Sermons in Stones

The morning’s news brought yet another report of a California official telling public employees that they need to give up a chunk of their pensions.  This one was the mayor of San Jose.  It’s a statewide problem, as cities, counties, and the state find that their pension funds don’t have enough in them to pay out the contracted amount.  As the wife of a state worker and a user of state services, I’m really tired of the public-employee bashing.  (I know the pension system needs to be reformed.  But you can’t change the terms retroactively.  We signed the contract and then we gambled with the pension funds, and lost. In a trustee, that would be called irresponsible stewardship, if not malfeasance; for the citizens of a state, it means suck it up and pay what we promised.)

So when I heard that Wisconsin’s governor was trying to eradicate collective bargaining for Wisconsin state employees on everything but wages, and limit their raises to inflation–work for Wisconsin and tread water!–I was depressed but not surprised.  So cynical have I become about the attitude most people take toward public employees that what surprised me was the fervor of the protests.  Actually, I didn’t hope for any protests except a few squawks from the usual suspects.  Instead, the last I heard, the Democratic state senators refused to show up for the vote, denying a quorum. Twenty-five thousand people turned out at the Capitol, and it’s cold in Madison.  (Yeah, a temperature in the 40s isn’t cold compared to what they’ve been going through this winter. But try standing outside in it all day.) Teachers are walking out and schools have been shut for lack of staff. The president spoke up on behalf of public employees. People seem to actually care.

One of the great regrets of my life is that I will probably never join a union. Despite their flaws, they are so eminently sensible to me, their history so much a part of the struggle for justice in this country, that I’d like to have my very own union card (I could show it to the National Guard if necessary). Lacking one, I sing “Union Maid” to my daughter, tell anyone in a purple SEIU hat “That’s our family’s union!,” honor picket lines, read Woody Guthrie’s autobiography, proudly claim the identity of worker, and watch events like those in Wisconsin with hope that the newly inaugurated GOP governors around the country are watching too.  Maybe, like the leaders of Algeria, Libya, Jordan, Yemen, etc. this week, they’re wondering if they can quite get away with what they’d planned.

Caltrain's Baby Bullet train at Diridon Station, San Jose (photo by snty-tact)

Caltrain is in trouble. It’s a major commuter line, running from San Francisco to Gilroy and serving San Jose, tenth-biggest city in the country, and Silicon Valley, where, according to Price-Waterhouse-Coopers, one-third of venture capital invested in the US is spent. A mighty important transit service, you would think, yet it doesn’t even have its own dedicated funding source. It’s funded by three area transit agencies that do have taxes dedicated to funding them, and that decide each year how much they’ll give to Caltrain. It hasn’t been enough. Right now things are so bad that Caltrain is in danger of shutting down completely within a year, and is planning to cut back service drastically this year–which, of course, would cause ridership to plummet.

We only refer to a few kinds of transportation as “public,” but the fact is that no transportation system in this country thrives without public funding. Transit can’t survive on passenger fares alone, any more than the highways are funded by tolls. The federal government subsidizes car travel to the tune of almost $80 billion a year, which is well over half the Department of Transportation’s budget. (My wife, who knows a lot about this stuff, reminds me that the interstate highway system, launched in the Eisenhower administration, is the biggest public works project in the history of the country. These Republicans, always taxing and spending!) Trains have had to compete with airlines as well, while both the airlines and airports have received government funding far outstripping that of railroads and transit. And that’s just federal funding; states also fund roads, bridges, highways, and airports more generously than they fund rail. We’ve gotten what we’ve paid for: gridlocked roads everywhere and a marginal rail system.

Transit can’t be done by halfway measures. The service has to be fast and frequent enough that it makes other options unattractive. For example, I would take transit to work much more often if it ran earlier on Sundays and more frequently on weekdays, but since the train can’t get me to work on time on Sunday, and leaves me waiting an hour for the next train on weekday nights, I usually drive. More bicyclists would take the train if it had more bike cars, but it can’t do that and carry its capacity of riders–unless it has a lot more funding and can run more trains. Partial and insecure funding just creates a system that turns would-be users away.

It’s the same story with Amtrak and the once-thriving private railroads that used to serve the whole country. Amtrak receives less than $1 billion a year, and not surprisingly, has become less and less useful and relevant since its creation in 1970, but there are members of Congress who seriously propose that we cut what little Amtrak funding remains. McCain is one of the worst–man, did we dodge a bullet when we declined to make him President.  He’s not proposing that we de-fund transportation–our tax dollars will still pay for air and car travel.  But when it comes to rail, he insists it be purely private.

The solution being sought right now by the BayRail Alliance includes a lot of private help: Stanford University and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group are funding polling and studies. That help is key, but long-term–even past the next few months–Caltrain needs serious public funding, because it’s competing with heavily government-funded options. If we want transit and rail service, we ought to fund them at the levels we fund the roads and highways, or cars will become our only option.