I, personally, would like MORE decentralization if it came in the
form of COMPETITION. The reason the above scenario is laughable
today is that there aren't too many good days. This is in no small
part because the monopoly providers of SF bus service and trans-bay
subway service can screw up and largely get away with it. Why? We
don't have a similarly priced choice. When potential users do
(take a car) they usually take it.
So head on down to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, rustle up some
venture capital, and build yourself another Transbay crossing. (Buy
legislation if needed; it's cheap.) You'll make a killing! A nimble
private entrepreneur will surely outcompete the lumbering socialist
dinosaurs of public infrastructure.
Imagine the following scenario for a moment. Suppose different
lines in SF and the region (why limit it to our tiny space?)
provided service based on their reading of users' needs. And
suppose that they got "proper" subsidies, or that users were
willing to pay a fare that covered the cost of providing
service. They would find, if they did good market research, that
some SF (and regional) users have needs not met by Muni today, and
they would commence such service as soon as they could, and when
they found that users' needs have changed, they would duly modify
such service.
No, what you'd find is that a _very_ few corridor services would be
"cherry-picked" by private operators. Everything else -- the stuff
which makes cities liveable, the stuff which makes public
transportation _systems_ viable -- would be abandoned. And even those
corridors would perform worse and worse as their feeder service
atrophied. (Alternately, the privateers have it both ways -- they get
to make an apparent profit on the key routes and public funds are
shovelled their way so they profit operating the marginal routes as
well.) Externalities are completely ignored by basing all decisions
on a single and hideously simplistic metric (dollars.)
That's how things started. It's been tried subsequently by ideologues
of your bent. The effects are known.
Best of all, you don't have to sit around and just _think_ about how
great this would be, you can actually travel around the real,
physical, compromised, contingent, imperfect-market world (start with
the USA, where this has already happened in 99% of the country -- the
99% without any effective public transportation systems whatsoever --
and then move on to the UK) and see the results. You may care for
it. I don't. (Different interests with different perceptions vying
for different outcomes is called politics.)
That's it. No lengthy supervisors' meetings, no two-year hiring
processes, no (or fewer) endless community meetings, no union
foot-dragging on seniority-based promotion systems, no mayoral
pressure.
And no service. (And, at the risk of being _utterly_ polemical, I
must say this paragraph reads depressingly like an authoritarian party
manifesto. Just place a wise and all-knowing CEO in the maximum-leader
role and away you go.)
And the users would benefit immensely.
Of course this is exactly what happens in the real world. Look at
my industry (telecommunications) for a moment - just compare the
choice users get today, 5 cellular providers, 100s of long distance
carriers, 1000s of ISPs (though only one real local carrier as of
yet) with the Bell System. What a difference!
The shell game of selling and reselling capacity -- or the useful
business of _comparatively_ trivially stringing up more capacity when
that fails -- doesn't work so well when your circuits are tens of
metres wide and surrounded by hundreds of billions of dollars of
immovable real estate.
Perhaps you can interest some VCs in a wireless roadway system
(personal helicopters?) or in technology for increasing roadway
bandwidth by several orders of magnitude (personal rocket cars?)
Perhaps we should shrink roadway "feature sizes" (vehicles,
passengers, lanes, all that) by a factor of two or so every couple of
years. Or build roads on exotic substrates (GaAs?) Or replace asphalt
with a radically more capacious medium. Or use differential or
time-multiplexed signalling? Or asynchronous traffic lights. Or
multi-level roadways. How about broad-band -- spread each packetized
passenger through dozens of parallel roads!
Mass transportation systems on physical roadways clearly have a lot to
learn from the technologies driving down costs in the
telecommunications industry...
Now the question of how we get to the nirvana above is the big
challenge. But I would say that when the Mayor said we all want
SuperShuttle to come to our door he wasn't too far off. Who could
possibly oppose that, except the entrenched interests who appear to
run this city?
There's nothing stopping you from starting this service. There's
clearly an unmet need and a service to be provided. Go out and line
up the venture capital! Why waste time with a transit rider's group
when you could be shaking it up with the captains of industry?
Politics is for the tired relics of the pre-_Wired_ Second Wave!
Seriously, I'm interested in how Muni is to be "rescued" by what you
advocate. Would destroying the notion of a transportation _system_
improve services to users? Improve environmental quality? How will
removing all oversight and public accountability improve service to
users? Or maximize utility to the greatest number? How will you
measure utility? How will you transfer externalities (one of the
major, if depressingly unrealized, roles of government)? How would
forking out tens of millions to pay multiple shysters CEO salaries be
a better deal than throwing it at the members of the Evil TWU?
If I didn't believe there were gross inefficiencies in the system I
wouldn't be interested in or at all involved in trying to make it a
better system, but I frankly don't see how this pure economic ideology
(and I use "ideology" non-pejoratively) and dubious analogizing can
attempt to fix the extant San Francisco Municipal Railway. Declaring
everything irreparable and throwing it all away to be replaced by a
Grand System -- historical inevitability, prelapsarian
perfectly-informed markets, whatever -- often sounds appealing to
people frustrated with intractable situations, but the results are
rarely as intended. I'm sure you could get enough mad-as-hell-at-the-
gummint signatures together for an initiative to Disband Muni, but
then what?
Throw the bums out, no new taxes, get the government off the backs of
the people,
Polemic and hyperbole are fun, but accomplish little,
I'll bite my tongue in the future,
Richard.