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Like most cities, New York City is facing a severe budgetary crisis. Later in 2009, the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority, which runs the regional mass transit) plans on significantly increasing fare rates to cover a budget shortfall. The likely consequence will be a noticeable reduction in ridership which will further erode the MTA's financial health in future fiscal years. If fewer people use mass transit, then more will drive cars. Yet a major thrust of regional, national, and international policy is the reverse – increase mass transit ridership and decrease auto usage, especially single occupancy car usage.
This is one of many contemporary examples of regional and national institutional failure. The rules we have established for making individual and collective decisions no longer serve the broader public interest. How do we begin to rethink our way out of this morass?
In recent years there has been a spate of research demonstrating that people place a high priority on personal happiness. Yet, few of us derive much happiness from rush hour gridlock, low-quality public transit services, air pollution, global warming, or the transfer of wealth from America to oil rich nations with their human rights abuses and violent, authoritarian governments – too many of which fund terrorist organizations.
So our transit systems fail to serve us, they fail to serve millions of other people who live in squalid conditions around the planet, and they fail to serve the core ecological systems of our planet that sustain all of life. This is appalling!
What kind of transportation network can we reasonably begin to build in five years and complete within 20 years that would dramatically transform our currently dysfunctional system into a world-class model of energy efficiency, human happiness, and ecological health? Moving people around the tri-state region should be fast, nonpolluting, safe, low stress, accessible to all, comfortable, and enjoyable.
The existing evidence suggests that the region needs to make a major investment in pedestrian friendly, mixed-use downtown villages and cities. The Village of Patchogue is leading the way in demonstrating that, when properly done, the public will support higher density villages on Long Island, but most Long Island communities remain wary of density.
Downtowns are the natural anchor points for rebuilding regional public transit systems under a framework of "Transit Oriented Development" (TOD). Moving in this direction also requires significantly increasing the costs of private automobiles by charging a lot more for parking and gasoline. Yet these practical next steps have been gathering dust in planning books for almost twenty years. This is already yesterday's progressive planning ideas. The staggering problems we face require leapfrogging over existing TOD models to something adequately scaled to today's enormous challenges.
We need to move rapidly to eliminate fossil-fuel powered cars from small districts to progressively larger political jurisdictions. We cannot eliminate these cars in one fell swoop, but we can at least begin to declare our own car free zones. We need to give transit agencies the funding they need in a system that minimizes corruption by management and unions.
For example, Suffolk County Bus already relies upon private bus services to help control costs. We need to integrate GPS throughout the system so that riders can get reliable information about service delays. GPS hopefully will curb the tendency among some bus drivers to cruise through bus-stops well ahead of schedule. We need to expand public transit routes. On Long Island it can take three hours for point to point travel. It should be possible for someone to get from Riverhead to the Massapequa Mall in 90 minutes with one transfer. We have the wealth; we are just using it for the wrong things.
In his recent bestselling book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond writes that "The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions [that lead to societal collapse] are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity." Social change is hard work. We have all the information we need to avert disaster, but we must act quickly.
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Fossil Fuel
