Dear Editor,
Regarding our choices for transportation
– what about private sector solutions? Are BART and Caltrain our
only choices? What about real alternatives, ones that history has
shown are sound, sustainable?
Dear Editor,
Regarding our choices for transportation – what about private sector solutions? Are BART and Caltrain our only choices? What about real alternatives, ones that history has shown are sound, sustainable?
Before we answer Professor Sherman Lewis’ “critical question” between arsenic and strychnine, we better answer Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta’s crucial question. Ten years ago he said at the transport institute that now bears his name: “The crucial question in transportation today is: What should government do, and what should it leave to others?”
Every country that tried politician transport options like BART and Caltrain either privatized their transport industries or fell in revolution in the 20th century. Do we join the “privatization revolution” as the Wall Street Journal described it? Or do we answer Secretary Mineta’s crucial question with nationalization, first transport, then land use, and where then will Valley Transportation Authority and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group apartachiks lead us? What will they nationalize next on the Marxist road to hell?
If we want the next generation to have any transport worth having, we better answer Secretary Mineta the same way the SVLG’s members answered their markets: capitalism.
Those other choices are poison; our leaders ought to have the common sense to reject them both.
Joe Thompson, Gilroy
