transit

"My name's Henry and I have good news and bad news. 

"First the bad news. I had been clean and sober for months but last week I went out with the guys to a tavern and really tied one on. 

"I drank so much vodka I could barely stand up. But I had to get home somehow and decided to do something I had never done before.

"I took a bus.
    

The 'Ay-Shun' word seems to be on the way out but there's confusion as to its successor. At the heart of the confusion is the fumble-mouthed Granma, the New York Times - the people who insist on lots of stops such as C.I.A. or U.N., just in case some dimwitted reader might not be able to to understand CIA, or UN? Their front page headline today reads: "Obama Offers a Transit Plan to Create Jobs" (see nearby). 

Transit ridership in the US in the first three quarters was 7.71b this year compared to 8.01b, a drop of 3.8%, according to data from the American Public Transit Association. The decline is very similar to the decline in road traffic and gives the lie to a common reporters' storyline that the road traffic drop is part of some structural shift toward transit use and away from automobiles.

Wishful thinking on their part!

Car travel currently costs about 24c/passenger-mile versus 87c on transit in 2007. Randall O'Toole of the Cato Institute gets these rough numbers as follows:

American transit agency managers are a shabby bunch of shameless scroungers. Used to squeezing money out of everybody but willing customers prepared to pay their way, they are masters of milking the taxpayer via all manner of government handouts and charlatanry.

The Washington Post reports (Apr 23) that the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well among the bureaucrats of Washington DC, even at the IRS. They've been trading transit vouchers like crazy - to the tune of at least $17m, probably much higher according to the Government Accountability Office GAO).