Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 18:40:00 +0000
From: Karen E Crowell
Subject: public transportation & on the job training
To quote a recent chatlist post:
“Why is it my responsibility as a taxpayer to subsidize transportation for you to get to work? Should I also buy your food and pay your mortgage because your income is limited? Sorry, but I believe in personal responsibility and this belief that the nanny government is here to take care of you has gotten out of control.”
Since you are so cost-conscious when it comes to government spending, consider this. It is far cheaper to subsidize child care, transportation and job training – which are significant obstacles to many people looking for work – than it is to feed, house and pay for the health care of the unemployed when they can’t find a job and have no other source of income. People who can’t afford to live close enough to where they are likely to find work, and who don’t have enough money to pay for gas and insurance, rely heavily on public transportation. Even families who have a car sometimes have to rely on public transportation if more than one person is employed and their shifts don’t coincide or their jobs are located in opposite directions from where they live.
If you own a car and you have a job that pays enough to cover your expenses, be thankful. Not everyone does. Ignoring that fact doesn’t make you a better person either. And apart from the issue of need, public transportation is important to consider if we want to stop polluting the air we breathe.. If you don’t breathe, then don’t worry.
As for the empty bus complaints, consider the fact that people who ride the Pittsboro-Chapel Hill bus might depart much earlier than you do to get to work. It takes time to get to the bus stop in the morning, time for the bus to get to its destination, and time to walk to your office from the bus stop where you get off. Some people even take more time to catch yet another bus to get to where they work, because the bus only stops at a few locations. So while you’re out and about running errands later in the day when most businesses are open, many of these commuters have been on the job long before you headed out the door.
Even in Chapel Hill there are plenty of big, nearly empty buses on the roads. From about 10:00 to 3:00 fewer people ride, so the buses make fewer trips with far fewer passengers on board. It probably isn’t practical for them to own a fleet of smaller buses to run the same bus routes during the middle of the day, while their big buses sit idle.
So even if you think it’s wasteful for such a big bus to make the trip from Pittsboro to Chapel Hill and back, it might be the only size bus they can provide. Maybe a better solution would be investing in a smaller bus, but don’t tell me that a big bus is worse than no bus at all.
There is always more to a story than what we think or what we’re told. That is why it pays to take the time to consider things carefully and not jump to conclusions. As someone recently pointed out, the new commissioners jumped to many conclusions with the decisions they made recently. Had they taken the time to investigate more thoroughly the circumstances in which previous decisions were made, they might have come to different conclusions.
Everyone know that it takes time for most newly hired employees to learn a job, especially if they have little or no experience. It doesn’t bode well that these new commissioners already think they have all the answers. Maybe they will learn by their mistakes, but at what cost to the taxpayers?
Karen Crowell
Pittsboro