

It means, in short, making the overgrown brat handle its allowance properly. Civic and commercial life takes place in a sea of monetary currents. Whether it benefits the people (or special interests) like the warmth of the Gulf Stream or sucks them under in a vicious undertow depends on government policies, those largely taxation and spending. One important general principle is that beneficiaries (except indigents) should pay for their benefits, that large social enterprises should cover their own costs. That is a principle little observed in transportation affairs.

Highway users pay far from the whole cost of highways. The long standing joke is that new expressways only create more congestion. In other words, demand outstrips supply, and, by elementary economics, highways are woefully underpriced. Something like one-third of police budgets and one-sixth of fire budgets are highway related. They do not pick up health costs, whether ftom pollution or accidents. Whether they even pick up local street repair costs is an open question. Daniel Lazare, The War on the Cities, is perhaps the best compilation of the costs the automobile has inflicted on the rest of society. In Europe highways are supposed to be profit centers. Whe ever heard of making a profit from highways here, except toll surpluses to fund more toll roads?

The privately financed railroads, on the other hand, are over capacity now and, facing a doubling of traffic in coming years, cannot raise the private capital needed. Why, for all the hubbub over carbon taxes in the past decade, have depletion allowances (26 United States Code 611 et. seq.) gone unmentioned since the sixties? Not just for oil, they are a blatant subsidy for extractive industries, for the profligate use of natural resources. By a 1981 Supreme Court decision, they are not even limited to the costs of extraction. If curiously enough applied to timber, they were disallowed to salt from the Great Salt Lake on grounds it is replenishable.

Meanwhile alternatives to oil fail in the marketplace and recyclers have to scramble for business. Throwing money at public transportation is no answer. In Chicago it will have a funding problem as long as the cost of the rush hour is essentially the cost of the transit system and as long as the downtown office industry can send everyone home at 5 without paying diddly squat for transit. Meanwhile CTA nickel-dimes neighborhood off-peak service to death, just what merchants need for the 1% sales tax that pays most CTA expenses. Meanwhile the 2002 Central Area Plan calls for a one-third increase in downtown office space and corresponding CTA service. Federal funding for transit investment removes cost considerations and creates a junior military-industrial complex. It also has a magnetic appeal to the grantsmanship of Alinskyite activism.

Cable cars came and went in two decades when costs were a consideration, but now third rail is enshrined as the prime rainmaker. Billions for that, but never mind a monorail that can do a lot more for a lot less. Accountability is not what you expect but what you inspect. It is a parental function, one requiring adult expectations, not childish favor-seeking. Accountability activism in Chicago pretty well ceased when the Chicago 1992 Committee did a study of poverty programs subsidizing south loop development about fifteen years ago. That immediately drew hostile editorials from the Tribune on the unquestionable worth of south loop development, eventually an editorial on the Low Income Support Corporation reaching an accomodation with the activists. Alinskyite activism, prominent in the Break the Gridlock flyer, has its definite limitations. It is great at dramatizing issues and getting people involved, but its superficial analysis and ingrained grantsmanship too often leave it playing the little kid, with his own gridlock between the ears.

William F. Wendt, Jr.