Kenders' Musings

The old adage that warns "Be Careful What You Ask For...You Just Might Get It" is playing itself out in many cities around the country as fuel prices rise and people flock to public transportation that is proving itself unable to handle the amount of customers suddenly flooding the transit lines.

A not so funny side effect of the skyrocketing demand for buses and trains, outside of the fact that people are finding themselves standing on the roadside as buses too full to pick them up go zooming past, is the fact that increased public transportation ridership will actually lower tax revenue as people buy less fuel. Less fuel purchased means less fuel taxes paid. Less taxes paid means less money to dump into the historically money losing public transportation business.

Are you seeing a circular problem here?

But don't worry, the folks in charge are on the problem already, with Florida, North Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky and Maine raising fuel taxes this year already, so those of us that have not yet adopted the socialist Utopian vision of bus rider heaven will be paying more at the pump to subsidize your overcrowded and dilapidated ride home this evening.

The one thing that is really going to hit home is the fact that transit systems have to buy fuel also and will be buying more of it as ridership increases (it costs more in fuel to haul more people) which means fares will rise, maybe not to the point of driving people back into their cars (pardon the pun) but rise they will.

So here's what we have. High gas prices are driving people to use publicly subsidized transportation that gets part of its funding from fuel taxes. As a result there are less fuel taxes to spend on public transportation, and public transportation is having to spend more money on the high priced gas that caused its ridership to increase in the first place. The end game being fares will increase to help defray the cost of increased fuel consumption by the transportation companies and the loss of fuel tax revenue, forcing poor people to either get a bike or walk to work.

Then the bus and trains will be the domain of the people that pay for them, the taxpayer, and not the homeless guy that's on there smelling up the place and snoring in the corner. On the other hand, having all those poor folks riding bikes and walking everywhere will make them much healthier and they'll live longer which will cost us more in the long run. I mean, really, how many old waitresses do we need anyway? If this is allowed to continue we'll have a world full of fit, bicycle riding Flo's from Mel's Diner running around telling us to kiss her grits.

I don't know if I could handle a world like that.

It seems too much like my family reunion.