Commentary—

Individual Travel vs Mass Transit

By William A. Collins

Quit the whining,

Skip the fuss;

Time to subsidize,

The bus.

Personally, I’d like to own a new Tata Nano. It only costs $2,500 (plus tax) and gets 50 miles to the gallon. They say it seats five, but those must be Calcuttans living on 1,000 calories a day. Plus it only has one windshield wiper.

Still Mr Tata, India’s Henry Ford, plans to revolutionize personal mobility in his country with this gem. It will make the ubiquitous motor scooter seem so yesterday. But even though the groundbreaking Nano sports only 33 horsepower, there are enough Indian buyers out there so that it may just finish off Greenland’s glaciers. It will certainly complete the trend toward universal urban gridlock on the subcontinent.

We’ve pretty much pulled that off already in Connecticut. Traffic is almost as big a conversation piece as sports. It’s one reason that corporations and the young are slow to settle here. Good thing we offer elite schools and spiffy neighborhoods or no one might come at all.

But what an opportunity Mr Tata gives us! We could now ban SUVs and other guzzlers in the United States and set up a handgun-like turn-in program. Bring in your old SUV and take home a shiny new Nano. Gas sales would plummet, highways would open up, parking would reemerge (though we’d have to narrow the pavement lines), and CO2 would dwindle. Of course, we might need to put heaters in those little buggies, and the new owners would likely need long-term psychological counseling.

Well, OK, so maybe the Nano wouldn’t sell very well over here, but the idea of it softens us up for the ultimate solution to our mobility problem — mass transit. Even as the rest of the world expands train, trolley, and bus systems, Connecticut widens highways. And as condos sprout in downtowns across the nation, do we service them with streetcars? No, we build parking garages. And do we set up a separate Connecticut government department to promote and build transit? Maybe that will come soon, but for now, we mostly still leave mass transit languishing in the transportation department where it only plays second fiddle to the highway lobby.

This continued veneration of the private auto is one of the presumed fruits of our free “market democracy.” Citizens vote their own top interest, which often turns out to be personal mobility. Fair enough. We can now go anywhere we want, when we want, as long as the road’s not clogged, there’s parking when we get there, we can afford the gas, and the highway isn’t flooded by global warming.

Plainly, individuals cannot pull off major solutions to this gridlock by themselves, save for switching to the Nano (or Prius). Only government, despised by all, can do that. An unlikely meshing of federal, state, and local initiatives is required to build a transit line, though some cities have actually managed it. Locally, zoning for high density housing downtown is a fine start, but then someone also needs to subsidize a grocery store, pharmacy, cleaner, stationer, etc, to make the neighborhood appealing to middle-class folk. Few towns have a department in charge of that. It’s a mess.

Unfortunately, we Americans are better known for our individualism than for our teamwork. Thus while New Jersey may have amazingly brought new life to its urban centers through mass transit, Connecticut can’t seem to learn from anything beyond the Hudson River. Indeed, corporate lobbyists, threatened bureaucrats, and jumpy citizens commonly stifle innovation everywhere. Nor is there any point in offering examples from other countries. We feel that they just have their own strange ways, though we’ll spend a ransom to go there and look at them.

Surely, the most practical place to start real transit change is with the bus. Some cities already have. But many voters still bristle at funding transit out of the gasoline tax. “That should only be for roads!” Well, maybe so, but if we don’t get past that little hang-up, there won’t be enough room left on those roads for us to even bother buying gas.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)