Jeger wrote:
If a company/city/country...anyone, wants to operate a public transportation service, it should be a self supporting operation. It should be able to run on the tolls it collects from the riders. If the operation cannot support itself it doesnt need to be there, and I dont want any of my money going to it. Would you buy stock in a company that you knew was going to fail?
Normally I would agree with you but it is exactly that reason that most
transit companies have discontinued service. As more people commute by
car, the fewer riders on busses, trains, etc. Fewer riders= less revenue.
Profits drop, and service eventually stops. Meanwhile, more and more
people commute by car, traffic increases, and so does pollution.
There is no way I could start my own transit Co. I would never be able
to get enough investors to even get started. They would all say "are you
stupid? No one is ever going to ride it!" Given the examples from the past
it is hard to argue this point. So the question is: How do you get people
out of their comfortable, beloved cars and into public transit?
Now, I don't know how it is where you live, but where I live (Jacksonville
area) traffic sucks!
Tax revenue would have to be generated locally to solve a local broblem.
There will be lots of people who would be against such a tax because they
believe no one will use a public transit system. Yet they will continue to
complain about traffic. Orlando is an example of a public transit system
that works efficiently and produces revenue, but it took some time and a
lot of public funds to make it that way. BTW, traffic in Orlando sucks too
but I hate to think what it would be like without this bus system.
L.A.'s MetroLink is another example of a good system that took lots of
time and tax revenue to make work. MetroLink riders pay a little more to
ride the train than to drive their car but the benefit is realized when they
whizz past all the cars stopped in traffic in the freeway.
The point is that without tax dollars from state and local governments
none of these projects would have ever gotten started. In the beginning
there were lots of people who said "I will never allow MY tax dollars to be
used for a stupid mass transit system that NOBODY will use." And they
were wrong.