Once you starve the transit service enough that you aren't running on weekends or late enough to support the second shift service job workers, you force those people into the misery of needing cars they can afford, and the cars that they can afford are mostly crap sold by dealers who have, at best, a very flexible moral sensibility. There is nothing that prevents a low wage worker from getting a leg up in life quite so effectively as a used car, with its insatiable demand for money at random moments; add the amorality of the used car market and you have a perfect recipe for bleeding people endlessly, and turning them into folks who won't support transit because they feel so burdened already.
What Salem needs most in transportation is a complete rethink of the whole enterprise, starting with the recognition that all users of roads, including public transit riders, should be funding the roadways, not the property taxes. We need to recognize roads as a network utility just like water, sewer, and electricity, and develop methods for pricing network usage that makes the heavy (literally) users pay the most, and rewards light users with an end to subsidizing the heavy users.
Alas, getting Americans to think rationally about moving around is like getting Japanese politicians to think rationally about whaling. In theory, it's not that hard, but the reality is that theory is a piss poor guide where deep cultural rituals are concerned, and there is no ritual more assiduously performed than American politicians and planners bowing and scraping to the idea that auto mobility is an American birthright, and that there's something vaguely suspicious about any young person who doesn't place driving in the center of life.
Portland city government is busy having its head handed to it over street fees by the populace unfamiliar with and unfriendly to the idea that there is no free lunch. In Salem, the powers that be, desperate to free up funds to promote more sprawl on the periphery, proposed on-street parking meters only in the downtown core, a partial solution that would work about as well as taking a partial course of drugs for TB: in other words, it would only make the disease worse and impossible to cure.
Some decades ago, however, Salem washed its hands of transit, fobbing the job of providing this basic essential service off on a transit district, allowing the city to get back to what it likes to do, promote sprawl development that cripples the transit district. Worse, the politicians bowed to the Chamber of the 1% and crippled Salem's mass transit district at birth by forbidding it from levying a payroll tax, which is yet another reason Cherriots is the basket case of Oregon transit.
Payroll taxes are less than ideal, but until we have a rational network-utility model for funding roads (including by persons in transit vehicles), they're a stopgap. It's past time for Cherriots and Salem and Keizer to go to the legislature and demand a fix that allows the system to raise the revenue necessary to become a realistic option for people to rely on for the necessities of living. In that struggle, perhaps we can develop a better model that taxes neither houses nor jobs, but only road usage.
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Why Higher Fares Would Be Good for Public Transit
http://read.feedly.com/html?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.citylab.com%2Fcommute%2F2014%2F07%2Fwhy-higher-fares-would-be-good-for-public-transit%2F374314%2F&theme=white&size=medium
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Why Higher Fares Would Be Good for Public Transit
http://read.feedly.com/html?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.citylab.com%2Fcommute%2F2014%2F07%2Fwhy-higher-fares-would-be-good-for-public-transit%2F374314%2F&theme=white&size=medium
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