“Public Transportation and Partisanship”
Kathy Ingle
Former DART Board Chair
Former Roadhand Recipient, LBJ Champion
Transit Coalition of North Texas Board Member
Public transportation should rise above partisan brinkmanship. Yet unsurprisingly, transportation, as with healthcare, budget deficits, climate change, student debt, domestic terrorism – virtually every issue of real urgency and consequence – is kicked to the gutter as partisan politics steamroll ahead with increasing fury. I am no history or governmental scholar, but I do have many years of caring about, working to understand, and advocating for better public mobility, and I have an informed opinion. Oh, and to be clear, I am no stalking horse for transit alone as I have championed road expansions, mobility congestion pricing, and toll roads when other solutions are unfeasible. Today I am exhausted and disgusted by the lack of bipartisan support for, and action on behalf of, basic infrastructure improvements, and in particular public transportation, i.e. transit.
Why do we need public transportation? Our lives depend on it. Who among us is personally or familially untouched by allergies, bronchitis, asthma, and respiratory infections, as we choke on car emissions? Despite improvements in fuel efficiency, cleaner fuels, the introduction of hybrid and electric vehicles, flex hours, and work from home careers, our air quality is still worsening. According to a recent Dallas Morning News article, air pollution in the DFW area increased by 133%, or 27% per person, since 1990, principally due to auto emissions.
Electric vehicles, carbon fuel efficiencies, and cleaner fuels may help with emissions, but what will be the energy source for increased demands on our already taxed electrical grid? Coal? Natural gas? Nuclear power plants? Solar power? Wind power? All of the above do not necessarily get us over the goal line. Greater use of coal and natural gas produce their own air and environmental contaminants, solar and wind power have not yet demonstrated that they will fill the future demand, and alternative energy sources on a massive scale have yet to be refined for practical application. And how about more nuclear power plants? Given the more recently uncovered/exposed information about past nuclear leaks and meltdowns in a number of countries, whether caused by human and/or technological failures or by natural disasters such as Fukushima, the appetite for nuclear power plants has not been embraced by any free world countries.
Dare we let our air quality worsen until we have days, weeks, and months when our children, elderly, and infirm are prohibited from being outside the house? Where sporting events are cancelled because it’s not safe for athletes? Where we are unable to see the sun, moon, and stars for days? When we must wear filters and masks to go about our daily routines? The steps we have taken to prevent this from happening have proven to be too little, too late, and clearly inadequate.
And what of the minutes and hours of our days increasingly spent in gridlock due to congestion? The DFW area ranks as the most congested in Texas, the 10th most congested city in the United States, and 28th worst in the world, according to an INRIX survey. Dallas-Fort Worth drivers spent an average of 54 hours sitting in traffic jams in 2017.
Anti-transit politicians, let’s call them ANTITRANS for fun, look to self-driving electric vehicles as a solution to air quality and congestion. Autonomous vehicles are promised to travel with less distance between units due to safety features that eliminate driver confusion about routing. The fly in this ointment is that adding more vehicles to existing roads has a definite limit. Autonomous vehicles alone will not solve our congestion problems. There is only so much asphalt out there and many roads have already been expanded to their practical limits. What then? More vertical layering of roadways? Tunnels? Mandated work hours by location? Mandated car pooling? Penalties for vehicle ownership? Eminent domain to acquire land to build monster highways?
But let’s assume all of the above “roadblocks,” pun intended, have been removed. What of the transit dependent: seniors, students, the mobility impaired, and those who can’t afford to own and maintain one, much less two, vehicles? Transit dependents are a significant part of our community – our parents, sons and daughters, friends, and workers who by their labor knit the fabric of our communities together. As was mentioned here in a prior editorial penned by Jeff Davis, the single biggest factor in financial solvency and upward mobility is access to dependable transportation. If you can’t get to where the work is from where you can afford to live, your life trajectory is defined: poverty. And yes, we have public transit in North Texas, but there are large swaths of the metroplex that are “transit deserts”, where access to a bus, train, or light rail line is a formidable distance from affordable housing. And let me be clear – affordable housing is a politically correct euphemism for cheap lodging, often undesirable, in unsafe areas, with little accessible fresh food.
The oh so obvious answer to our air quality and congestion problems is public transit. Public transit minimizes the need for ever more freeways, moves many more people at a fraction of the cost, and uses much less energy per capita. Public transit is a part of the equation to cleaner air. Public transit minimizes the need for ever more paved miles.
Existing transit systems have their flaws. Top to bottom reviews of existing services and long-range plans as well as continuing customer and community input, are essential. None of these are insurmountable, and failing good alternatives, speak to the need to more fully support and engage in making public transportation better – safe, efficient, cost effective, and desirable. Be a part of the solution by demanding adequate funding from elected officials, rejecting partisanship that stalls needed legislation, and by engaging in the public process to perfect local solutions. Be a citizen.
