December 2009

Following up on my first post about our American car cargo cult, I want to look at this from a different angle.

The American suburbs of the 1950s were built in a landscape that apparently had been constructed by a race of now-departed giants. Roads, schools, hospitals, parks, bridges, electric power lines- all were ready for our use, but who were the people who built them?

Consider the old Highway 10 (now I-90), an arrow straight four lane road over the Floating Bridge, past Factoria, which at that time had only a school for students from nearby farms, up the hill and past the airfield, even less-needed than the school, and out to Issaquah, a village of several thousand people. All of this was just waiting to be used by the people who came after the war.

This, of course, was the work done by the Roosevelt Administration during the Depression. The WPA alone built, during the Depression, an average of 1000 schools, 50 hospitals, 15,000 miles of roadway, and 20 airfields per state. The Tennesee Valley Authority and the Bonneville Power Authority built great dams, and rural power authorities run by the public distributed the power.

When the veterans returned from WW II they went to school on GI Bill stipends at great land-grant universities and built homes with VA loans that they commuted to on roads built by the WPA and federal grants to the states. Naturally, America’s businessmen immediately proclaimed this as the prosperity of the American Way and a wonderful bounty conferred on us by the “free market”.

And over the years, people actually began to believe the business propaganda. The “free market” Black Ball ferry fleet of Puget Sound, actually an extensive monopoly, couldn’t make enough money to hire workers, and went bankrupt, forcing the state to provide ferry service in some places. But the business propaganda was so loud and pervasive there are actually people today who think the state forced the Black Ball Line out of existence so the state could take over the lucrative ferry lines.

So now, we, as a people, sit and wait for the great Cargo Cult god of the Free Market to return with another load of wonderful gifts. We’re waiting for a repetition of something that never happened. And this delusion mostly affects the Baby Boomers, the largest cohort of our population, the children who grew up in a landscape built by the government while they were told it was the bounty of “free enterprise”.

This especially affects transit because, while free enterprise may work fine for restaurants or bookstores, it never in the history of the world has been able to provide good transportation for a society. It is almost as simple as saying that transportation is a product of a functioning government and society, and if you don’t have those, you will have no reliable transportation.

It should, therefore, come as no surprise that building transportation involves people and governments and rules and taxes. It’s the way we’ve always done it.