The Bus Toll

© 2010 by Tom King

Taking public transit was
Supposed to be a cheaper way
To get from here to there
And from there to home,
But for the tender-hearted
There are hidden fees.

I traveled on my card
The first time through.
An experiment with the new
Cashless economic system.
Fearful the plastic wouldn't work
And me with no backup.

Between the bus and train,
I was befriended
By a fairly well-dressed fellow
Who offered to show me the way to the station.
I was grateful not to have to walk alone
In that part of town.

Didn't sleep well on the plane, though.
My companion guide to the train
Casually having mentioned.
His homelessness.
And me with no cash had muttered
Excuses why I could not help him.

Coming home he met me at the train this time,
And walked me back to the bus station.
This time the story was different.
And my name was the same as his father's.
I didn't tell him we'd met before.
That I knew his game.

I gave him twenty anyway.
On the bus I slept, short of cash.
I'd carefully planned to make the trek
And spend as little as possible.
Keeping a reserve as a reward
For my frugality.

I'm pretty sure he bought a bottle.
He'd asked me just for three or so.
The price of just enough
To warm a belly or deaden pain.
It does not matter I am under orders,
To treat with kindness, not to judge.

I sympathize with those who pay,
The extra price that lets them
Travel where the bums do not sleep
Huddled on a loading platform
Against a warm door;
Where the skilled at homelessness talk quick cons.

Do I give the taxi man the twenty bucks,
A guy working a second job to make ends meet?
Or hand it to the helpful hobo schmoozing for a drink.
Or the big-eyed kid who ran away and brags he lives his own way,
Eating from dumpsters, but managing to fast talk a free ticket to Chicago.
Mostly a night on a warm bus to somewhere else?

Maybe every other time I'll take a cab or park my car.
Next time around I could pay the extra
To encourage the self-reliant guy with kids to feed and self-respect,
And to sleep in my seat with nothing on my mind
But where I'm going
And who I'm going to see when I arrive.

Maybe the next time after that I'll save the extra.
Pass among the bums; refresh my memory
Lest I forget how close a man can be to losing all
And more directly pay the toll for sleeping
For worrying about where I'm going
And if all will be well when I arrive.

------
* I decided that since my truck was broken down, I'd take buses and trains to get to the airport. I figured I'd save myself a little money and see how well the transit system worked, my having spent a year giving advice to the government on how to make it work better. I spent about what I would have to drive myself over to the DFW airport and get a friend to park my car at his house, not because the transit system wasn't economical.  It's the hidden cost of such a trip that will get you, for it is a trip through dark places. I saw a man sleeping on a bus station loading dock in sub-freezing temperatures. I was conned by a neatly dressed homeless man who apparently makes a passable income showing people how to get from the train to the bus station and back in downtown Dallas. He has quite a convincing patter and you won't have to hear the same story twice and apparently his father had a lot of names as it's always the same as yours. If you have cash when you start and you're not completely heartless, you will part with a portion of that cash before you wend your circuitous way from stop to stop and finally arrive at your destination. The taxi guy got almost the last of it. I put the rest in my son's gas tank. I apparently, am not supposed to have any cash on me. 

Jesus said, "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

Precisely, why I gave the guy the twenty bucks. I figure I helped solve his worries for that one day. It's all we're asked to do.

Tom

Who Gave You Permission to Help That Man?

Someone asked me something like that once. We were trying to find rides for seniors and people with disabilities who can't drive so they can get to the doctor, to the grocery store and to church. He was a development director for one of the largest charities in town. What he really wanted to know was whether we had the okay of the local good old boy network BEFORE we started looking into the problem.

"Who gave you permission to start a transportation initiative?" he asked.

The answer: Nobody did!

So, without permission, in 7 years we tripled the funding for rural transportation for seniors. We forced the rural transit provider to drop discriminative practices. We engaged private sector transportation providers to help get folks with disabilities get to and from jobs. We stopped predatory "coyote" drivers from exploiting the families of farm workers in small rural colonia's and helped the women get an affordable ride to town to buy groceries. We did so without raising taxes by so much as a nickel.

For our troubles, I got a nasty letter from the executive director of the local Council of Governments. The director of the state Transit Association called me "anti-transit".

I figure we must have done something right if we upset so many good old boys!

There has been a lot of rhetoric in recent years about an old African proverb. "It takes a village to raise a child."

Somehow, folks of a certain political persuasion have come to believe that Washington, DC is just the village to do that.

I'm not sure on what planet the federal government is considered a village, but it is surely not in this solar system. The proverb is dead on, though. I know from experience. I grew up in such a village.

Back when I was 12, If I had been seen throwing rocks at a street light in Keene, Texas by any one of the town's mothers or grandmothers, word would have reached my Mom before I could have made it home at a dead run. Mom would have met me on the porch, her arms crossed and tapping her foot in a way that boded no good for me.

There is no power on Earth for getting things done effectively and humanely like that of a small community. That's the village those old Africans were talking about. Local communities, united together to fix their own problems - that's what the proverb means. They aren't talking about vast unwieldy social programs.

Virtual Village began as a dream to help people working in small to mid-sized nonprofits in rural and small towns, local neighborhoods and communities. The idea was to help inexperienced, but passionate local leaders successfully network, write grants, create new programs and solve problems in their own communities.

They don't need a mandate from Washington. They don't need the okay of whatever good old boy political network runs things in their state. What they need is help figuring out how to do what needs doing.

We call it "doing good without permission".

You'd be surprised how many government bureaucrats we've aggravated so far.

As we built the website, however, the economy suddenly came crashing down around everyone's ears. Foundations cut their giving for new projects. Some closed entirely. The feds cut the deduction for philanthropic giving, seizing control of dollars that once flowed freely to charities and channeling them through government programs. Our small, local charities need help more than ever.

I was driving through the country yesterday and saw a crude sign in front of a tiny country church advertising a "Soup Kitchen". It wasn't sophisticated. It wasn't politically correct. Yet struggling rural seniors were getting a hot meal. The church started the soup kitchen because Meals on Wheels and food bank programs have been having getting food out into the rural areas and there were a lot of older people out here in the sticks that need a hot meal every day. So neighbors pitched in and are helping their grandmas and grandpas and struggling families that have been laid off, have lost jobs or businesses or who have had the family wage-earner die suddenly. By the time a government program could have been put together, isolated seniors could have been starving. They didn't because their neighbors acted quickly and solved a problem with the resources they have.

They'd like to keep it going permanently, but they don't know how.

The Food Stamp folks have long complained that church food pantries were cutting into their business. A couple of years ago they actually started a marketing campaign to bring people back to the Food Stamp program that were being fed by little church food pantries. Now, the Food Banks that supply those church based pantry programs are suddenly finding it harder and harder to get the food supplies they once did as the federal government tries to centralize all anti-hunger programs under government control.

Small to mid-sized charities also face stiff competition for increasingly limited Foundation grants. Big charities with fat development budgets and marketing resources dominate the competition for what grants and other funding remains out there. Local charities are having to do more, with less money and they're doing it with organizations that don't have the aggressive development resources they need to find funding to keep their doors open.

Virtual-Village is a vitally needed on-line tool that can help the hundreds of thousands of small church and community-based organizations that have sprung up to meet needs in our towns and neighborhoods that were not anticipated up in Washington's central planning.

We're here to help the people who create and run local charities. We're here to show them how to reduce travel costs, to access information they need to do their jobs and to help build collaborative networks using 21st century telecommunications and Internet based tools. These wonderful people solve a myriad of problems that exist in our home towns that nobody in Washington has ever thought of, much less designed a "program" for.

These are tough times.

Please go to this link ( http://virtual-village.org ) and visit the site. Small charities can't afford expensive development officers, much less afford an extensive development and fund-raising program. Yet, Foundations and government funding sources increasingly require more and more networking, interagency cooperation and program coordination before they'll give money to local charities. This is an expensive and time consuming task, something most nonprofits can't afford. Virtual Village can help by bringing the collaborative networking process down onto our own desktops.

You can help the little nonprofits and faith-based ministries survive in this era of crumbling economies. Contribute now. We need your time, your talent and your money. Any one or all three!

We need just $25,000 to finish adding all the new tools the site needs to be fully functioning. A commercial for a used car dealer can cost more than that to make.

Just go to the Virtual Village homepage and click on the 'donate' button. Help us finish building the website and adding the tools our friends will need to survive the coming lean years.

The community you help may be your own!

I've given 6 weeks pay so far. Can you give lunch money? It's easy. Follow the easy to use Paypal "Donate" link on the home page. Just a couple of minutes and you can strike a blow in support of all those little guys out there helping your communities.

• They aren't making government salaries.
• They don't have government health benefits.
• They spend on average less than 8% of their entire budgets on admin costs.
• Many go without pay altogether.
• Millions of volunteers work with them.
• Tens of millions are given a hand up.
• Tens of millions of lives are changed.
• We can help them do even better.

Join us, won't you.

We don't have to ask the government for permission to help the homeless, to shelter a battered wife and her kids, to feed an elderly person or to help someone who's fallen on hard times to get back on his feet.

Why should we have to ask someone in Washington whether the widow next door deserves to have a couple of neighbors mow her grass or paint her porch for her?

Why should our neighbor have to file stacks of humiliating paperwork when all he needs is a couple of bags of groceries and a ride to work for a few weeks till he gets on his feet?

Help Virtual Village help our community do-gooders to, well, to do good!

Thanks for your support,

Tom King

Sustainable Communities - Comfortable Ant Hills

Relying heavily on designs inspired by anthills and termite mounds, the modern sustainable communities movement calls for a radical restructuring of the American Dream Home. The Sustainable Communities folks call for smaller, more energy efficient cities with jobs and services placed closed to large apartment like complexes. The single family home will go the way of the dinosaur and nature will fill in all the new open spaces left when everyone moves into these human hives.

This concept for the future makes several assumptions that I think make some of their ideas untenable as a practical policy for the future of our nation.

1. This model assumes a pretty thoroughly socialist political system in order to work. Residents of these communal cities will inevitably give up many of their rights and freedoms that they now take for granted. You won't be able to go where you want, when you want. The proximity of neighbors limit what you can do on your own property, if you, in fact, own your own property in the first place. Public ownership of all property seems to be embedded in the sustainable communities concept.

- I don't think socialism will ever be acceptable to a significant portion of Americans. The right to independent movement, the right to property, the right to make decisions about how and where you live and what your home looks like is precious to a lot of us. I don't expect many will be willing to give that liberty up on the notion that we'll be saving the planet.

2. This model assumes that technology will not catch up with demands in key areas like power and transportation sufficiently to allow independent movement and that society must inevitably move in the direction of mass transit.

- Technology is expanding geometrically. It doubles every ten years or so in this fashion 1 > 2 > 4 > 8 > 16 > 32 > 64 . At the current rate, technology will seem magical within a very short time. We can adapt to what we have or we can innovate till we have what we want. The question is, "What will be best for humankind as a whole?" The lesson of history is that hive cities don't work out very well on the whole. They tend to violence, human sacrifice and citizen on citizen aggression.

3. This model assumes that placing everybody in close-packed utopias will result in peace and safety and free us from dependence on cars and trucks thanks to a well-managed universal public transit system.

- The problem with staking everything on short walks and subways is that mass transit leaves us terribly vulnerable to terrorism in a way that is unacceptable to many Americans. Our lifestyle and success has earned us many enemies among poorer nations, not because the ordinary people believe we are robbing from them, but because their dismal leadership must needs make us the villains to draw attention from the fact that their own tyranny and mismanagement has led to the appalling conditions in their own countries. Unless governments worldwide suddenly renounce tyranny and embrace capitalism, I don't see much chance of that changing anytime soon. Therefore terrorism will increase and it always seems that the best place to set off a bomb is on a bus or subway. I figure they can't get as many of us at a time if we're each alone in our cars.

3. The model assumes a growing paucity of resources for power.

- While it is true that resources can be depleted, there are obvious alternatives available out there that are infinitely renewable and I see no reason for pessimism. The man who finds a cheap and reliable energy source will be a millionaire. The oil companies can only hang on to their dominance in energy so long as they provide cheap energy. They can't do that any longer and unless they find another kind of energy, they aren't going to remain on the top of the heap much longer. It may be that something else is already on the horizon and that that is why they aren't interested in drilling and building new refineries. Maybe they know something we don't know.

4. The model assumes that rising energy costs will drive us to bunch up and submit to "planning" by a powerful central government run by really smart people. They've even gone so far as to deliberately drive up costs to force people to use public transit or cut auto use.

- In doing so, they threaten to collapse our economy in the name of a theory that at best has limited evidence that it's a good model for human cultures. Human nature is what it is. Our society's most innovative and productive citizens also tend to be independent and freedom loving. If you naturally select a society for members that are docile, non-threatening and accepting of authority, you inevitably reduce productivity, innovation and drive to excel or you drive your best people elsewhere and they take their talent for problem-solving with them. My suspicion is that they'll move off planet if Jesus doesn't come soon.

Don't get me wrong, I think there's a place for such communities and some people will fit nicely within them. At the same time, there's also a place for folks who want to live amongst the woods and lakes and we have the ability to make that an environmentally rational choice as well. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for mankind's problems.

Human socio-political systems never work well when powerful individuals and groups exercise absolute or near absolute control - not in governments, not in churches, not in cultures. You can't simplify a society through rigid rules and ubiquitous public planning enough that planners and rulers can effectively control a society. You create an illusion of safety and security, but not the thing itself.

As you remove personal liberty and personal responsibility and replace it with group think and group action, you sew discontent in the populace and set your society up for disaster. Human eco-systems work best when decentralized and a high level of personal liberty granted and a high level of personal responsibility expected.

You can still do innovative work on eco-friendly communities and sustainable communities, but just lets not get carried away and try to legislate them into existence. Good ideas are always sellable if the marketplace is free and available to all.

That said, however, I think we're headed for big trouble in the next election, I'm here to tell you.

Just one man's opinion....

Tom King

Stanley Steamers, The Wagner Act and the Perils of a Managed Economy

Fuel prices are ridiculous and it's getting ridiculouser! I say we bring back the Stanley Steamer. All you need is a heat source. Heck I have a couple of cords of wood in the back yard - I could get up nice head of steam.

History Lesson - draw your own conclusions.

The Stanley was taken off the market because of false rumors (wonder who'd make up false rumors?) that their boilers would explode. One Stanley did nearly 200mph in a Daytona Beach test once back in the 20's. Another wrecked with a full boiler on that same beach going full out. All the boiler did in the wreck was come loose and roll down the beach blowing steam. I bet I could run one on alcohol. I had an uncle who still knows how to make moonshine. That stuff was potent. He says they used to run their Model T's on the stuff during prohibition!!

Only legit complaint about the Stanley I ever heard was that it gave off an ultrasonic whistle that drove dogs nuts!

I think there was some legislative effort to make them illegal (wonder who would want to do that).

This all happened about the same time that Sam Rayburn (D, Texas) and FDR got together with lobbyists from Goodyear, GM and Standard Oil to write a law that banned electric companies from owning public transportation (remember those electric trollies that ran all over the place in the 30's). The electric companies that were making piles of money off electric streetcars were forced to sell them under the newly passed Wagner Act.

Guess who bought the streetcar companies?- A company formed by a partnership between (you guessed it), Firestone, GM, Standard Oil and, I think, Phillips Petroleum. And what did they do first thing. If you saw the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" you know about the deal. They scrapped the electric streetcars in favor of gasoline powered, rubber tired buses! Shortly after that, they decided that public transit was not cost effective and they scrapped the bus companies right and left. They did this because the new mega transit company and their allies in the government thought it would be a good way to stimulate the auto, rubber and oil industry - so they meddled a little with the free market - all with the best of intentions, of course.

The folks on the left want to blame somebody, so they point boney fingers at the so-called "greedy consumer" - those of us driving SUV's and pickups and such. Somehow it's our fault.

That's a bunch of bunk. We drive cars because that's the system we got stuck with thanks to Sam and Frank's manipulation of the transportation system "for our own good". The over the past half century, we've been sold the on the idea of big cars, the freedom of the open road and the promise of eternal cheap mobility by legions of ad agencies for more than half a century. We designed the roads and transportation systems for private cars when oil was cheap and plentiful and we were trying to fix the problems with railroads. So, we developed a transportation system fueled by gasoline and diesel.

It's just that somebody else saw how well we were doing and decided to siphon off the profits from out economy. Guess who?Same guys that had us standing in line at the pumps back in 1979! Personally, I wish Texas would secede from the union and join OPEC! As long as we're siphoning money.....

The Wagner Act forced a change in our transportation system that deliberately pushed our economy toward reliance on personal cars for transportation. Sam Rayburn (D. Texas) and FDR thought it would be a good idea. Henry Ford and Mr. Firestone thought it was a pretty nifty idea to. J.P. Morgan was wild about the idea.

The point is that the whole streetcar thing was an incident where an attempt was made to control an economic system "for our own good". A bunch of smart guys got together, decided what was "best for America" and wrote some laws to force the changes they thought would be best (and, coincidently, make them all richer).

The great temptation for wealthy and powerful people is to simplify complex systems so that a group of planners, industrialists, or a government can control the economy, the transportation system or the monetary system. What inevitably happens is an exchange of one problem for another.

In fact, the more complex and open economic systems are, the more healthy and stable they are. Whenever you get groups whether governments or corporations or unions or international cabals, trying to control things, they only mess it up. It doesn't matter if they are let, right or centrist, it's the attempt to control what is too complex to control that gums up the works.

Our benevolent leaders deliberately made us dependent on cars and gasoline and oil so that when we were no longer able to produce enough oil for ourselves, we became vulnerable to those that had it and could control the flow of it. We managed ourselves into a lovely trap.

So now, we're looking at a range of political candidates who all tout schemes for managing our way out of the mess we're in, when we got ourselves in this mess in the first place by trying to manage another mess we'd got ourselves into (railroad monopolies and electric company monopolies) which we got into because we tried to manage ourselves out of another mess we'd got ourselves into before that.

Ironically, if we would just quit trying to manage everything and opened up the markets to all sorts of new ideas, opportunities and markets, we might have a shot at digging our way out of this big old mess we're in!

It's not about politics, it's about unleashing the energy of the American people to solve problems. It's like someone pointed out to me the other day about the food shortages. It happened because we decided to pursue bio-fuels by legislative fiat rather than by letting innovation happen as a matter of course. All of a sudden all the corn was going to bio-fuel and acreage was not being planted in wheat and other important crops.

Even then, if we'll get out of the way of American farmers, it looks like small farmers will be able to spring up to meet the need using long abandoned smaller plots of land scattered and lying unused since small farms began to fail thanks to previous government attempts to manage agriculture "for the good of the American people".

Like Ronald Reagan said, "The most frightening sentence in the world is, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help!'"

The end of the great streetcar plot was that a few oil and auto execs were convicted of illegal manipulation of the markets and fined $5,000 each - chicken feed compared to the kind of money they made on the whole deal.

It's kind of fun that GE (the remnant of Thomas Edison's electricity empire and a major loser as a result of the Wagner Act) stands to make a monumental fortune off the whole Global Warming movement which is at the same time crucifying the American auto industry in favor of high mileage foreign made cars, flaying the oil industry for "profiteering" and advocating a return to light rail (non rubber tired) mass transit!!!

Lovely!

They're going to start writing laws again. As the Russians used to say, "The Cossacks are coming. Take off your watches and hide your wives!!!!

We can figure out a way to fix things, if we just quit trying to figure out how to fix things so that they benefit only a certain narrow group of folks or according to the ideas of a tiny group of "leaders".

If we learn anything from nature it ought to be that eco-systems and economic systems are too complicated for us to diddle with. Every time we try, we just muck it up. When are we going to learn the lesson our mother's taught us when we were little.

"Stop picking at it! You'll only make it worse."

Just one man's opinion

Tom King

A Streetcar Named Politics

Glenn Beck is wrong. I really enjoy Glenn's radio and TV shows and generally find him one of the more sensible conservative commentators around. So, I was disappointed when I read one of his "illustrations" of the power of free markets. The section is called "A Streetcar Named Corruption" (page 104).

The story goes like this. In 1914, electric streetcars were 100% of mass transportation in US cities - even in cities of very modest size. Sensing an opportunity to take over the industry and make money, 3 companies from 3 industries came together - automobiles, oil and rubber. Over the next 40 years, streetcar companies were bought up, dismantled and replaced with buses built by the auto industry on rubber tires burning oil. Once the streetcar and the Interurban electric rail system became extinct by 1950, the consortium that started it all, shut down the new small town bus companies, calling them unneeded and too expensive. By then, the American culture had moved away from reliance on mass transit toward private auto ownership.

In citing the story, Glenn says, "Far better than any government agency, private industry can lead us through another transportation, but it needs the right incentives." Here's where he loses me. Glenn assumes the whole thing happened without government intervention as a result of private industry responding to a transportation crisis in our country.

The truth is more infuriating and he shouldn't have used that story to support a plea for free market competition. Quite the opposite is true.

What happened was this. The three companies in this story faced a nation that had cheap transit and no strong need for private automobiles. Interurbans and streetcars provided cheap transportation virtually anywhere you wanted to go. Even small towns were linked up. How could they sell more cars and oil and tires?

Simple.

The streetcar companies WERE ALMOST ENTIRELY OWNED BY THE ELECTRIC COMPANIES!!! The electric companies had plenty of low cost electric power and the transmission infrastructure to support it. For them, it was another way to make money off of electric power delivery. The auto, tire and oil industry understood that so long as Americans depended on cheap streetcar travel, their industries would not grow as quickly as they wanted them to. They formed a company called National City Lines (NCL).

So.....................

The auto/rubber/oil consortium approached Texas Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, the powerful Democrat Congressman who ran roughshod through the halls of power back in the day. Rayburn with the help of then president, Franklin Roosevelt pushed through a law (The Wheeler/Rayburn Act) that they told everyone was passed in order to "protect consumers from the evil electric company monopoly". The law forced electric companies to divest themselves of their streetcar companies. So, streetcar companies went up for sale at fire sale prices and practically the only buyer who could afford to pick them up was NCL.

Within weeks of purchasing the streetcar companies, NCL began replacing streetcars with rubber tired, gas burning buses built by the auto industry. Operating costs increased dramatically and over the next couple of decades, many of the smaller bus companies folded up. As transit became more unreliable, people began to (guess what) buy more personal cars. Executive of Standard Oil and GM actually went to jail for conspiracy over the deal, but by then, the damage was done.

Without cheap streetcars, in no time, Americans all had bought personal cars and developed a massive appetite for oil. Unable to produce enough to meet the need, oil companies began buying it overseas.

So, thanks to Democrats trying to manipulate the transportation industry through laws that limited competition in favor of one industry over the other, we wound up dependent on foreign oil.

The Moral of the Story: When the government starts restricitng business competiton for the good of the American Public, everybody grab for your wallet - someone's after your paycheck.

Glenn, give me a call. I can help you with your research for the next book. It's embarrassing to be praising behaviour you obviously disapprove of - even it's by accident.

Just One Man's Opinion

Tom King

A Three Ring Binder Solution?

Today, the East Texas Regional Transportation Coordination Steering Committee released its plan for coordinating transit in the 14 counties served by the East Texas Council of Governments. Several of you glazed over and dozed off right there on that sentence. Why should you care? You’ve got a car.

Let me make this simple for you.

You ought to be paying attention to this issue. First it’s your tax money that’s been wasted in the past and if something isn’t done, more will be wasted in the future. Second, you’re gonna need transportation some day. Here are the facts!

1. 1 in 5 East Texans doesn’t have reliable access to a car. They can’t go where they want unless they find someone who will take them.
2. For most of us, it’s not if we lose the ability to drive, it’s when.
3. We all get old.
4. By 2010, 1 in 4 of us will be over 65 years old.

See. Someday, you’re going to need a ride. Your grandma may need one right now! Your disabled neighbor may need one.

Here’s why this all happened. The state got sick of throwing money at an inefficient transit system, especially in rural and small urban areas. Empty buses were running everywhere. Old people and disabled folks were left stranded all over the place. Commuters didn’t have any alternative to driving their cars to work. The state demanded that transit be coordinated with human services, local government, other transportation providers and other modes of transportation. They mandated a planning process with broad-based public participation.

Now the plan is ready. It’s been reduced to a three ring binder. The plan was approved unanimously. At that point I got up on my hind legs and asked the group what happens now? Is this one of those three ring binder solutions where we spend a horrendous lot of time and effort and create a plan that gets consigned to a bunch of notebooks and forgotten.

Griff Hubbard, the chairman of the committee, answered the question with a challenge. Evidently it’s now our individual responsibility to make sure the plan gets done.

Sadly, the resources for making our transportation dreams come true aren’t readily available to a large segment of the transportation stakeholders who developed the plan. If, for instance, an agency controls the region’s transit dollars AND acts as the recipient of those dollars as well, isn’t it sort of the fox watching the hen house? Yet that’s what could happen if the rest of us don’t get organized and make sure the plan gets done.

The steering committee will still meet, but it’s not enough. Somebody's got to bird dog this turkey! (I mean that in a good way - I like turkey! It's yummy!)

So we’re going to have to go to work. Should be interesting.

Just one man’s opinion….

Tom King

Difficult Come, Easy Go

Local TV news announced last night that the late run of the Red Line bus route will be discontinued in January due to lack of funds. Don’t know yet if the JARC and Para-transit service will continue or not.

Most people will not be affected. Only the poor, seniors and people with disabilities are going to be affected. The problem is the same that it has always been.

1. East Texans don’t use the bus if they can help it.
2. The 20% of us who don’t drive are, after all, a minority
3. We don’t like to spend tax dollars if we don’t have to on something that isn’t giving us a return on our investment.
4. We figure bus riders are people we don’t really want to have in our community anyway. A Tyler city housing official once said, “We don’t really want to attract ‘those people’ to our community.” We want to attract rich retirees to Tyler according to an economic development official, not poor and middle class.

For those of us in the middle class or below, who are aging or who have a disability and for some reason depend on others or public transit to get around, we will only get what we need in the way of resources or retain what we already have if we make ourselves heard by those we elected to public office.

Before you dismiss me as a liberal, left wing kook, let me say up front that I’m a conservative down to my bones. Public transportation is an important element of a healthy economic infrastructure. It’s a long term investment we, as a community need to make. Here’s how the community can communicate our interest in making this investment.

1. Right now, everyone who cannot now drive, who may not be able to drive much longer, who owns a business that depends on entry level workers (food service, hotels, retail, restaurants and service business should drop a note to their city councilman and the mayor and the manager of Tyler Transit asking them to re-examine the reduction of evening services. At the very least, alternative strategies should be aggressively pursued and the word should be got to the media that we’re not just cutting service, but finding a way to make it more cost-effective and more efficient.
2. The advocacy community needs to begin a guerilla PR campaign to promote the idea that a whole segment of the community is stranded and needs a ride rather badly. The campaign needs to make the public aware that as they age or if they become disabled, they may need transportation.
3. The advocacy community needs to promote bus service as a low cost alternative to the daily commute for workers in Tyler. Commuters are the allies of seniors and people with disabilities.
4. More people need to take part in the regional transportation planning effort that is taking place in this area..
   

We worked awfully hard to get service expanded. We need to work a little harder to keep it evidently.

Good luck and may the force be with you.

Just one man’s opinion….

Tom King

I may have spoken too soon...

Yesterday’s regional transportation steering committee meeting went pretty well, despite an apparent disinformation campaign that seems to be going on in the eastern counties that is apparently designed to discredit the Greater East Texas Transportation Alliance (GETTA) as a fair partner in the planning process. There were some surprisingly vehement speeches to the effect that GETTA is some sort of gang of Tyler bully boys whose sole object in all of this is to hog up all the money for Tyler. Statements were made in one breakout session to the effect that GETTA members should not have a vote or have any responsibility for selecting members.

First, when you hear this kind of stuff, you have to wonder what agency or group would most benefit by discrediting GETTA and then you would have to wonder whether that group was involved in spreading such disinformation. One member said firmly that, we are "going to have to deal with GETTA’s bad reputation before we can move on with the process". Evidently a significant group of steering committee members, especially from the smaller unserved counties, feel GETTA needs to be removed as a player and replaced by some agency that covers all 14 counties. Where have I heard that line before? Hmmmmmmmm...

Wow! I have a problem with that big time. Let me lay out the issues we heard and a response to each:

1. GETTA is about Tyler and only what Tyler needs and doesn’t deserve a special place in the process. First of all, the Texas Department of Transportation has mandated that consumers be represented in the regional transportation planning process! There is only one organization in this region that represents seniors, people with disabilities, low income families, commuters, business and human services as well as providers and government agencies and that is GETTA. East Texas Just Transportation Alliance (ETJTA) does too and is a member of GETTA but while it has a broader membership, participation in ETJTA has been up to now very informal and tends to be in response to some problem or issue. GETTA, however, was organized more formally and has the support of providers, MPO’s and the COG (at least they show up to meetings most of the time). Without GETTA, the regional service planning process would have no “organized” consumer advocacy representation to bird dog the lead agency as a participating member. Everyone on it would merely be providers, and COG appointees. That’s how it was originally set up until GETTA members and stakeholders objected. ETJTA has supported GETTA’s efforts to expand transit in Rusk and Wood County and to obtain the JARC grant for Tyler Transit. We’ve offered to help the rural provider obtain the same funding but were rebuffed. GETTA members have tried to reach out even though we had no funds to do it with. The fact that GETTA hasn’t got members from Camp County yet, doesn’t mean we aren’t working just as hard for them as we are for Smith County. This is an ongoing process and needs time (which we’re out of) to pull in everybody (see recommendations below).
2. There have to be more than just advocates on GETTA. Well that’s impossible because everyone on GETTA is there as an advocate for their own constituency whether that be seniors, people with disabilities, low income families, business, commuters or economic development leaders. Evidently “advocacy” is a dirty word to some folks on the steering committee (at least the way the word was being used yesterday anyway). Let me define “advocate”. An advocate is someone who speaks on behalf of someone else or a group of someone elses, usually, regular ordinary people – those who would use or benefit from public transportation, for instance. One in 5 East Texans don’t have reliable access to transportation, but most of them can’t get to the meetings to speak up for what they want. It is for that 20% that ETJTA and GETTA speak as well as for the businesses they would patronize if they could and the services they would use and the elections they would vote in. If it were not for advocates speaking loudly and clearly, this steering committee would never have met in the first place. The existing system was just fine as far as the provider community was concerned when we started this process and, though we have a couple of standout providers who have since embraced this coordination effort, it took ADVOCATES to get the ball rolling (or have any of us forgot how bureaucratic inertia works). We’d still be having meetings about having meetings and complaining and getting nothing done and being assured that there wasn’t anything that could be done because the rules wouldn’t permit it. Instead, advocates got up on their hind legs and got something done. During the past two legislatures, we got bills passed that changed things, we changed rules and funding formulas. We pestered lawmakers and public officials, we held meetings, listened to consumers, drove the wheels off our cars, started blogs, websites and e-mail listserves. We went to Washington and Austin on our own dime and testified on behalf of people who need rides in every corner of East Texas while our COG issued resolutions AGAINST CHANGING THE STATUS QUO EVEN THOUGH EAST TEXANS WOULD BE THE MAJOR BENEFICIARIES OF SUCH CHANGE! Advocates deserve a place at the table because without us, the table would not even exist.
3. 'Advocates’ are a group of cripples, geeks and old people trying to co-opt the system for their own selfish purposes. GETTA as an advocacy group is a coalition that includes people and agencies from consumer and provider communities who believe that better transportation is possible and are willing to stick their necks out to see that it happens. Some of those people who stuck their necks waaaay out were transit providers God bless ‘em! Unfortunately, the tendency has not been universal.
4. GETTA doesn’t cover all 14 counties. Well, that’s the truth. Would you like to know why. GETTA would like to – you bet! Did we try to include as many as we could? Absolutely. But GETTA had no budget, no staff and did everything we did do as volunteers on our own time, spending our own money. Yeah, we're a local initiative and not ashamed of it. The folks who did have the budget for this, namely the Council of Governments, should have been holding meetings, visiting unserved communities and diversifying services, but they didn’t do it. Instead the COG reduced the number of transit providers down to 1 (from more than a dozen). They made speeches at GETTA saying GETTA had no business even talking about regional coordination because it was ETCOG’s responsibility. Their rural transportation program director stood up at a Regional Conference on Aging and stated that they "didn’t have to make their customers happy; their customers had to make them happy in order to get a ride". GETTA and ETJTA meanwhile, scared up money for transit projects, resource surveys and consumer surveys. We went out to surrounding counties to find out what people needed.
   

GETTA members have taken a lot of flack over the years because we have pushed, prodded and cajoled legislators, public officials and agencies to create a state supported regional transit planning process going. When we started, we asked why there wasn’t a regional planning process. We were told there was one. I asked who was involved and was told it was the 3 directors of the 3 big transit providers (Tyler Transit, Mini-Bus and ETCOG’s rural transit director). I asked where were the advocacy people, the human services people, the economic development people, the chambers of commerce and the employers with workers who commuted. We were told they weren’t invited because they didn’t “understand transportation issues”. So, a group of us formed East Texas Just Transportation Alliance and when GETTA was formed we joined our efforts with theirs. In the past 7 years we have:

1. Held public forums on transportation to get a sense of what issues were and to investigate ways to address those issues.
2. Organized public comment on transportation issues (digging up transportation for transit riders so they could attend and informing everyone we could think of about important issues and where they could comment on them).
3. Put together agendas and position statements that helped focus local efforts to influence legislation and regulatory change that would make East Texas transit work better.
4. Facilitated the provision of information to congressmen, senators and legislators both federal and state about the sorry state of transit funding in East Texas. Testified before house subcommittee on transportation in support of the historic House Bill 3588 which fundamentally changed TxDOT for the better.
5. Provided representation on the state Public Transportation Advisory Committee that changed the funding formula and sharply increased funding for East Texas over the next 3 years that should make transit resources available in the outlying areas of the region if the funds are used wisely. The PTAC representative (me) visited local groups and individuals in Jacksonville, Vernon, Jefferson, Lufkin, Palestine, Rusk County, Marshall, Van and Wood County to talk transportation issues during my tenure on the Committee. I did this with my own money on my own time and was not reimbursed in any way.
6. GETTA and East Texas Center for Independent Living conducted two pilot surveys of resources and riders in the western counties of the COG with the intent that the process could be repeated in other counties as we were able to organize local initiatives. We have worked with individuals and initiatives in Rusk, Wood and Cherokee counties.
7. ETJTA and GETTA members worked together with Just Transportation Alliances to obtain a Federal congressional earmark under Job Access and Reverse Commute to increase Tyler Transit hours till midnight (or later) and then led the effort to obtain state toll credits from TxDOT to match the federal dollars. We offered to do the same for ETCOG for a rural JARC project, but were told they weren’t interested in working with us.
8. Forged an alliance between providers and consumers in support of an organized regional transportation planning process, organized everybody we could get to with our limited resources to be a part of the stakeholder process and agreed to serve as one of the tri-lead agencies when asked by stakeholders who were concerned that some advocacy group should be a part of the lead agency group to provide balance and consumer representation. There was no other similar group available and still isn't for that matter.
   

For those from unreached counties who feel GETTA isn’t a good representative of their interests, let me make a suggestion. Rather than obstruct the process and throw out the baby with the bath water, how about we do this:

1. Look around your counties and find what you consider a properly representative group and hold a meeting to organize yourselves.
2. Contact Just Transportation Alliances. You can talk to Sheila Holbrook-White (512-699-8136) or to me (Tom King – 903-714-2353). We will be glad to provide you with support as you organize a local transportation advocacy group, just like GETTA members did.
3. Our TxDOT public transportation coordinator helped us organize. Why hasn’t yours done the same in your area? I’d ask if I was you.
4. Then, let’s approach GETTA about joining your group’s efforts with theirs.

Rather than dilute GETTA (which is more powerful as a local effort than it would be if you spread it out over such a large area), let’s create a partnership among a whole bunch of tough, flexible and active local initiatives like GETTA and then unite their efforts with the other JTA groups statewide. ETJTA would be happy to organize a loose confederation that unites GETTA with other local transportation initiatives throughout the region. I am certain that GETTA would be happy to work with those other initiatives to make sure they are represented in GETTA’s work on the steering committee. We’d need to create some sort of mechanism for that, but it could be very effective and is exactly what GETTA members would like to see get done.

ETJTA is standing by to help in any way we can and you’d be surprised what we can do if we all work together. Hey, maybe they’ll start talking nasty about you guys too. That’s how you know if you’re effective.

But be forewarned. As a member of PTAC, GETTA and ETJTA, I have …..

• been told repeatedly to shut up
• been told I know nothing about transportation and so I should shut up
• been told I was misrepresenting the situation when I stated in a public meeting that there was a transportation shortage in East Texas and I should shut up
• been told I should submit any statements I planned to make about public transportation in East Texas to ETCOG for review before I make them (or shut up).
• been told as a member of GETTA that we had no business talking about regional coordination when it was none of our business and that we should just vote on how to spend 5310 funding and shut up!
• been accused of being “anti-transit”, ignorant and ill-informed (and was advised to “shut up”).
• been accused of only being a transportation advocate because I wanted a consulting contract from “all of this” (in other words, be paid to shut up!)

There were other things said, but I won’t repeat the impolite, gymnastic or geneological comments I've received – there might be young people reading this post.

Finally, I recognize where all the distrust comes from. I know the history of public transportation and how unevenly it has been available to East Texans. I and fellow GETTA members were part of efforts to change that history.

GETTA is not who you need to be worried about. GETTA has earned a place at the table simply because they can be trusted to include you out there in the hinterlands.

If you’re looking for someone to pull out a chair for anyone who accidently got left out, it’s likely going to be a GETTA member with his hand holding the back of that chair when they sit down.

That’s been the history anyway!

Just one man’s opinion…

I’ll shut up now!

Tom King

Ground Control to Major Tom

I've got to tell you, I was beginning to flag in my enthusiasm for transportation advocacy...

As you know, I've had a rough year and things seemed to be going along okay, so I thought I could let it ride the rest of the way on its own. Then, along came Jamal....

I got an e-mail and a phone call from an enthusiastic cab company entrepeneur here in Tyler the other day. I had plenty to do, bankers to schmooze, creditors to appease, lawyers and CPA's to make happy, so I wasn't exactly looking to get involved in some new crazy wild-haired campaign to reform transportation in East Texas. I'd just about decided to let someone else worry about transportation. I'm tired.

Then, I sat down to talk a little treason with Jamal. Holey, moley, I've found a kindred spirit! In a short meeting and a lunch, we'd decided to launch an organized effort to develop a regional transportation broker system for public transportation in East Texas. Now, when I've tried to explain this concept to people before, I usually get a lot of blank looks and confusion. Jamal got it right away, then he ran with it.

I come from a background in aviation, he told me. We have air traffic controllers that....

Yeah, I interrupted. We do like ground traffic control....

After that we started talking fast and finishing each other's sentences and pretty soon we worked out a strategy for pulling together a detailed outline of how the plan would work and presenting it to the regional steering committee. Ain't regional transportation planning grand? It's the same regional transportation idea ETJTA has been pushing for more than 6 years now (and the powers that be - they know who they are - have viewed with horror).

But don't you just love the air traffic control analogy? It's perfect. Even cab companies like Jamal's are installing GPS and tracking software. His dispatcher showed me their display. When you had a customer waiting, it showed a little stick figure. It showed where the assigned cab was and how fast it was approaching the rider. When the pickup is made, the stick figure disappears and when the fare is paid, the amount is recorded. How cool is that?

So why not create a master system that tracks the whole 14 county region, all provider vehicles, all riders. You have a single number to call and somebody to hook you up. There are all kind of software solutions to do that kind of dispatching.

That way if Jamal is hauling a couple of pints of blood to Addison and someone is headed for Mineola from Lindale, he can swing by and grab the fare on the way instead of sending a huge paratransit vehicle on a special trip for one guy. What a wonderful resource it would be. Each transit provider could continue to do its own dispatching if they wanted. They'd just be tracked by the master system too so they could be coordinated and the broker could hook up the provider from its end too. If we can track hundreds of planes in the air, why not hundreds of transit vehicles, cabs and vans on the ground.

The increase in responsiveness, reduction in turndowns for rides and increased loading such a system could generate would increase ridership. To make it work you'd need some basic stuff:

1. A funding stream to cover the service - we might have to get TxDOT or the legislature to help us figure out how to structure that and obtain state, federal and/or local funding.
2. GPS equipment would have to be installed on every participating transit bus, paratransit vehicle, cab and church van.
3. The broker agency would have to be able to broker rides across all participating providers and have some control over how funding gets done
4. The broker/ground traffic controller would have to have a development capacity to promote innovation, rules changes needed to facilitate coordination and cooperative equipment maintenance arrangements.
5. The system would have to allow all provider partners to maintain independent operation while grabbing opportunities for picking up as many riders as possible. The broker dispatch system would act as a "travel agent" or better yet be able to interact with "travel agents" from human service agencies to broker rides. The as well as traffic control system.
6. The system would have to favor efficiency and reliability and customer service FIRST!
7. Eventually, the system should have the capacity to "hand off" traffic to other similar systems in border regions or to hand off customers from one provider to another to piece together trips that cross service boundaries.
8. The broker/controller would have to be trusted by all the providers to be neutral. If it's a nonprovider, consumer oriented agency, then you've got a workable solution that more nearly guarantees equal treatment of all provider partners. It's in the interest of consumers to make sure everyone is successful so there are more resource out there.

Interesting how it works when you get fresh ideas at the table.

We need to create a planning group of around 10 people from a cross section of providers, consumers, civic and human service agencies. We need to create something like a business plan for a regional ground traffic controller / trip broker and then we present them to the steering committee.

What fun....

Just one man's opinion.

Tom King

An Act of Amazing Grace

Marty Allen (TxDOT) & Jon Mitchell
(ET Wheelers & Walkers) at GETTA Meeting
A TURNING POINT REACHED IN THE BATTLE FOR CONSUMER BASED TRANSIT PLANNING

TYLER, TX: I saw something yesterday that I never thought I'd see. So as not to embarrass anyone, I'll just say that what I saw was an act of courage and grace. I won't say who did it because it might infer that this person was not a person of courage and grace once upon a time. I don't intend that impression at all, so lets just leave it anonymous. If you've followed the course of the East Texas transportation initiative, you know how contentious the process of bringing consumers and consumer advocates into the regional transportation planning process has been. There's been name-calling, incessant maneuvering and a lot of distrust between elements of the provider community and the consumer advocates.

I think we've reached the turning point in this process. At a tri-lead agency meeting yesterday all parties agreed that it was important for the new 33 member steering committee be given the opportunity to find its own voice and to facilitate that, the tri-leads elected to step back and let a neutral presenter facilitate the meeting. East Texas Council of Governments deserves a lot of credit for putting their own interests behind those of the communities of the region they serve. It is terribly tempting for transit providers like ETCOG to protect their turf and go to extraordinary lengths to control the process. ETCOG has made a public decision not to do that, but to let the steering committee do its work and to serve the committee rather than control it.

For an organization like the COG, that's not easy. It WILL mean more work, more trouble and probably force them to do things that are uncomfortable and difficult.

GETTA (the consumer/provider coalition) and TxDOT are to be congratulated for steadfastly insisting that the steering committee be independent and at the top of the organizational pyramid for regional service planning instead of being an isolated "advisory" branch - easily by-passed if they get too frisky.

So things are looking pretty strong for regional coordination in East Texas. Maybe next we can get a one-stop ride broker coordination scheme going. It's probably too early for that, but who knows. We've got a steering committee now. Anything could happen.

Tom King
East Texas Just Transportation Alliance
tomking@broadwayinternet.com

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you're a good
person is like expecting a bull to not charge you because
you're a vegetarian. - anonymous

Regional Service Planning - Custom or Spec, what's it gonna be?

Once again, we're hearing rumblings complaining about Greater East Texas Transportation Assn. being one of the lead agencies. People are asking "Who is GETTA?" and "Why should GETTA be there?" "They don't know what it takes to be transportation provider." "They don't represent everybody." "They're divisive and are responsible for too much negative outflow."

There've even been a couple of attempts by the COG (that we know of) to get county commissioners and city officials to name ETCOG as the one, the only, the true leader of regional transportation service planning - and this happened weeks after transportation stakeholder groups had already spoken and named TXDOT, GETTA and ETCOG as co-leads.

And the COG can't figure out why we don't trust them....

Here's why GETTA should be one of the lead agencies.

-----------------------

WHO GETTA IS:

Greater East Texas Transportation Association is a coalition of East Texas transportation stakeholders, users and providers, funders and regulators organized for the following purpose:

1. To create an open discussion process about transportation challenges faced by seniors, people with disabilities, low income workers and families, the homeless, commuters, tourists and transportation providers.
2. To plan solutions to specific transportation problems and initiate projects that address specific community transportation needs.
3. To recommend funding and service implementation strategies to the Texas Department of Transportation’s Public Transportation Department.
4. To promote regional service planning and effective transportation coordination.

GETTA HISTORY:

GETTA began as a TxDOT Tyler District initiative to create an advisory committee for the DOT’s 5310 rural transit program. The group quickly identified issues beyond the 5310 program that needed the attention of some sort of community advisory group. Prior to the creation of GETTA, regional service planning existed only as an annual exercise by regional transit providers and the East Texas Council of Governments done to meet the requirements of federal and state funders and to address the planning needs of the transit providers.

In the 4 years GETTA has existed as an organization, the members of the group have obtained grants for studies of regional transportation resources, promoted new local projects, worked with one area transit provider to obtain a congressional earmark for funding for an important transit project and participated in the process of restructuring how regional service planning is done.

WHY GETTA SHOULD BE INVOLVED:

GETTA is an organization whose members represent transit users, transportation and human rights advocacy groups, nonprofit organizations, the business community, health and human services, consumers and transportation providers. The state legislature and the Texas Transportation Commission have mandated that regional transportation service planning WILL blend provider-based planning and consumer-based planning priorities. It is critical that consumers take their place at the table to watchdog the process. GETTA, because it is not a government agency, can ask questions and express concern that organizations dependent on federal and state funding cannot ask, will not ask or dare not ask. GETTA has the flexibility to change its structure, composition or membership makeup to adapt to its new role as co-lead agency with TxDOT and ETCOG in the regional service planning process.

Already it has been suggested that the membership of GETTA be changed to include representation from other districts in the region and to cover a larger geographical area. This is possible for GETTA, whereas ETCOG and TXDOT are what they are and cannot make such changes in structure. It has been suggested that, because of the role GETTA has been asked to play as one of the three lead agencies for regional service planning, that we ask TxDOT and ETCOG to resign as formal voting members of GETTA to address concerns about double voting and the threat that GETTA’s vote on key issues could be tainted as a result by the dual membership on GETTA of the other two members of the lead agency team – namely TxDOT and ETCOG.

The point is, because GETTA is what it is, it can do these kinds of things to insure that consumers are well-represented at the table. In bringing consumer based planning into the regional planning process the great danger is that we would fall back to the old ways of doing things in which plans are made out of sight of the public and then presented to the public for comment – essentially for an up or down vote. This is basically provider based planning in that providers attempt to guess what the public wants without the benefit of ever having the public in the room to tell planners what it is they want. Plans are always better when the people for whom you are planning are in the room to tell you what they want and to give you ideas about what might work best.

It’s the difference between a “spec” house and a custom house. Builders like to build spec houses. They get to build them the way they want to, they get to cut corners and they don’t get asked to do the difficult or impossible or to change things halfway through the construction. Of course, spec houses can be harder to sell because if you don’t get it exactly right you could wind up having to sit on an unsold house for a long time till the right buyer wanders in who happens to like what the builder did.

Builders hate custom houses because the owner wants what he wants and sometimes what he wants is hard to do or adds to the cost. Custom houses are harder to build, but then the advantage is that for all the headache for the builder, the house is already sold before you hammer in the first nail.

The big debate in this whole thing is between those who believe transportation planning should be done on “spec” and those who believe it should be a custom design. Apparently the legislature thinks it can be a combination of both approaches. Like a good custom house job, it can be done in a way that meets the needs of both the contractor and the buyer. After all, we’re building a system for the people who ride it, not for transit providers. At the same time, transit providers need to be able to function efficiently and well in order for their agencies to stay healthy and to be able to continue providing services so they need to be an integral part of the process.

The problem is the providers have never NOT been considered an integral part of the process. Providers have always been drivers of the process.

Till now, however, the consumers have never been considered integral to planning. Historically, our job as consumers has always been seen by COG leadership as (and I quote) “to make the transit provider happy in order to get a ride,” not to tell transit providers how to do their jobs.

So, now that has all been changed by legislative proclamation. So does that mean that magically, an entrenched bureaucracy is going to suddenly open its doors and let us tromp through the house with our muddy boots on? That’s not terribly likely.

Ideally what we’ll get to eventually is a good partnership between builder and buyer. Unfortunately, the head builder in this case apparently doesn’t trust the buyer and wants to make sure he “controls” how much the buyer gets to participate. Every concession transit users have got so far has been taken, not given; has been protested and resisted by the self-appointed leadership. This is a disturbing trend and does not bode well for the future. Repeatedly we’ve been told that we don’t know anything about transit so we should sit down and shut up and let the pros take care of this for us.

Well, we don’t buy it and neither does TxDOT or the legislature apparently. We’d rather we were freely invited and welcomed to participate at the table, but if that’s not going to be the case, then we’ll bring our own chairs if need be – especially since we keep having to check the legs of the chairs we’ve been provided so far to see if they’ve been sawn through or unscrewed.

Someone at ETCOG recently lamented, “I can see right now you guys will never be satisfied.”

That’s only true if ETCOG isn't going to do anything differently. We just aren’t satisfied yet and with what we’re seeing so far, we don’t have a lot of reason to feel satisfied (or secure) either.

Just one man's opinion....

Tom King

Slouching towards Bethlehem

"What is this rough beast
slouching towards Bethlehem to be born?"
W.B. Yeats

I don’t know about the rest of the transportation stakeholders in East Texas, but I’m beginning to get tired of the weekly meetings that ETCOG keeps calling as it pushes forward the regional service planning process at a breakneck pace. It’s forcing the process along faster than unpaid volunteers can keep up.

Of course, that could well be the whole point.

Meetings are announced without checking to see who can attend. The last couple of meetings that they posted drew comments from key committee members who weren’t going to be able to come including the director of Tyler Transit and today we learned that the entire TxDOT delegation can’t come to the March 9 stakeholder meeting at which the steering committee will be chosen according to ETCOG’s Mark Sweeney.

It’s time to put on the brakes! If you’d like to see a change in how the lead agency team is structured, I recommend dropping an e-mail to TxDOT’s Shawna Russell, Commissioner Andrade’s staff member who has been bird-dogging the regional service planning process in East Texas. Here’s what I’m writing to her:

---------
TO: "Shawna Russell" SRUSSE1@dot.state.tx.us

Dear Shawna,

I am concerned that the regional service planning process in East Texas is not being well managed. My concerns are:

1. East Texas Council of Governments has virtually assumed the chair of the lead agency team without any formal consensus by the other two entities elected by stakeholders to serve as an integral part of the lead agency team. I intend to propose tomorrow that TxDOT staff direct the lead agency team. We’ve never formally chosen a chair of the team. Mark Sweeney simply assumed the job and nobody has challenged that and election of a chair is unlikely to ever appear on the agenda.
2. ETCOG has scheduled a rapid-fire series of regional stakeholder meetings and lead agency meetings designed to appoint a steering committee to oversee the lead agency. The meetings have been called almost weekly with relatively short notice and little consultation with other participants. The most recent meetings will be held without key members in attendance, including a large announced stakeholder meeting which TxDOT staff members are unable to attend due to prior commitments. I believe this places an undue burden on transportation stakeholders too, most of whom are either volunteers or work at full time jobs from which they cannot be absent on a weekly basis. The whole thing gives the appearance of an attempt to wear out the public and reduce attendance by non-providers. ETCOG staff can attend meetings as often as they like. They get paid to do just that and they get reimbursement for their mileage. Most of the rest of us do not.
3. Consumer representatives at the most recent stakeholder meeting left the meeting early. Most had traveled to the meeting via Mini-Bus. If they left early in order to meet Mini-Bus’s schedule, I am concerned that this skews any votes taken later in the meeting after the large contingent of users left. Mini-Bus has, in the past, made it a practice to pickup passengers by 2 pm in order to get everyone delivered home before their offices close.
4. I think it is important that TxDOT take a more directive role here in East Texas until a competent and well-trusted, community chosen leadership team can be formed. I believe TxDOT should force ETCOG to cancel and reschedule all further meetings until the lead agency team can meet with full representation of all members and, under TxDOT direction, choose a fair and balanced management structure.
5. I believe that the local TxDOT districts should assume the lead at this point and use their Evergreen contracting ability to bring in an outside consultant to guide the regional service planning process forward to the point where stakeholders in East Texas are assured that we have a process that will truly balance consumer-based and provider-based planning requirements. This would remove the need for an extensive RFP process, remove the supervision and selection of the consultant out of the hands of the agency most likely to receive funds to administer planning dollars and take the process of creating a steering committee entirely out of the hands of the agencies that will be supervised by the committee, thereby increasing the likelihood that we have a representative committee at the end. I shall propose this at the next two meetings.
   

Please extend my thanks to Commissioner Andrade for her attention to East Texas’ regional service planning process and for deploying staff to monitor the meetings.
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Note to ETJTA members and friends: If you wish to add your voice to mine, please feel free to cut and paste and copy and send your own version to the Commissioner’s office.


Tom King
Coordinator, East Texas Just Transportation Alliance

If you don't want to look shifty, don't dress like Snidely Whiplash!

Dear friends of ETJTA,

We finally received a copy of Mr. Sweeney's Powerpoint presentation to the TxDOT "Sharing Approaches" workshop on Wednesday - at 8:56 AM the day of the presentation. The workshop started at 9:30 AM. We were all driving to work or getting our day started. We had 36 minutes to react and respond and no time for them to fix it.

And they pleaded "lack of time" as expected...

There was an entire page in the Powerpoint on developing an RFP for a consultant and describing a "work methodology" (read "scope of work") for the consultant. This was something that we specified on Monday that should NOT be in the presentation, but be left for the steering committee to decide how and whether or not to do.

Fortunately, an angelic being must have intervened for the digital projector at the workshop malfunctioned and prevented the Powerpoint from being used. As a result, Mark scarcely mentioned the offending slide.

A couple of days later, the rumor mill in Tyler is reporting that ETCOG has approached the City of Tyler and Smith County Commissioners to create a resolution declaring ETCOG the lead agency for regional service planning in East Texas, in direct opposition to the carefully developed and implemented stakeholder process that appointed a three member lead agency management structure consisting of TxDOT, GETTA and ETCOG.

Someone has also been spreading around among good folks over in the Marshall area, the accusation that the "Tyler gang" (ETJTA, GETTA, TxDOT Tyler District) somehow deliberately left out folks from the 6 Eastern counties and the two other TxDOT districts for their own nefarious purposes.

Trouble is, it was Just Transportation Alliances and TxDOT and GETTA folks that did, in fact, invite folks from the Marshall, Jefferson area to both TxDOT stakeholder meetings. We wrote letters, made phone calls and sent e-mails to those we knew of in the eastern counties of the region. We did this while we were pushing hard for our own consumers in our neighborhood to be included in transit planning. We have since offered the Marshall area folks all the help that JTA and the rest of us can give them to organize a consumer-based initiative in their area.

It has always been our intent to include everyone we could find. Three years ago, we started collecting stakeholder data in all 14 counties, believing that broad participation makes for a stronger, smarter process. What weakens the process is deliberately setting about to pit stakeholders from one region against stakeholders from another region in what looks like an attempt to neutralize the consumer voices that have successfully infiltrated the regional service planning process and to seize control of the planning process. By manipulating a series of political "resolutions" out of trusting city and county officials you may get yourself appointed the Great And Powerful Oz and Ruler of All Things Transit, but in the process you will make yourself some powerful foes and really hack off the Texas Transportation Commission, TxDOT PTN and an assortment of powerful state, national and local advocacy groups.

In the interest of clarity, I want the Marshall folks to know that I am not criticising them for feeling left out. They were left out! What I want to make clear is that they may be blaming the wrong folks. Who, after all, claims to be the leader here? Who's been calling "planning" meetings since December 2004 without calling for actual participation by consumers in the process? Who objected to the planning meeting on August 12 because it was "premature"? Who should have been making the effort to bring together the far East Texas Counties from day 1? Who's been making the case that they have the resources to do it and the rest of us do not?

For five years I've been running all over East Texas talking to local transportation initiatives from Jefferson to Jacksonville to Mineola - listening to literally hundreds of people talk about their transportation problems. I've filled up my own gas tank, worn out my own tires, scrounged money from JTA's grants for plane fare and hotels, bought meals on the road, spent unpaid hours away from work that I had to make up and spent countless late night hours (check some of the posting time stamps on my past e-mails and blog posts), creating websites, writing e-mails, making phone calls and visiting politicians. ETCOG has me outnumbered. I admit it. They can do more than me.

So why then are we just now finding out that the "six counties" have been left out and suddenly realizing that we need to hold meetings in Marshall to choose the steering committee? Why all of a sudden have the folks in Marshall suddenly become upset, saying angrily that "Tyler" isn't the whole region? How did that come about? Who could have suggested the idea that somehow consumer groups in Tyler were to blame in the first place? Even more ludicrous is the suggestion that the Tyler District was leaving out Paris and Atlanta districts when it's common practice for the district with the most territory in a COG to take the lead on behalf of the other districts. Besides, who led the way in inviting consumers to the planning process in East Texas beginning more than 4 years ago? Four years ago, TxDOT Tyler District was the one that pulled out a chair for consumers at the table in the first place. Does anyone else think things are getting a little aromatic with all this sudden concern for those who haven't got local initiatives going and don't really know what's going on and so are still a little too trusting?

It would be well to remember that even though Richard Nixon said, "I'm not a crook," and Bill Clinton said, "I didn't have sex with that woman," it sure did look like it to most of us and both gentlemen suffered a lot of misery and humiliation for it even though they were the most powerful political figures in the country at the time.

It would also be well to remember that when citizens believe they have been disenfranchised, it is to the law that they turn for help.

Finally, it would be well to remember that even though your heart may be pure and your motives above reproach, if you dress up like Snidely Whiplash and twirl your long black moustache a lot, nobody's going to line up to buy a used car from you...

Just one man's opinion.

Tom King

They're at it again....

We had a meeting at East Texas Council of Governments on Monday. Things were discussed, decisions made, promises extended.

The most important promise was by ETCOG planner and the meeting's facilitator, Mark Sweeney. Mark promised we'd get a look at the Powerpoint he was going to present at Wednesday's regional service planning workshop in Austin. He promised to e-mail a draft for us to look over. It's Tuesday and it's after midnight. No draft!

No such file was e-mailed to me or anyone I know of. It will be presented unreviewed by members of the lead agency team other than possibly a few members of the COG staff that helped draft it. This presentation tells the DOT what we're doing about regional service planning in East Texas. It must represent what's actually happening and who's really doing what. It might and it might not. Without that draft, we do not know and sadly, we don't particularly trust the authors of the draft based on the last 5 years of experience with them.

After the meeting on Monday, a member of the COG staff asked me how they'd done. I want to change my answer. This one thing would have at least made it look like they really meant to do what we asked them to do. Instead, by not releasing the draft file BEFORE going to Austin, the COG only further demonstrated an inability to understand how important it is to show us the draft in advance of presenting it and in time to discuss any problems we might have with the structure of it.

So, here we go once again. I'm positive they'll downplay this as a technical difficulty and nothing intentional. Meanwhile, we don't have any idea what Mark is really presenting down there till it's too late. Meanwhile, consumers who have been shut out time and again by just this sort of bait and switch tactic, grow ever more tired of being marginalized by an ETCOG staff that are really failing in their struggle to make the paradigm shift from provider-based to consumer-based planning (or even a blending of the two). It doesn't matter if it was an honest mistake, it looks like what it looks like and it don't look good and if you want people to trust you, you've got to look trustworthy.

One man's opinion (leave yours below if you want).

Tom King

Old Brummi and the She-Coon

As some of you may know, I rotated off the Public Transportation Advisory Committee this month. This caused a stir amongst those for whom I was a major thorn in their side on that committee. Suddenly, the members of the loyal opposition have come out of the woodwork to provide me with Job's comfort - gloating over my perceived demise and listing reasons why I was not reappointed.

These reasons included factors like my titanic ego, my unrepentant arrogance and my colossal ignorance. I fully expected to get an e-mail that starts, "Tom, you ignorant slut..." like the old Dan Ackroyd/Jane Curtain Point/Counterpoint bit on Saturday Night Live. Interestingly enough, E-mails from my critics included a particularly scathing "nanny, nanny boo-boo" letter from ETCOG's executive director* (which I understand got a lot of really big laughs down in Austin when I showed it to them).

To those of you who have supported the efforts of East Texas Just Transportation Alliance to bring some real consumer participation into regional transportation planning, I want you to know that everything is moving along as planned. I was replaced on PTAC by not one, but two new members; good people - one an advocate and the other a business person with strong ties to Commissioner Andrade who has been carrying the banner for regional service planning from the very beginning. I leave the PTAC in good hands.

As for me, personally, I have a huge capital campaign to run for Generations Together (taking cash donations, credit cards, pledges and unused bus tokens anytime - just call me) and I'm looking forward to some more really interesting fun with regional service planning in the near future (I can't talk about it just yet, but will let you all know as soon as I can). In contrast to the gloating of my opponents over my leaving the PTAC in disgrace as they suppose, I've also had a stack of thank you letters and expressions of appreciation from a wide range of people in TxDOT and the advocacy community. It's nice to hear from people who really do care about people who need a ride to work or the doctor or the grocery store. It's encouraging to know your work was appreciated and to be reassured that you weren't taken out by the forces of darkness, but that everything is part of the plan.

The whole thing reminds me of a Jerry Clower story about Uncle Versi's coon hound Old Brummi. Old Brummi had been after the She-coon of all time for years. Finally, one dark night Old Brummi treed her. Well she tried to jump clear on over to the next tree and escape, but she missed and landed right on top of Old Brummi. They commenced to fightin'.and scratchin' and bitiin' and clawin' up one side of the hill an down t'other.

Finally, they rolled down a little railroad cut and out onto the Union Pacific railroad tracks. Old Brummi and the She-coon was so intent on killin' one another that they weren't aware of where they were conductin' their fight and that great American train, The City of New Orleans run right over the top of them.

Uncle Versi ran over to the battered body of Old Brummi and dropped down on his knees and commenced to squallin'.

Clovis Ledbetter, his great good friend, caught up with him and knelt down beside him there on the tracks and tried his best to comfort Uncle Versi.

"It's a hard thing to lose a good coon hound," he commiserated with the old man.

"That ain't it," Uncle Versi shook his head sorrowfully. "Old Brummi had a good long life and did a lot of huntin' in his time and he had a quick death. He didn't suffer none neither. That's a mercy."

"Then why are you so upset?" Clovis asked puzzled.

"Well," sobbed Uncle Versi, "It's just that Old Brummi died thinkin' it was that coon what killed him!"

-----

For me, it's just nice to know it weren't the She Coon what killed me.

Thanks to all who wrote such nice things.

Old Tommy

*A full copy of the text of Glynn Knight's letter is posted in the "comments" section to this post.

Bad Dogs & Bicycles - Why I Care About Rural Transit

It has been suggested that my passion for rural transportation issues (particularly my opposition to ETCOG’s handling of regional service planning) has something to do with me hoping to get some money out of this deal. In answer to that charge, let me tell a story.

In 1981 I had ended my career as a parochial school teacher and temporarily taken up my father’s work as a construction hand at Brown & Root. New to the trick of working in the heavy construction industry, we miscalculated our finances the first time I moved from one job to another, and we found ourselves broke and homeless. Our old car broke down and had to be hauled away. We found a cheap farm hand’s house for rent in the middle of nowhere in Johnson County. I rode my bicycle to town 5 miles away to get groceries and rode back on narrow county roads balancing two large sacks of groceries on my handlebars dodging dogs and pickup trucks. My wife was pregnant and sick staying home in the heat of summer with no air conditioning and with two small boys. I’d been working for a week for Brown & Root at the Glen Rose nuclear power plant and it was an 85 mile round trip commute to work. We couldn’t even afford a phone.

My day went like this. At 4:30 AM I got on a bicycle and rode through the pitch dark on back roads and Farm to Market roads for 5 miles into Joshua – dodging several large vicious dogs who found it amusing to chase the fool in the hard hat and work boots rattling past their turf with the big clanky lunch box balanced on his handlebars. There were two Rottweiler's that got particularly pleasure by streaking across the yard in absolute silence and then leaping the fence with a roar in an attempt to startle me and knock me off the bike. I assume they viewed my early morning passage as an opportunity to snag a light early morning breakfast (I was much thinner then, what with all the healthy early morning cardio-vascular exercise I was getting). There were long stretches of road that were pitch black (you couldn't see the rattlesnakes that like to stretch out on the warm asphalt at night - those big squishy bumps you'd go over in the blackness were a particularly thrilling element of the old daily commute). It was a frightening, exhausting and humiliating trip. Passing farmers laughed and pointed. It took me an hour to pedal to town.

In Joshua I chained my bike to a light pole and boarded an old school bus some guy had. We paid him $20 a week to share a ride. We rode for another hour or so to get to Comanche Peak. At the end of long, exhausting day of hauling steel plates and huge metal struts from the storage yard to the containment building, I got back on the bus rode back to Joshua, got on the bike, set out cross country, dodged the dogs and pickup trucks and reached home to find my wife sitting in the front yard, holding the kids and crying because she’d been alone for 13 hours and was too sick to be able to fix the kids supper. She'd come outside to wait for me because she heard the dogs going nuts up the hill and knew I was almost home.

A few weeks later, she had the baby. I left the hospital at 3:00 AM, walked from South Fort Worth to Burleson, hitchhiked to Glen Rose (48 miles) and turned around and came back the same way to sit with her in the hospital. When she got home, I went back to riding the bicycle until someone stole it while I was at work. It took two hours to walk to Joshua and two hours to walk back home (the dogs were even more of an interesting challenge on foot). Finally I bought an aged Ford Maverick that lasted just long enough for us to get on our feet again. I went to work for a nonprofit organization the next year working in my field of expertise once again and have been working in the nonprofit/human service field ever since.

So, when I hear stories of little old ladies hitchhiking to Wal-Mart, colonia’s families handing over $80 worth of food stamp purchases to predatory van drivers for a trip to the grocery store and elderly couples being told they would have to build a circular drive in order to qualify to be picked up by rural transit I see a little red. When a small town council member tells me how desperately families in her town need rides to work and can’t get them and then a certain rural transit district manager tells me deviated fixed routes and commuter bus services are not practical/not doable and then I meet a provider in another region of East Texas who tells me they’ve been successfully doing deviated fixed routes for more than a year……

When a certain rural transit director stands up in a public meeting and says, “We don’t have to make our customers happy, they have to make us happy in order to get a ride!”.....

When we work for 5 years to get a JARC grant that a certain rural transit director told us would be useless and unusable and then, despite predictions, we actually get it and it’s usable after all and we realize we could have got a similar one for our rural counties with a little cooperation from that same rural transit district…

And when ETCOG spends 9 months working on a framework for regional service planning without inviting a single consumer side representative to the table effectively blowing a priceless opportunity to do regional service planning right, appoints itself lead agency without a general consensus, issues a premature self-serving RFP, and in the process endangers the brand new transit funding we all worked so hard to get for them by scoring zilch on their performance measures….

Well, I get just a teensy bit NUTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You can see why I have an interest in transit issues now!

It’s not because of any money I hope to get.

It's not about contracts.

It’s about those damned dogs!

Tom King