Milwaukee County Exec. Walker Claims That Increased Use of Mass Transit is a Bad Thing

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.

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  By Chris, June 5, 2008 @ 10:52 am

  The public transportation = private business analogy you’re constructing is a strawman of epic proportions, not to mention you’re building it using the conservative framing that public services should operate like private business. There are a gazillion reasons why Scott Walker is a moron and his public transportation policy is abominable… you need to articulate some of those because this angle is convincing exactly nobody.
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  By Go Celtics, June 5, 2008 @ 7:53 pm

  Dan, I listened to that interview. You’re either misrepresenting or you didn’t understand what Walker said.

  When asked if the increased ridership was helping raise revenues to the point that the per-passenger subsidy was reduced, Walker merely made the mathematically-correct statement that increasing ridership to 95 or 100 percent capacity was good because it wouldn’t require additional buses; but that if ridership went to 120% then costs would go up because another bus - using more fuel and paying another driver - would have to operate at 20% capacity and therefore would require more subsidy.

  I have no dog in this fight - in fact I once worked for an organization that advocated for transit investment. The fact is your spin of that interview doesn’t wash with what Walker actually said.
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  By Daniel Cody, June 5, 2008 @ 7:59 pm

  @celtics: Right, that’s what he said, and I don’t think I misrepresented it though. Here’s why.

  Walker used the 120% figure purposefully because it’s just over “full capacity” and would indeed require more resources to serve the need of that extra 20%.

  But my point is that this is a good problem to have, as illustrated by the 10 planes analogy. First off, who says utilization would cap at the convenient figure of 120%? What if ridership could increase, as it is across the Country, so that instead of filling 80% of the buses, demand would reach 150% of capacity? In the overly simple numbers we’re using here, Walker is trying to make the point that 100% ridership is the perfect number it takes to make money, when that’s entirely false.

  And I admit I don’t have the exact number, but I’ve already contacted some friends at the County to try to get an idea of how many riders per mile it takes to break even on a County bus and compare that to capacity.

  One thing I know though is it’s no where near even 60%, especially considering the high fares of Milwaukee County buses.

  As services have been slashed and fares have gone up over the Walker administration, of course ridership was going to fall, and Walker could use that as justification for more cuts.

  I’m a believer that if you increase service/capacity and lower fares, usage would skyrocket to pre-Walker levels and the County would bring in more revenue. In fact, this was the case in the late 80’s and 90’s when Milwaukee had one of the best transit systems in the Country.

  Ridership was much much higher back then than now, even in the era of low fuel prices. If we even only had the same level of service today as we did back then, we’d have a much higher level of ridership in this County today.

  Again, I’ll point out the 10 planes example, and use the above to show we shouldn’t be afraid or opposed, as Walker is, to that extra ridership. It’s only going to go up as time goes on and as every other metropolitan area in the Country is seeing.

  I’d just like to close by saying this is classic Scott Walker. He’s fabricating numbers and unrealistic scenarios to support his own ideological viewpoint about mass transit.
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  By Daniel Cody, June 5, 2008 @ 7:59 pm

  Chris, thanks for bringing that up. As Walker has continually tried to say, government should be run “more like a business”. That’s not only his stance, but that of his party as well.

  I personally don’t believe that, and was only trying to use their own misplaced logic against him in the example above.

  Thanks again for your comments!
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  By Go Celtics, June 10, 2008 @ 7:58 pm

  Dan:

  Your ten planes analogy is a failure because at this moment the airlines are doing exactly what you think they shouldn’t: raising fares and reducing service even as demand remains strong.

  There was nothing incorrect nor sinister about what Walker said. He was merely pointing out the mathematics of ridership: an increase is good for business from a profit standpoint until it reaches a certain point, after which further increases are good and so on.

  There is nothing “good” about transit ridership going up - it is value neutral. If it goes up then we need to increase capacity - if possible - to meet it. But even you must understand that we cannot raise taxes in perpetuity to cover every possible need.

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