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Nothing socialist about public transit
By Dallas Hansen
Responding to my previous column about the late economist Milton
Friedman, one Free Press reader, musician Jeff Presslaff, challenged me
to reconcile my admiration for free-market economics with my advocacy
of public transit—a civic feature Presslaff insisted is, in his
words, “inherently socialist.”
That's rather like saying running water is inherently socialist. If
there's one department in which governments have an overall acceptable
track record, it's in creating infrastructure. Are highways, bridges,
traffic lights, sidewalks, water mains, and sewers inherently socialist
too?
In the low-density suburbs—where, indeed, public transit is often
altogether absent—having a transit system might seem an avoidable
option. But in high-density urban centres—grid-patterned central
cities—the consequences of neglecting transit can be disastrous
to the local economy. Indeed rapid transit, or lack thereof, makes the
difference between winning downtowns—see Toronto or
Chicago—and losing ones, such as Kansas City's or Detroit's.
Friedman believed that governments' purpose is to provide a framework
for the free market. Streetcars, subways, and elevated trains are
necessary infrastructure vital to urban safety and commerce.
Brooklyn-born, a long-time resident of Chicago, and having lived his
final days in San Francisco—three of the most transit-saturated
locales in America—Friedman undoubtedly would've recognized that
premium transit service is what makes Brooklyn, Chicago, and SF the
dense, bustling, attractive places they are today.
At this point the argument leaves the discipline of economics and
enters the realm of pure physics. If approximately 70,000 persons are
employed in downtown Winnipeg, an area just over three square
kilometres, and most of these workers are arriving from outside
neighbourhoods, it follows that even if a minority were to arrive via
automobile much of the land use that could be devoted to commerce and
residences will instead be given to storing automobiles. There simply
aren't enough places to park on the street; besides, parking
restrictions preclude all-day parking, and often even parking at all.
(Unlike 70 years ago, when angle parking on Portage, coupled with the
street-car right-of-way down the Avenue's centre, maximized on-street
parking while giving transit priority.) Even above-ground, multi-storey
parking garages engulf space that could comprise buildings instead. And
if we're going to go several storeys below ground, throughout the
downtown, we might as well start digging a subway—so that tens of
thousands might arrive downtown each day bringing nothing more to store
than a backpack or briefcase.
In a February 21, 1964 editorial in the Free Press—hardly a tool
of the radical left—headlined, We need a subway, this newspaper
observed, “The Toronto example shows that within the past 10
years in areas contiguous to the subway, property assessment rose by 58
per cent. Thus any expenditure on the subway would certainly pay for
itself in the long run in increased revenues....” In a January
28, 1965 editorial, Do it now, the Free Press impatiently noted,
“It will be six years in March since the Norman Wilson report was
first published.... It does not require an expert to realize that
developing Winnipeg will need a subway sooner rather than later.... Of
course, the longer the delay, the more expensive will it be to build
the subway.”
Somehow transit talk turned to monorail, then to busways, and here we
are more than 40 years later with a central city whose population has
shrunk by nearly 100,000 while growing poorer; meanwhile, our overall
population has remained stagnant despite a significant expansion of
Winnipeg's built-up area. Grand old schools in the inner city sit
underused while Linden Woods, Whyte Ridge, and Linen Ridge (and soon
Waverly West) demand new ones. With a stagnant tax base paying for
vastly expanded infrastructure, is it any wonder we have what's
described as an infrastructure deficit today?
Private enterprise built New York City's principal subway systems, the
Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) and Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT)
lines. They stayed private until the city's LaGuardia administration
determinedly acquired control of both in 1940. In the last decade,
NYC's Metropolitan Transit Authority has raised fares from $1.25 to $2,
yet while the IRT remained a private entity fares held steady at five
cents.
Socialist governments, such as the USSR's, might have lifted public
transit to new heights—offering such grandiose touches as marble
pillars and opulent chandeliers on subway station platforms—but
Havana, in socialist Cuba, does not offer its residents a rapid transit
system. Nearby San Juan, Puerto Rico, however, opened its metro system
last year, providing an infrastructural boost to a nation whose economy
continues to grow under capitalism. |
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