Right-sizing WMATA would help
As one who testified at WMATA’s fare increase hearings and cut my commute in half by switching to VRE, I can attest that some of us did try to warn WMATA about their underestimates of ridership losses from their second record fare increase in two years. While WMATA’s first fare increase last year was widely accepted because fares had stayed constant for so long, another series of increases this year, some of us warned, would be too much for recession-wracked riders. But instead of cutting back costly unsupportable services, the WMATA board must now confront their erroneous groupthink. While well-organized special interests (transit workers, environmentalists, “smart growth” associates, etc.) cheered for a fare increase, a third of those testifying encouraged WMATA to take a serious look at right-sizing their operation.
Right-sizing need not mean abandoning service. Instead, WMATA could acknowledge the difficulty of running a mixed-mode transit system and spin off local bus routes that operate 85 percent in a single jurisdiction to municipal systems such as Ride On and retain only key interregional routes that cannot be subdivided.
While WMATA wrested some additional funds from fiscally hard-pressed jurisdictions, these jurisdictions would be less reluctant to accept the costs of running these local bus routes as an “in-kind” WMATA subsidy because it would also give them more local control.
This is the long-term solution to WMATA’s challenges.
Dino Drudi
Alexandria
Waste at rallies is informative
There have been many reports about the difference in trash left behind in Washington following the 2009 and 2010 Tea Party rally on 9-12 and this August’s Glenn Beck rally, compared with last weekend’s rally of socialists, communists, progressives, and liberals called the “One Nation” rally.
The trash analysis tells a very interesting story: constitutionalists and conservatives pick up their own trash, progressives and liberals leave their trash for someone else to dispose of.
Hmmm. Doesn’t that put a very fine point on the crux of the differences in the two philosophies? Who is responsible for the results of my actions: me, or someone else?
If you doubt the trash reports, just Google the topic and see the comparisons and videos and the online news comments from D.C. police regarding the cleanliness of the Capitol Hill area following the past two 9/12 rallies and the Glenn Beck rally. Then look at the observations and videos about all the trash left behind after this weekend’s One Nation rally.
I can corroborate the videos and reports from my own conversations with National Park Service police. While attending this year’s rally with our Liberty Bus, I talked to D.C. police officers and asked this question: How do the D.C. police and Park Service police feel about the Tea Party and 9/12 protesters? The answer: There were hundreds of thousands of attendees at last year’s 9/12 rally and this year’s Beck rally. With that many people, we police like any group who leaves the Capitol Hill area as clean as they found it. The Tea Party groups generally leave the area cleaner than when they arrived.
The constitutionalists’ and conservatives’ philosophy is clear: I am responsible for myself.
Progressives and liberals have a different answer: Let the government deal with it.
Elizabeth Powers
Founder, Liberty in America
Orlean, N.Y.
