I saw this mentioned on Fresh Loaf yesterday, but Brian reminded me of it this morning.

The SaportaReport relays a talk given by William Lind, director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation in Arlington VA, to the Sustainable Atlanta Roundtable back on June 3rd, which points out that while liberals are most well-known for their near-sexual attraction to public transportation, it’s actually an issue that transcends party affiliation.  Some really juicy quotes in this one…

“You can’t get conservative votes with liberal arguments,” Lind said. For example, they should not utter the word — environment. Instead, they should talk about conservation and stewardship. “Vocabulary is important.”

Lind is a big proponent of rail transit rather than traditional city buses. “Very few conservatives will ride buses,” Lind said. “Rail can provide a quality of service to compete with cars.”

Also…

Lind said conservatives also will embrace the national security argument for transit.

“One third of our defense budget can be traced back to our dependence on foreign oil,” Lind said. But that dependence can be reduced by bringing back rail transit. “Let’s rebuild the network we had back in the 1950s. All we want to do is get back to what we had.”

Now since this was a political tactics talk, it sorta comes off as putting one over on conservatives wary of public transit.  But looking beneath the “here’s how we get it passed!” rhetoric, there are quite a few facts that are often overlooked in conversations about transit in favor of clinging to old misconceptions.  Examples?  There just happens to be a concise list in the article!

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William Lind writes in The American Conservative that they should.  Here’s a snippet….

The perception that conservatives do not use public transportation is only one of the mistaken notions that has warped the Right’s position on transportation policy. Another is that the dominance of automobiles and highways is a free-market outcome. Nothing could be further from the truth. Were we to drop back 100 years, we would find that Americans were highly mobile. Their mobility was based on a dense, nationwide network of rail transportation: intercity trains, streetcars, and interurbans (the latter two electrically powered). Almost all of these rail systems were privately owned, paid taxes, and were expected to make a profit. But they were wiped out by massive government subsidies to highways. Today’s situation, where “drive or die” is the reality for most Americans, is a product of almost a century of government intervention in the transportation market.

Another misperception is that public transportation does not serve conservative goals.

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Has anyone else been following this MARTA $60 million budget deficit story?

Over the past week or so, we’ve gotten a nice, healthy taste of the impending crisis for MARTA, thanks to its heavy reliance on the 1 cent sales tax (it accounts for 52% of revenue).  As people buy less, MARTA receives less tax money.  This isn’t an uncommon way of funding public transit – this document I discovered thru Terminal Station shows that a 1 cent sales tax is the majority funding mechanism for most city’s around the country.

But what to do when the market collapses? (We could ask this same question about 401k dominated retirement plans!)

Who foots the bill for public transit when stops growing?  In ultra-dense areas, like NYC, where public transit is widely supported, legislators are thinking about implementing a payroll tax.  But that would never fly in Atlanta/GA.  So who will save public transit in car-smooching cities like Atlanta, which provide questionable support for transit even in boom times?

At a Tuesday meeting of MARTA minds, general manager Beverly Scott announced that it would do whatever it could to reduce costs, including a hiring and salary increase freeze,  freeing up some funding tagged for construction only, and reversing a prohibition on eating, which could invite food vendors (and their fees) into the stations.  But that won’t do much to ease the pinch.  Without some sort of outside help, MARTA predicts a “draconian” reduction in service and a huge ticket price increase in the coming year.

So, who will come to MARTA’s aid?  The state?  Yeah right.  The feds?  Maybe.  But every other transit org in the U.S. will be clamoring for the same help…so MARTA will be just one beggar among the masses.

So how big is the nation’s purse when it comes to its commitment to public transit?  Are the struggles of the U.S. auto industry a sign that we’ve moved beyond the automobile era and have turned a corner into a century where the auto lobby doesn’t rule supreme on Capitol Hill?  Or is this just a hiccup for the auto industry?

Once we get the answer to “Who Will Save MARTA?” we should have a much clearer idea.

The AJC reports this morning that MARTA ridership was up 12.4% system wide in the third quarter of 2008 vs. same period year-ago, even though gas prices peaked in July.

That’s an even bigger increase than the 10% system-wide increase reported in second quarter 2008.

Obviously the great unknown is whether the return of cheap gas will get people back in their cars or whether the recent reintroduction to transit along with a sagging economy will keep transit ridership levels up over years past.

Time will tell.

If you like numbers, all of the data cited above can be found on the American Public Transportation Association website.