Belling Blindly Blasts Brewtown Boons as "Boondoggles"

This week Mark Belling, not content to immerse himself in the Deep Tunnel, continues to dig a deeper hole to rest his weary intellect when he careened from Milwaukee's Public Market to commuter rail for Milwaukee. The rabid right-wing radio pundit was eloquently taken to task by Bruce Murphy on Tuesday, Mark Belling's Folly, when it was noted that the "Deep Tunnel has reduced overflows from about 60 per year to less than two."

For those who want a fine dissection of the excessive Belling verbiage flowing through the Cheddarsphere you need only examine Jim Rowen's Milwaukee Deep Tunnel Debate: Commentaries Abound. But I digress.

This time Belling sees massive waste in the Pubic Market, "the parking lot is underneath a freeway," and the Kenosha-Milwaukee commuter train, "there aren’t four people clamoring to be able to take a train from Milwaukee’s east side to Kenosha’s east side."

The problem with Belling is that he does not grasp the concept of public investment in infrastructure. He simply does not get it. Mark, here are two examples. Think of:

• Dams like the Grand Coulee and Hoover that bring electric power to millions of people and increase the value of wasteland by the billions of dollars. Not to metion more than a glass of water for tens of millions of people.
• Streets and roads going back to the first camel paths in Jerusalem to the modern interstate highway system which ensures the efficient transportation of goods and people creating healthy commerce.

A little more difficult to grasp are investments, that on the surface do not appear to pay for themselves, but when the externalities* are examined, 'turn a profit.'

Two examples:

• Public transit which requires public subsidies. These systems may show a loss at the revenue box but they are just as 'profitable,' and often more so, than highways. The average passenger vehicle does not pay for the cost of its operation. Despite the gasoline taxes and licensing fees, the cost of road construction, right-of-way acquisition, repairs, maintenance, snow removal, and cleaning all result in taxpayer subsidies. And we did not  mention the environmental cost  of the air pollution and the contamination from petroleum products and heavy metals. When passengers use public transit, reducing peak demands on the roadways, we all save money by the reduced congestion and the fact that we do not have to build additional miles of roads to accommodate them. Maybe we should pay people to take public transit.
• Madison's Monona Terrace. The ledger books show that this public convention center loses over $2 million a year. What is not measured is the increased property taxes collected as a result of new construction, the new sales tax dollars, collected by the state and the county, and the benefits of the hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs the facility created, thorough direct and indirect services.

*One cannot understand capitalism and markets without understanding this concept. Externality is a cost or benefit resulting from an economic transaction that is borne or received by parties not directly involved in the transaction.

Comments

[Steve Vokers]

Heh heh... You said "pubic" heh heh...

(Typo in the first bullet under "Two examples")

[Barry Orton]

Fixed it; thanks.

(bleary-eyed Waxing editor)

[Jim Bouman]

Light Rail, Rapid Transit, whatever you call it, consider the possibility that--once we get it--you'll actually like it.

I grew up in a city that opened a light rail system in 1955. I was twelve years old and instantly mobile, able to travel to all different parts of the city of Cleveland, including the suburbs which had seemed remote and unapproachable to a kid from the near west side (the equivalent of, perhaps, KK and Oklahoma in Milwaukee).

I could be out at night during high school, certain that I could get home using a reliable transit system that ran a train every half hour until midnight.

And during the past three years, I have spent a total of about five months (in 2-week chunks) in Boston. The "T"--that transit system in the mythic folk song on which "Poor old Charley" rode the rails, but couldn't get off--was pure pleasure. I had to get all over town and was continually amazed at the interesting variety of people with whom I would share the T on those trips. Students--both high school and younger, professionals, professors reading student papers as they rode, families, people in work clothes, people headed downtown to entertainment and restaurants, people with enough to drink in them that they'd be a menace on the highway, but were just sleepy people getting home legally and safely.

Getting from my sister's house in Brookline to Logan airport was pure $25 dollar anguish in a taxi, a snap--for a buck and a quarter--on the T, even (especially) at rush hour.

Many riders carried a book or newspaper they were reading. Women often carried their dressy shoes and wore the kind that allowed them to walk eight or ten blocks to a stop/station. There was always lots of conversation--not all in a familiar language.

Call me out-of-step for not liking the tedium of driving to Milwaukee alone in my car. I'd love to go there oftener if I didn't have to put up with the isolation, the tension of dealing with lane-changing, tailgating and bird-flipping fellow happy motorists. All followed by parking meters, after cruising to find one that's available.

You have to experience fast rail, probably have to have experienced it from an early age to appreciate its most civilized aspects.

We will have it, but not on reasonable terms. Once the easy and cheap availability of energy/ oil declines and happy motoring becomes impossibly costly for most people, we'll build it. But we won't grow into it. Many will see it as a comedown. Most will grind their teeth over all the money we threw away on mostly useless freeways as we pay again to get a system that will work.