Taking Responsibility: Matt Drew for City Council

This is a post I wrote in response to a comment on the Independent Weekly endorsement story:

Yes, it might be a half cent tax, but it will extract tens of millions of dollars from the people in our city and our county. This money does not appear out of thin air, it comes from us – money that would have gone to jobs, businesses, housing and other useful economic activities. Instead of those useful things, you would have us expand a government-run mass transit system that consistently loses millions of dollars every year, not to mention strongly contributing to pollution by running mostly-empty buses that get about five miles per gallon of fuel. Most of the people you mentioned, like nurses, students, and retail workers do not ride the bus now – our ridership is pathetically low.

There are many other ways to get from point A to point B, many of which are cheaper than our subsidized bus system. Like I did for two years when I worked at IBM, you can ride a bicycle. It’s good exercise, doesn’t pollute at all, and is far cheaper than the bus; a useable bike can be had almost for free from the Durham Bike Co-op. Or, as I do now, you can buy a scooter for a small fraction of what a car costs and use that to commute. My scooter gets over 100mpg and I pay less than $5 a week in gas, which is cheaper than the bus, pollutes less, and is far more convenient.

This isn’t about making people walk, or putting them down because they don’t make a lot of money. This is about being responsible with the money we take from our citizens – all of them. The sales tax, despite the exemptions, is highly regressive and hits low-income citizens hard at a time when they can least afford it. This is also about integrity and being able to admit when we’re wrong – when we have created a program that simply doesn’t work and can’t work as designed, no matter how much money we throw at it. Either we need a system that can support itself, or we need to look at other alternatives.