An interesting but not completely surprising follow up to yesterday’s post about Milwaukee not being able to meet the increase in demand for mass transit that $4.00+/gallon gasoline is creating.
In an interview this morning on the Jay Weber show, one of the right wing talk shows that commonly give him free air time to practice hitting soft balls, County Executive Scott Walker expressed his opinion that he doesn’t necessarily think increased ridership on Milwaukee bus routes is a good thing.
Walker says that if demand for mass transit in Milwaukee (people wanting to ride the bus) exceeds demand (seats on the bus), that would essentially be a bad thing.
As a resident of Milwaukee County, this is deeply troubling to me, and I’m sure others feel the same way as well. The top elected official in our County is publicly saying that he considers more transit riders than we currently have the capacity to serve would be a bad thing. If we only have 20,000 seats available, he reasons, demand for anything more than that is bad. Coming from Walker, however, this is par for the course.
Throughout his tenure as County Executive, he’s done everything in his power to cut existing transit options, and Milwaukee County has fallen from one of the best transit operations in the Country to one of the worst as a result.
Imagine if the CEO of Midwest Airlines were to claim that he didn’t want more people riding his airplanes. He only wanted to sell as many tickets as he had seats on his airplanes… customer demand be damned. Scott Walker and the anti-transit crowd in Wisconsin, who like to think of themselves as “pro-business” wouldn’t ask a company like Midwest Airlines to do something so ridiculous, would they?
Of course not. Because it’s called, among other things, progress. Investment. Long term planning. Foresight. And I don’t know of a business owner who wouldn’t want to have the “problem” of making additional capital investments to gain more customers and increase revenue.
That’s how businesses grow revenue. How ridiculous would it be for the Midwest Airlines CEO to say, “Well we’ve only got 10 planes, so we’re going to cap growth there despite demand from our customers…”? It’s harmful to Milwaukee and irresponsible to it’s residents.
And that’s exactly how our County Executive sounds now when he’s trying to rationalize his “no growth” policy towards mass transit in Milwaukee County.
Irresponsible.