Don’t Model SBC Transportation Laws on Big Cities’ Policies
Don’t Model SBC Transportation Laws on Big Cities’ Policies
Editor,
The new executive director of the San Benito County Council of Governments has recommended to the COG directors that they adopt transport law and policy for our county’s future that emulates big city socialist transit “solutions.”
She’d have San Benito using more mass transit, building densely packed housing alongside transit, and increasing taxes and fees to pay for it.
She calls it “smart growth.” I think it’s just the opposite.
Her recommendations fly in the face of logic, economics, common sense and American hopes and dreams. It also contradicts the directors’ 4-1 decision on Oct. 27, 2005, to reduce transit by 15 percent as we begin to phase out socialist transit and replace it with more efficient private-sector transport. It also violates COG’s 2001 decision to privatize transit in San Benito.
The reasons for these decisions are obvious to local taxpayers. Since only .004 (.4 of 1 percent) of San Benito’s trips are on transit, residents choose private vehicles and the freedom they afford, even with historic high gas prices, and even though our government forces motorists to pay 99 percent of the costs of transit riders’ rides.
Independent studies show transit actually increases congestion on highways by diverting 40 percent of highway taxes from roads to transit. Moving empty transit seats helps pollute our air.
Autos and self-reliance is what people prefer, and what our government leaders should be recommending. We cannot afford the socialist transit we are forced to pay for today, and we certainly cannot afford higher taxes and fees for a government that exhibits despicable wastefulness, e.g., 98.6 percent of County Transit bus seats are moved empty.
COG’s executive director said in response to my lawsuit that COG does not have that data, but in fact they do. They just don’t want to admit how much waste they’re forcing taxpayers to pay for.
Thus, COG is incompetent to dictate the transport portion of the general plan revision for San Benito County and they are advising COG to take us to places that we don’t want to go by increasing tax and fee burdens to get there.
Bad idea. Bad government. Wrong for SBC’s taxpayers.
Joseph P. Thompson
Tres Pinos
