As part of their efforts to reduce air pollution, San Francisco and its suburbs offer free transit rides when pollution spikes. Ridership on BART and the other transit systems has soared on those days, causing some leaders to wonder if transit ought to be free all the time. But the San Francisco experience also offers some cautions: Misbehavior on the transit systems also soars on free days. There was considerable mischief and some outright lawbreaking on the buses and trains on free-ride days. BART's police chief thinks the problems are so great that he wants the free rides to be limited in the future, perhaps to morning commute hours. Two teenage girls got into a fight at one station; one stabbed the other, who ended up in the hospital. Others played boomboxes on trains, ate and drank, and tossed litter everywhere. It wasn't all kids, though. There were reports of homeless people riding trains and buses to beat the heat, the San Francisco Chronicle said. All of which is to say that there's good reason to charge something for transit. People don't tend to abuse things for which they pay.
FIXING A REGIONAL ORGANIZATION
For the past three years, Northeast Ohio's latest economic development effort, Team NEO (including Cleveland and Akron), has talked big, tried many things and accomplished little. Since its inception, the organization has loudly announced big goals only to quietly abandon them, changed strategies frequently and turned over its executive team, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported recently. Team NEO's problem is it's not really a regional economic development organization, it's a confederation of chambers of commerce. It gets a little money from local corporations, but much of its meager funding comes from area foundations. This is a recipe for failure. What Team NEO needs is for those who would benefit most from a regional approach to economic development--the corporations, big universities and major governments--to rewrite the organization's charter so Team NEO can go directly to them for funding and not deal with the chambers. That's how successful regional economic organizations do it: They get annual dues from members to pay the organization's overhead and mount occasional fund-raising campaigns to finance their economic development initiatives. The campaigns give these organizations their focus: The organizations promise to create a certain number of jobs by undertaking specific, detailed initiatives.
PEDDLING PUBLIC POLICY
Selling voters on new ideas is a critical part of the mayor's job in Seattle because, like many West Coast cities, it has to take a lot of things to referendums, including fairly routine transportation improvements. Seattle's a pretty liberal place, so persuading voters to tax themselves for urban improvements isn't impossible. Still, it's hard to get people revved up about a bond issue to install pedestrian signals, resurface streets and replace street signs, as Mayor Greg Nickels is proposing for this year's fall elections. So, he sponsored a public contest. In June, the mayor asked voters to send him their nominations for the worst traffic problems in Seattle--the bumpiest roads, the most irksome delays, the most dangerous bike routes. From the nominations, he said, he would create a "Dirty Dozen" list that would receive "very high priority" for repair. Nickels' intent was to shine a light on the city's backlog of transportation needs, generate some publicity for his upcoming referendum and show voters how such things connected with their everyday lives. More than 700 people wrote or e-mailed with their peeves. Nickels unveiled his Dirty Dozen at a press conference and talked at length about the need to repair all of Seattle's transportation infrastructure.
