The draft COG Regional Transportation Plan for 2005, which was
distributed to the public at the Veterans Memorial Building on
Wednesday, Oct. 22, contains faults which must be corrected before
it is approved by COG’s Directors. The first and most expensive
one, is COG’s plan to follow the VTA mass transit model of
socialist transit. The draft RTP amendments do not reflect COG’s
Directors unanimous vote to privatize SBC’s public-sector
transit.
The draft COG Regional Transportation Plan for 2005, which was distributed to the public at the Veterans Memorial Building on Wednesday, Oct. 22, contains faults which must be corrected before it is approved by COG’s Directors. The first and most expensive one, is COG’s plan to follow the VTA mass transit model of socialist transit. The draft RTP amendments do not reflect COG’s Directors unanimous vote to privatize SBC’s public-sector transit.
The losses incurred by SBC transit operations, masked by incomplete financial reports that do not incorporate generally accepted accounting principles, are unafforded, unsound and unsustainable. As I have repeatedly said to COG’s Directors, continuing with the urban mass transit model for SBC transit is killing us, just as it is killing all the other counties in California.
For example, the draft RTP amendments cite demographic data as justification for the socialistic-communistic County Transit. Among the data, which appears to be an effort to justify continued County Transit, it states that “8.1 percent of the total county population is aged 65 or older.”
While this may be true, it is illogical to then conclude, as the drafters apparently intend, that the government must furnish them all with transportation. If that was true, then SBC ought to declare bankruptcy right now because the county cannot afford, and will probably never be able to afford, with the Baby Boomer Generation approaching retirement age, such a burden. At the present time, .002 of all annual trips in SBC are furnished by the county, for which SBC pays MV Transportation, Inc., approximately $1 million per year. If, as the drafters apparently suggest, we increase “ridership” to .081, an increase of 405 times present usage, then we would need to get $405 million every year to pay the operator. However, since SBC gets back only 11 cents per dollar that we send to Sacramento, then SBC’s taxpayers would have to pay (.11x=$405,000,000) $3,681,818,181 to Sacramento so that we could get back the $405,000,000 to pay to the operator.
Simply stated, it is impossible. Simply stated, this does not work. Simply stated, COG’s Directors were right to vote to dump our present mass transit model and try something better. Simply stated, that is the private sector. The RTP must reflect reality, not an unattainable, Soviet-style utopia. Caveat Viator!
Joseph P. Thompson,
Tres Pinos
