Second-Class Transportation

Is transit second-class transportation, as I argued in an op-ed in the San Antonio News-Express, or are the people who ride transit second-class citizens, as a response from urban planner named Bill Barker implies that I said? Like this question, most of his response focuses on semantics, not reality.

For example, he claims that the billions of dollars that taxpayers are forced to pay to transit agencies aren’t subsidies because he says he found a dictionary that defines subsidies as “a grant to a private company.” Transit agencies aren’t private companies, he notes, so therefore they aren’t subsidized. (No dictionaries I’ve looked at specifies that money has to go to a private company to be considered a subsidy.)

In response to clear evidence that taxpayers pay more than 90 percent of the cost of running San Antonio transit, he alleges that “billions of dollars in transportation subsidies are going to Boeing, General Motors, Ford Motor Co.” Say what? I’m not sure why Boeing is relevant, but I don’t know of any subsidies going to General Motors or Ford. As near as I can determine, neither received funding from the CARES Act, and while the federal government “saved” General Motors from bankruptcy in 2008 by forcing it into bankruptcy, Ford didn’t receive any federal subsidies at that time. (Ford did receive some loans but repaid them, and by Barker’s definition only grants, not loans, are subsidies.)

My op-ed presented numbers showing that the great majority of minority bus commuters have a car in their household, which was a response to a claim by the chair of San Antonio’s transit agency’s that most minority transit riders don’t have cars. Barker used this to argue that “people choose to ride transit even when they have options” so therefore transit must be successful.

What he doesn’t say is that 2018 census data indicate that only 12,437 transit commuters in the San Antonio urban area live in households with at least one car. It’s quite likely that many of those people live in two-worker households but have only one car. Regardless, only 1.4 percent of all workers in the region whose household has a car commute by transit. So, to use Barker’s wording, close to 99 percent of people who have cars choose not to use transit.

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Barker presents the usual claims about transit making “a positive contribution to the environment and sustainability.” I guess it doesn’t bother him at all that San Antonio transit buses use more than twice as much energy and emit more than twice the greenhouse gases, per passenger mile, as the average car.

He also cites a study that he claims shows that driving cars makes people fat. That’s funny; I thought eating that made people fat. I know Barker is only an urban planner, but even urban planners should know the difference between correlation and causation. (Other studies have shown that there is causation here: people who are overweight are more likely to drive than other people, which increases the average weight of drivers. But driving doesn’t make people fat.)

“Policies that force people to always travel by automobile are taking away people’s ability to choose,” says Barker. I don’t advocate such policies; I just want to see an end to transportation subsidies. Barker wants taxpayers to pay more than 90 percent of the costs of San Antonio transit even though nearly 98 percent of San Antonians choose not to ride transit to work. Such market signals are more important than the nonsensical idea of offering people a choice that most won’t take.

“No one who uses any mode of travel should be labeled a ‘second-class citizen,'” Barker concludes in a distortion of my argument that transit is second-class transportation. It is people like Barker who want more people to be dependent on transit who are making them into second-class citizens.