Confronted with a choice for governor between an incumbent that wavers between doing nothing for transit and actively working to inhibit it, and a challenger that consistently works to inhibit it, I’m wondering if there’s a better way.
I’ve been doing some thinking about how to build a coalition for transit in this state. Rather than engage 5% of the electorate that is theoretically pro-transit but finds a reason to oppose any actual plan, why not work on capturing some segment of the ~45% of the electorate that is historically opposed to transit?
Transit advocates tend to emphasize two key arguments, neither of which is appealing to conservatives. First, they talk about global warming. A large number of conservatives simply refuse to believe that the Earth is warming at all, that humans are responsible for it, and/or that the costs of doing something about it outweigh the benefits. The arguments are intensely technical, so anyone emotionally invested in debunking global warming is going to be pretty difficult to dissuade. Other environmental arguments, such as encouragement of dense development, are also unpersuasive to people who might idealize living in a place like North Bend.
The other key argument is quality of life for people who use transit. Obviously, riding a train is much better than riding a bus. Rail critics often prefer BRT because of its “cost-effectiveness,” which has its own distortions, but they essentially don’t care about the quality of the ride because they don’t plan to use transit. They’re certainly not particularly energized about BRT proposals like Transit Now, except when attacking light rail. Selfish arguments are common to all parts of the political spectrum on many issues, and are difficult to defuse with persuasion.
I think that transit advocates, in their efforts to dissuade car use, have soft-pedaled a national security argument that naturally appeals to conservatives. Specifically, every gallon of gasoline consumed, on a bus or in a SUV, ultimately puts money in the pockets of people who are either strongly anti-American (Hugo Chavez), or are actually trying to kill us (various Saudis). Of course riding a bus is much less damaging than driving an SUV, but neither compares to riding a hydroelectric-powered train.
The two things preventing recognition of this by right-wingers are (1) a failure of rail advocates to properly exploit this (frequently due to a distaste for raw appeals to patriotism), and (2) economic illiteracy, something that is much easier to counteract than unwillingness to pore through the details of climate simulations.
There’s a general perception that we can avoid dependence on “foreign oil” by reducing our consumption by a bit, or drilling for more oil in Alaska; both Democratic and Republican politicians have pandered to this belief. There’s a related argument that because the gasoline that we buy here in Washington generally comes from Alaska, that we aren’t putting money in the pockets of those that wish to do us harm. Some simple logic, involving basic economics, debunks both of these notions. Stay with me:
Oil in North America is generally expensive to produce. The oil sands of Alberta cost around $9 to $14 dollars per barrel to extract. Offshore production in the Gulf of Mexico is obviously an expensive proposition. In contrast, the Saudis pump oil out of the ground for less than $1 a barrel. So, a little thought experiment: if demand for oil suddenly collapsed, sending the price dramatically downward, who would still be producing profitably? That’s right, the Saudis, while all the other producers went out of business. So we’ll never be “independent” of foreign oil.
Secondly, even if we get all of our oil from domestic sources, that still lines the pockets of oil producers that we don’t purchase directly from. Since oil is a fungible commodity, whatever demand we do generate raises the price of oil, which benefits all the producers. If our consumption were lower than our production, excess American oil would be exported to the world market, lowering the price.
Therefore, anything that reduces American demand for oil, regardless of the origin of that oil, reduces the revenues of oil producers, some of which is diverted to organizations hostile to the United States.
I think Bill Maher coined the slogan “When you ride alone you ride with Bin Laden.” I might also suggest “Support the troops: Take Public Transit.” If I were a better graphic artist I might make the posters myself. At any rate, I think it’s a more productive proposition than quibbling over small differences with the Sierra Club. You’ll never get the dedicated anti-tax zealots, but there are others willing to pay for congestion improvements and enhanced national security.
Has anyone out there tried this line of argument? Any transit skeptics out there moved by it?
Most of the time, when you engage someone opposed to Mass Transit in a conversation, they don’t want to be won over. And if you can win them over, it has to be over an extended period of arguments.
Those who aren’t entrenched in the Anti-Rail camp hardly ever engage in the conversation due to general apathy.
You usually only have the passionate talking about any given subject.
The ride alone comment is actually from WWII. There was a poster that looked exactly like the one you posted, only it had Hitler in the passenger seat.
Hmm carsharing promoted 60 years ago!
http://www.propagandaposters.us/poster10.html
The problem with the national security argument, in my experience, is that it leads you down a road (pun intended) of more and more elaborate ways to continue fueling cars, rather than towards rapid transit.
You see this playing out in our politics right now. People want to stop “lining the pockets of dictators,” so they run towards other ways of fueling their SOVs: ethanol, liquid coal, hydrogen-from-nuclear-power, etc. The result is more sprawl, more net energy consumption, etc.
My biggest fear is that 100mpg cars — or worse, ethanol cars — will take the wind out of the new urbanist movment, and give Americans the illusion that they can return to their sprawlin’ ways, which have so many other deleterious effects on the environment and on our public health.
I seem to remember an advertisement during the 2004 elections (from moveon.org?) that directly related buying gasoline to supporting terrorism. There was public outrage, and the networks quickly dropped it.
Of course four years later energy independence is a big conservative issue – brought up prominently in recent debates. I consider this a wonderful opportunity for society to switch from liquid fuels – as long as we can make people aware that:
1. Corn ethanol uses more gasoline than just using gasoline.
2. Coal is an enemy to mankind (this is a big one – as many conservatives don’t believe in global warming)
3. Hydrogen uses far more energy than just letting electricity stay as electricity.
4. The cost of renewables is dropping rapidly.
5. We’re missing the boat on renewables*.
These are all facts, and not terribly complicated facts (other than 2). If we win people over to the concept of gasoline = terror, then getting these points in would be the next step.
*Expanding on point 5 – the US isn’t producing equipment all the way from wind turbines to batteries to trolley cars. If we stay behind the renewables curve, we won’t be able to own a piece of the (huge) future renewables market.
Frank,
Good point.
The fallacy here is the idea that if we just got our consumption down to the point where we could satisfy it with domestic consumption, then we would be alright. As I suggest in the post, that is an economically illiterate argument.
In reality, the national security benefits continue to accrue as you bring gasoline consumption towards zero; they don’t plateau once you’ve stopped importing petroleum.
I’m surprised the most obvious selfish reason for anti-transit folks to change their minds wasn’t mentioned. People just don’t realize that every dollar invested in transit helps get reluctant and/or bad drivers off the road, thus, more room for the gas guzzlers and fewer accidents. You don’t have to take transit to want it there.
ldb makes the suggestion I came here to make…
Many people of both political persuasions won’t be won over to transit.
I’m a King County Conservative with a 7 mile commute working for a global non-profit Christian non-profit who wouldn’t benefit one bit from rail.
Rail wouldn’t go where I need to regularly go. And my east-west route probably wouldn’t see too many fewer cars if rail suddenly appeared in our town, possibly more as people made their way to the proposed rail stations.
But, it would go where I might someday want to go. Or might someday find myself regularly going. And for most of the people who make traditional north-south commute, appeal to their greed. The more people using the rail means less time you spend stuck in gridlock. (And, sure, we believe you when you say you’ll never try it and even if you do try it, you’d never consider using it. Sure…)
Or for the undecided techies, it’s easier to read your Kindles and check your Blackberries on a train than driving.
Martin does a nice job considering the issues, but I would emphasize one point: it’s fundamentally un-conservative for each individual to travel alone (with 4,000 lbs of metal and plastic) especially over long distances.
Forget energy, and just watch the absurd “accordian” effect when a single line of 5 or more cars are involved. Wave theory is in full effect on every road and freeway around here for most of peak hours: one stop-and-go magically creates tens of thousands of stops-and-trickles. And how’s about the “herding effect” where large groups of solo drivers all pack together (for safety of course) and create giant rolling slowdowns because of some kind of primal instinct.
But my favorite fundamental inefficiency of the faux Conservative’s “one person per car” dream: slight inclines on the freeway. Want to watch a traffic jam appear out of thin air? Watch Southcenter Hill turn into a parking lot each pm rush hour, for the simple reason that tens of thousand of individual feet on gas pedals does not make for symphonic coordination. With decades of driving experience, and all this technology, we still haven’t figured out to accelerate up hills. The result: traffic jams that last for hours and back up for miles.
Again, just a reminder of how terribly in-efficient and un- conservative the right wing / Libertarian position on transportation is. Although it would appear most vociferous Republicans aren’t traditional conservatives, anyways.
Frank is spot-on about this “green ” car movement. Why do you think the transit opposing Discovery Institute is all over plug-in hybrids? The cheaper and ‘greener’ it is to drive, the more people will drive and the more they will contribute to turning our cities and neighborhoods into large auto holding areas. The Sierra Club / bike club critique of ANY new freeway lanes (even HOV) is ridiculous in my view It very well could be that driving alone in a plug-in hybrid could make autos super-cheap to own and operate – and leaving a smaller per capita carbon footprint than a half-full diesel metro bus.
All these greenie electric car buffs are going to need roads to drive on, right? It’s the ineffeciencies related to space and right of way which makes any rubber-tired transport a bad choice for the future of our city and region. High capacity transit turns the solo driver car conundrum on its head. Which is what drives anti-humanity /anti-community right wingers and Libertarians nuts.
jason, you’re right in saying that the problem with cars is as much the waste of space and unproductive development as it is the carbon emissions. If there was no global warming, our cultural focus on cars would still be a social disaster. On the other hand, we have a lot less time to respond to global warming than we do to recover from the other negatives of our car-driven culture. I’m all for switching from internal combustion to plug-in hybrids to help us hit emissions goals. If anything, the issues of sprawling car-based development will become clearer once they’re not conflated with the concerns over climate change.
It’s hard to get too worried about what will persuade “conservatives”, most of whom are perfectly happy with Bush adding $4 trillion to the national debt, setting up illegal wiretaps on all of us, and declaring he is “the decider”. Good luck with any form of reason with that kind of “conservative”.
Nor need we worry about this society building an endless series of new roads and suburban homes. Even with $4 trillion worth of pump-priming by Bush, the economy is dead already, it just ain’t laid down yet.
The thing to note is that the money spent on gasoline can’t be spent on housing or food or medical care or consumer items. If you want to talk to anyone about this, talk with ordinary people, who are a lot more reasonable, and have more common sense, and a better grasp of reality, than “conservatives”.
My guess now is that within about five years people are going to be very interested in alternatives to driving. Will you have the answers to their questions?
How about also making arguments that are entirely non-partisan in nature? For example, in making the recent announcement in British Columbia, they pointed out how the proposal would make it significantly faster to get around compared to a car. That argument is politically neutral.
(In Seattle, “mass transit” is currently synonymous with “takes three times as long as driving.” That’s the reason everyone gives me when I ask why they drive to work despite living on a direct bus line, so it’s a point that needs to be addressed.)
The better traffic argument has to be handled carefully. If we say it will make for better traffic because of the fewer cars, many people think there will be fewer cars than there is today, whereas in reality there are fewer cars than there would otherwise be in the future. Transit likely doesn’t mean that traffic/congestion will get better, just that it won’t get worse as quickly.
Serial catowner,
I’ll take pro-transit votes wherever I can get them, whether they’re from people who favor illegal wiretapping or not.
Supporting those kinds of measures is not a failure to listen to “reason”, it’s a value judgment where they trade their civil rights to be 0.01% more secure.
Dismissing our opponents as merely stupid both underestimates them and eliminates the possibility of engaging with them.
It only takes a few converts to make a big difference in the transit debate.
By the way, I know “ordinary people” who are also “conservatives.” How do they fit into your us-vs.-them mentality?
With any luck I’ll be blogging for quite a while (knock on wood) so let me make myself perfectly clear- Trent Lott and Paul Weyrich have probably done more than any other two people to preserve and improve America’s rail industries.
But most of the “conservative” trolls you’ll meet, say in a Seattle P-I thread on mass transit, are neither Trent Lott nor Paul Weyrich. They are not going to be swayed by your Aristotelian logic or Socratic arguments, even if they’re wearing a blazer jacket with a little logo from the Lakeside School.
But you knew that already.
Even if they were, who cares? The pieces of transit may obey the laws of physics, and can be analyzed in mechanical terms, but transit systems are built to make people’s lives better and improve society. That’s all about the 80% of the people in the middle who honestly can’t see any idealogy in the matter- they just want to know if there will actually be service, and whether the bonds can actually be retired.
Those are good questions to ask, and if you can’t answer them- back to the drawing board. Or your debate with the local “conservative”, as you prefer.
I’m not suggesting that this logic is going to suddenly sway Kemper Freeman or John Niles. They’re far too emotionally invested in the anti camp. If it was proved to me tomorrow that building light rail would lead to the destruction of the earth, I would probably have trouble accepting that as well.
I maintain, however, that there is a swath of people out there, generally conservative, who aren’t terribly invested in the anti-transit position. They’re not really convinced of global warming, and honestly can’t conceive of using transit. The other environmental effects seem remote as well. So projects like ST2 seem like an awful lot of money for something not all that beneficial.
For those people, linking transit with antiterrorism is powerful, as I think it’s something everyone can understand.
There are a segment of “conservatives” out there like myself (and many of my friends and colleagues) that can be brought into the pro-transit camp.
These are those that are economic conservatives but not idelogues (might have even supported Clinton) who are often professionals (Consultants, Attorney’s, Doctors, etc). This demographic has often lived, gone to school, or at least frequently visited, cities like New York, Boston, London or Tokyo with good functioning transit systems they have seen first hand the benefits (gee… it was great being able to read while commuting, or save money by not owning a car, or being able to drink without worrying about driving).
These professionals WILL vote for transit if they believe that the outcome will be as promised (on time, on budget) and especially if the route benefits them personally in some way (think Queen Anne/Belltown to Microsoft or Issaquah to Downtown Seattle).
By delivering a route that helps them personally, by an agency who is trusted, they will bring their votes.
By “emotionally invested” Martin means “psychologically obsessed” For Kemper, it’s all about his Howard Hughes ego trip. For John Niles (Kemper minion) it’s about all the string of failures which dominate his adult life.
Niles surrounds himself with broken men to make his anti-rail jihad appear semi-rational. Just google “will knedlik” to see how that has worked out for him.