Bless the Chicago Reporter. I've never been to the Reporter's offices, but I like to imagine that they shout Microsoft Excel formulae at each other through stacks of Freedom of Information Act requests, producing the data that makes my job so much more pleasant. Most recently, they evaluated the Chicagoland area's traffic congestion problem, illustrating that despite the constant highway construction, that has cost so many people so many thousands of dollars in direct costs (not to mention tax dollars), people are spending more time in traffic now than they did 20 years ago.
I once read an editorial, I believe by Irving Kristol, about how one day, stuck in Washington, D.C. traffic, the author had a civic epiphany about how even despite the terrible commute times, Americans would always still prefer to while away their hours in the car, because it represents our rugged individualism and desire to be free from the fetters of socialized transportation. The car, even when it wasn't moving, was a symbol of American democracy and the American ideal of the individual's liberation from the tyranny of social relations, where a bright brilliant light, perhaps like Kristol himself, or maybe John Galt, isn't made filthy by the common mud people who can only succeed by relying on one another.
Like with everything the radical right argues, this is exactly backwards. If the early part of the 20th century was an ongoing effort by the left to bust the private trusts that kept so many people in misery, the last part of the 20th century was an ongoing effort by the right to bust the public trusts that kept so many people financially and physically safe. And one of those was the public trust of commonly-owned transit that allowed supreme freedom of movement. And has the conservative assault on publicly owned transit made Americans more free?
It has made us dependent on automobile manufacturers, oil companies and insurers. It has created a massive public-private complex that compulsively fleeces taxpayers to build roads. It has made it easier for the government and private entities to track our movements.
Cars must be registered to the state; if we don't want a transponder in our car that keeps a record of where we've traveled, we have to pay double the toll as a tax; cameras at intersections snap our pictures. Cops driving behind us can just run our plates and get our histories. While you can drive wherever you want, you cannot do so with freedom, and you can only really do so if you can afford it — the core conservative principle of freedom for those who can afford it. There is a tiered system of movement here — the wealthy can afford to move at their leisure (though still ultimately trackable) while the working people are confined to wherever a few "leisure" gallons of gas per week can take them.
Compare that with travel by rail, where a ticket can be purchased with cash. You can hop on and off wherever you choose, without presenting identification; you can go from one end of the country to the other in complete anonymity. There is nobody to track or follow you; if there is a problem with the train, it is somebody else's problem. Once you step off the train, you don't need to worry about where it will park, whether it will be broken into, or stolen. You don't have to insure it.
The conservative and libertarian narrative is of course the opposite of the truth: the assault on public transportation has made movement more difficult, more expensive and less free. But the purpose of busting public trusts was never to make things easier, cheaper and more democratic, but to make a small group of people much more wealthy. And that is exactly what has happened. The car makers, the road builders, the petrochemical producers, the insurance companies have all made enormous fortunes as the options for public travel are slowly eliminated and a car has become a necessity for moving around.
In the former Soviet Union, you couldn't move from city to city, province to province, without government approval of an interior visa. How the Kristols of the world hated the Soviet Union! How dare the state limit individuals' movement!? The individual was what it was all about, the magic individual who without an atom of social relations can skyrocket to the heights of success — in fact, carry the entire world on his shoulders. And here was a state, limiting how a person could move. Much better, I guess, to place limitations on how people can move through incremental steps, dissolving the hard-fought-for public trust that ensured equal access to movement, and for the benefit of private profit. Don't misquote me: I'm not saying it was easier to move around the Soviet Union than it is to move around the US. My point is merely that to the person — the average person — who cares if it is private industry or the state that makes it impossible for you to move around? The solution here is to "make more money" — but the solution would have been similar in the USSR, substitute "money" for "friends." Maneuvering up the corporate hierarchy and maneuvering up the massive bureaucracy are hardly fair solutions to a pretty basic problem.
Conservatives wasted no time in going after Amtrak in the 1970s right at its inception. It was one of the earliest targets of so-called "movement conservatism" and the Reagan public trust busters gleefully halved its budget. The White Flight happening simultaneously made sure that the lion's share of public money went to building highways rather than strengthening public transportation. Cars consume huge amounts of public resources — state, local and federal agencies are constantly subsidizing expansions, paying cops to police the roads (Amtrak pays for its own security), and generally sustaining losses in revenue due to the inefficiency of traveling everywhere by car.
But it is easy to make private profits off of course, when we atomize transportation. So we'll keep the leisure class at the public teat, milking us for every last penny before we finally shake them off.
Air quality in the suburbs, where congestion on surface streets is worse because cars have to move slower, is seriously declining. The roads are more and more full. At a time when the average working American is forced to be more and more productive, we are losing an ever increasing amount of our precious personal time in getting to and from our employers.
According to the Metropolitan Planning Council, congestion on our highways costs employers and individuals $7.3 billion — billion — a year. Money wasted. Money thrown away. But why? What is more "privatized" than travel by car? Nothing! So why isn't it "peak efficiency?" Because, of course, privatization as a magical key to "efficiency" is a fairy tale.
That our city is even considering an Olympics here when problems like this are affecting working people is not unconscionable, it is criminal. Well, sort of — inasmuch as cowardice can be criminal. The American political class has been brought completely to heel by a Free Market Fundamentalism where up is down, and congestion is freedom.
Carve up the highways. Replace them with rail. Dedicate city streets to buses; incentivize community car liveries. Cars don't make us free. They tie us down; they make us trackable units in an atomized society where the most favored have the most freedom, and working people — the mud people who so get in the way of your average libertarian — spend more to move less.
joe / August 13, 2008 1:14 PM
Amtrak does require ID.
http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=Amtrak/am2Copy/Title_Image_Copy_Page&c=am2Copy&cid=1080080554204&ssid=342