A World Without Wheels
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union AWORLD WITHOUT WHEELS BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS One of the characteristics that distinguishes rural transit from urban transit is the fact that most of its ridership...
...Many of our passengers have either a rural origin or a rural destination, or both...
...Either way, it's a constant rural headache...
...He wants to know what went wrong and what can be done to fix it...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an Executive Order establishing the Rural Electrification Administration on May 11, 1935...
...David Raphael, Executive Director, Community Transportation Association of America Solitude vivifies...
...It supplied low-interest loans to electric power and telephone cooperatives being organized by farmers in every state...
...Highways...
...Greyhound's wholesale pullout from small towns amounts to a virtual betrayal of its rural customers...
...the bill's original sponsor...
...isolation kills...
...This is indeed an unusual situation," said the president of the Wisconsin Power Company...
...The demand for good highways is general among the farmers of the entire United States...
...Over the generations policymakers have tried numerous routes to relief but have found no reliable remedy...
...For as the fellow said, "When you're alone in your boat, it's always comforting to see the lights of the other boats bobbing nearby...
...Public transit service between towns, meanwhile, continues to dwindle...
...The Urban Mass Transit Administration, which funnels transportation dollars to states and towns, contributes just $1 for each rural resident, as opposed to $28 per city dweller...
...By last February, the Rural Connection had 69 groups serving 750 towns in 16 states...
...Now we have this latest plague, what some commentators speak of as "transit deprivation...
...There's really no constituency for that kind of legislation," says Sheryl Washington, an aide to Senator J.J...
...There are 1,000 electric cooperatives today, and they supply electricity to 95 per cent of the country's rural residents, nearly all of whom take the blessing for granted...
...Only this time, alas, there are no REAs to come to the rescue...
...Last spring the lawmakers gave short shrift to a Senate bill known as the " Rural Bus Services Act," designed to encourage states to set up more intertown bus service...
...Exon (D., Neb...
...At one point it was widely assumed that establishing Rural Free Delivery (RFD), with its new network of rural roads, would pierce the agrarian cocoon...
...But the road to rural deliverance, it turned out, would have to be paved with more than macadam...
...In effect, the new power lines extended around the world, even into outer space...
...Department of Agriculture, 4,500 small communities had seen their bus service eliminated or reduced...
...In theory, it could recommend the establishment of a Rural Transportation Administration, a lending agency that might finally lead to the formation of rural transit co-ops throughout the land...
...its suggestions are almost certain to be restricted to the nonspending variety...
...Certainly the time seems past when a President could light up millions of benighted lives with a single stroke of the pen...
...Rural residents have been there before...
...For a brief honeymoon period the company kept its word...
...The idea was for Greyhound to reimburse the van lines for their feeder services...
...Deregulation of the bus industry occurred in 1982...
...All of the above, unfortunately, has a familiar ring...
...Thus, as in the case of RFD and the highways, it was public subsidy rather than private enterprise that connected rural America to urban America...
...In practice, it is not likely to do anything of the kind...
...Onlythree years ago it took over the bankrupt Trailways Corporation, its only national competitor, with promises to the Interstate Commerce Commission that the new monopoly would not endanger rural service...
...The bus is back," Greyhound's chairman, Fred Currey, assured an audience of small-town transit advocates at a 1988 meeting...
...Theylivein a world without wheels...
...I guess the riders are not writers...
...For a time it appeared that the new cooperatives had at last exorcised the demon of rural isolation...
...They had imposed a virtual quarantine upon rural communities...
...The co-ops not only lit up the lives of rural citizens, but via radio and television they linked those lives to the rest of the planet...
...Millions of smalltown residents are either too poor to own a car or too old to drive one...
...The knowledge might at least provide some small consolation to small-town citizens...
...As late as 1935, according to Marquis Childs in The Farmer Takes a Hand, fewer than 10 per cent ofthe farmers in America had electrical power...
...It is said to owe small-town van lines thousands of dollars for unpaid services...
...In Europe they call it " desertification"—the abandonment of public services in small towns and hamlets...
...As for Congress, it has hardly begun to stir...
...In the United States we just call it isolation...
...The farmer, a user of power, is trying to force the utility, a sellerof power, to sell him the product it has for sale...
...Using it as an excuse to shut down unprofitable routes, Greyhound's management has halted service to still more communities across the land...
...and those few were paying outrageously high rates for it...
...But the strike has left the Connection badly frayed...
...At first the agency's instructions were broad and unspecific—simply to "initiate a program to generate, transmit, and to distribute electricity in rural areas...
...It worked remarkably well...
...Later, with Congress' advice and consent, REA became a lending agency...
...By 1986, according to the U.S...
...It died in committee, apparently without discussion or regret...
...That the blessing of mobility has grown increasingly scarce in rural areas cannot be disputed...
...Still and all, a GAO study can do no harm...
...It invented the REA...
...In today's market-crazed climate, the New Deal and the Fair Deal, and yes, the New Frontier too, are polities as remote and as unrepeatable as Solon's Athens...
...The strike has caused additional grief...
...The idea of electric co-ops was the modern equivalent of the quilting bee or the barn-raising...
...And President George Bush, who has plenty of limousines and golf carts to carry him around, not to mention his well-appointed new jet plane, seems as indifferent to rural immobility as he is to many other domestic miseries...
...it is choosing between transit and isolation...
...This is chiefly a result of Federal deregulation of the bus and airline industries, but it is a consequence as well of the yearlong labor dispute at Greyhound...
...Senator Exon has asked the Government Accounting Office (GAO) to take a critical look at rural transportation...
...In some instances entire regions were left out in the cold...
...Not yet, anyway...
...In all, the decade saw more than 2,000 communities abandoned by either Greyhound or Trailways...
...We think the rural markets are of the most importance to us...
...A company spokesman recently conceded that it may never run buses again to thousands of small towns that have already been cut off from intercity public transportation by the strike...
...The problem was that most private utilities deemed it unprofitable to put up power lines in sparsely settled areas...
...It could even give some exactitude to a definition of our troubles, by spotlighting the places where rural isolation has taken over...
...Some of the utility executives may have been embarrassed by the impasse, yet not embarrassed enough to change their ways...
...As Childs has noted, "Millions of farm boys will never know what it is like to bump their heads on a stable beam in pitch-darkness, and millions of farm girls will never know the experience of bending over an oldfashioned zinc-covered washboard...
...A French saying What this country needs is a Rural Transportation Administration, an RTA that could do for mobility what the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) has done for electricity—bring it cheaply and efficiently to stranded rural residents...
...thundered Theodore Roosevelt's Commission on Country Life back in 1910...
...It established the Rural Connection, a system whereby small-community transit groups, many of them nonprofits, carried passengers in vans to Greyhound city terminals...
...Indeed, it soon became clear that there was also such a thing as electronic isolation...
...In many cases Greyhound has stopped reimbursing its feeder partners...
...The GAO has promised to study the matter...
...One suspects that the age of political miracles, of instant radical remedies, has receded into the mists...
...States of the Union AWORLD WITHOUT WHEELS BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS One of the characteristics that distinguishes rural transit from urban transit is the fact that most of its ridership is not choosing between cars and transit...
...We never hear from anyone except the lobbyists...
...In the midst of the Great Depression, the New Deal took the market into its own hands...
...Its underlying cause is strikingly reminiscent of the one that created a rural electricity shortage two generations ago—namely, laissez-faire paralysis, an inability on the part of private enterprise to get the job done...
...Having swallowed Trailways, Greyhound now has itself filed for bankruptcy, leaving creditors slowly twisting in the wind...
Vol. 73 • September 1990 • No. 12
