ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, May 29, 1996 TAG: 9605290109
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
THE PUBLIC bus system in Greenville, S.C., recently became the first in the nation serving a metropolitan area to shut down - go kaput - because of the loss of federal operating subsidies. The result was predictable. Many people who depended on the buses can't get to their jobs. Leaders in the Greenville area are now scrambling for ways to get the buses running again.
The Roanoke Valley isn't facing a similar predicament - not yet, anyway - because the city of Roanoke has upped its subsidy for the Valley Metro bus system. But that is a temporary fix. Federal funding for Valley Metro is also drying up, and the city can't be expected to make up the difference on its own, year after year.
To keep the buses running - not to mention expanding and improving the service commensurably with the metropolitan region's needs - a regional solution is required. And it's the valley's fiscally conservative business community that should be taking the lead in pushing for this.
Unfortunately, according to a recent study underwritten by the American Public Transit Association, many conservatives tend to liken support for mass-transit systems to welfare. Perhaps President Clinton's proposal to phase out federal funding for public transportation (quickly embraced by the Republican-controlled Congress) was part of his plan to ``end welfare as we know it.''
But as the report by Paul M. Weyrich and William S. Lind of the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, makes clear, it's time to disabuse conservatives of the notion that mass transit is merely an entitlement for the poor, particularly the inner-city poor.
For starters, the report reminds, free-market cheerleaders wrongly assume that the rise of the automobile was purely a free-market choice. It was, on the contrary, a "result of massive government intervention on the automobile's behalf.'' Federal, state and local government spending for roads and highways to accommodate cars soared from 1921 on, while assistance for public transit was virtually nonexistent for most of those years. As of 1990, public spending for mass transit amounted to only $14 billion, while highways got $74 billion. Only where government policy is more balanced, suggests the report, can consumers make a free-market choice.
It is also wrong, the authors say, to assume that only minorities and/or those with low incomes use public transit. When mass transit is of high quality, the middle class and those with higher incomes will and do use it, and they want it to be available.
Perhaps most obviously, as the report emphasizes, mass transit can serve such conservative goals as economic development. As an example, it cites how the Metro rail system spurred development and increased state and local tax revenues in Northern Virginia.
The Roanoke Valley needs reliable mass transit for economic growth and economic stability. Business leaders, conservative and otherwise, should heed the challenge of the Weyrich-Lind report: Take a new look at public transit, and get involved with finding solutions to its ills.
LENGTH: Medium: 58 linesby CNB