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Public Transportation and Poverty |
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When I was out on the road today, I got to thinking about how much it costs to maintain and drive an automobile. Doing some quick calculations in my head, I came up with a rough estimate of $8000 a year for my family’s two vehicles. That figure includes one car payment, gasoline, insurance, taxes, maintenance, and repairs. $8000 represents 20% of our household income - almost equal to the national average of 19%, according to the Thoreau Institute. This figure has risen from 10% in 1935 and 14% in 1960.
Let’s get hypothetical for a moment. Let’s assume that every American household spends $8000 a year on transportation. That comes to a total of $880 billion for the entire country. Now, let’s assume that we all reduce our transportation costs by 10%; we can car pool, buy more fuel efficient cars, buy less expensive cars, drive less, drive slower, and do a lot of other things.
Suppose we could take the money we’ve saved and pool it together - about $88 billion.
Just imagine what kind of public transportation systems we could build with an $88 billion annual budget. For comparison, the federal government currently budgets about $40 billion per year for highways, some of which could also be diverted toward public transportation since we’ll be driving less and needing fewer new roads.
I know that this proposal is not realistic, but it demonstrates how much better we could be doing with the resources we are currently spending. As our population continues to grow and as our cities face more and more persistent gridlock, we’ll have to start doing something differently.
And let’s not forget how big of a justice issue this is. In my work with poverty in my hometown, I meet person after person who is being hamstrung by these high costs. If my town could receive a bus line to the city that is 20 miles away, most of the unemployed people in my town would have a shot at finding a decent job. But the county consistently shoots down any proposals for improving the reach of its bus system.
So it’s not just middle class people who are feeling a pinch in their wallets every time they go to the pump. Rising transportation costs are driving more and more people into poverty. Folks are losing their homes, neglecting their health care, living with without heat or electricity, and scrounging for food - not because they can’t work, but because they can’t afford to get to work.
Vastly improved public transportation should be at the top of our presidential candidates’ platforms, but all they can talk about are more ways to perpetuate our addiction to the personal automobile.
Jim Moss is a Presbyterian minister from Honea Path, South Carolina. He publishes a blog and a quarterly newsletter called “Discipline for Justice,” which focuses on ways North Americans can live lives that promote peace and economic justice.
Have you seen this site? http://htaindex.cnt.org/ It’s the addition of housing plus transportation costs.
The “middle class,” so-called, is little more than a modern bastion of sinners captured within their own excess; no matter how societally acceptable - neigh, admirable - it may presently be to find one’s self classified as such.
For how can a man be called middle-class, lest he possess the deed on a two story home with a two car garage; two cars to fill it; three televisions; a high speed computer with high speed internet access; a text-enabled cell phone (preferably the hands-free douche-baggery); at least one major toy: motorcycle, moped, classic car, jetski, atv, snowmobile, etc…, health and dental coverage, and a retirement plan?
And still how can one possess -even one- of these and answer him who asks, ‘How can you say that you keep the law and the prophets for though it is written that you shall love your neighbor as yourself, look: many of your brothers, sons of Abraham, are clothed in shit and dying of hunger while your house is filled with many good things, none of which go forth to these others?’
The statement that it is not “just” the middle class that is financially flailing is misleading first and thereafter somewhat insulting. It reinforces a despicable visage of reality: That we should look to these carnal zealots for guidance; that it is good to be so categorized; good to gather and do for the self; to lay up earthly rewards; that there is, and must be, a separation between ‘me and mine’ and ‘you and yours;’ and that the acquisition of Caesar’s coin equates to just accomplishment.
I know no man, in the flesh, who is not fallen prey - just as well - to the goods, convenience, and aggrandizing self-rewards of the modern American zeitgeist. Though many advocate grand notions of selflessness and conservation, all have failed to live them fully or faithfully. Even the churches among us now contain sound systems with 24 track mixers, digital recording equipment, and full PA systems. I wonder how many men might be fed a meal each day of the year if only these would resolve to speak a little louder, and forsake the amplification. As they fail to live the word, so go their followers. For he cannot pluck the mote from out his brother’s eye while his own sight is blighted by the beam therein.
What ever happened to the vow of poverty? Dante was the wiser of many a man. Still, despite him and his noble prose we have lived this past millennium in remarkable pride, greed, avarice, and vanity. In the end we have come, at last, to accept that our personal property should rightly amount to thousands, and tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands of dollars; whilst others sleep beneath bridges and upon public land.
I find the suggestion that our cars should be greener or our driving habits, more mindful, sets a fairly low bar. Would that we should choose to live lives of greater humility. Lives that demand less to sustain us. Lives that might entertain a bicycle, but not a Honda and certainly no SUV; a book shelf, but not a TV and certainly no plasma… It is frightening to realize that we have come so far from economy, modesty, and meekness that it is now thought economical to purchase a $34,000 hybrid vehicle.
Would that we should seek not this middle-class laodicea-livelihood, but rather tarry after the purer, narrower path of mindful poverty. Thus - come the thief in the night - we might not be found hording what’s absence our brothers suffer by.
Roy, your message is garbled with analogies that dilute your message, if anything. The comment on the modern bastion of sinners is well, misguided. I could speak of your own shortcomings in the role of human ascension which are doubtless to exist, but suffice to say that your idea of ‘mindful poverty’ is meaningless. Poverty is a relative word that compares economic classes and describes the lower part of that. Isn’t the problem the difference? I won’t comment on your understanding of economics, but I must ask why do you want meekness?
Roy,
While I agrre with the basic sentiment behind your comment - that Americans on the whole are self-centered, materialistic, overly consumptive, etc. - I think that you make a number of assumptions and generalizations that weaken your argument.
Most glaringly - what you call the middle class is what is normally called the upper middle class. These are the folks who are buying large houses, who drive $30,000 automoblies, and who make incomes that approach or exceed six figures.
My article is not concerned with the upper middle class. It is with the middle middle class (making about the median income) and the lower middle class as well as with those who are officially considered poor. These are the folks for whom $4 a gallon gasoline and and a 50% jump in food prices are more than just an inconvenience. They’re backbreaking.
While I agree that our culture as a whole could stand to radically redefine its approach to wealth, humility, simple living, and what we consider necessary, your comment shows a distinct lack of compassion for the large number of people who are genuinely struggling to get through each month. I’m all for being prophetic, but you’ve got to mix some caring in with your anger.
One last point - I used to call myself a prophet and I used to unleash eloquent tirades on people who did not share my particular vision of social justice. But that got old after a while, because I realized that all I was doing was annoying people - that my efforts didn’t really bring about any positive change.
So I appreciate your interest in my article, but I think you could express your opinions more responsibly and less confrontationally. We’re on the same team…
Perhaps I went too far in my description of the two car, two job, two child, nuclear family. Nonetheless I wasn’t aiming at the upper-middle class. I was attempting to chastise all the middle classes - the lower-middle as well. Especially those who align themselves religiously with some form of Christianity.
For they have not sold off their possessions, given the money to the poor, taken up their crosses, and followed the Lord. They have not sought the ways of the spirit. They have not declared enmity with the world, and thus they have declared it with God.
They have sought to serve two masters, if not more. First they have accepted that there is something much more powerful and much more important and much more needed then the ways of this world. Then they have spent the whole of their days playing at the victor-less games that very world has designed; ever convincing themselves that they have no choice in the matter; that it is an evil which must be done and despite God’s promises.
I, of all, know it isn’t easy to live the teachings espoused by the rabbi. And none will approach that life he advocates without failing time and time again. (As some have said, relapse is part of recovery.) But what brings me to the words you claim to find some excess of passion in is my despair: That none seem to remain who advocate the way. (Let us alone any who attempt its living.)
If I seem to lack compassion for middle-income families who are struggling to ‘get through the month’ it is only that I have yet to find that perfect love that would allow me to empathize beyond all semblance of wisdom and reason. (Though I continue to seek it.) For what each has need, God will provide. Or do we not believe this teaching: that God loves man at least as much as the other beasts of the Earth and therefore will He bequeath the favored child as much as his siblings - food, water, and raiment?
If they struggle, is it not because they lack the faith to trust in their Father’s provisions? Is it not that they seek more than what their God thinks enough? Must I sorrow for them endlessly because they continually choose to cause themselves pain?
Perhaps someday I will. But the reason I broke my silence at all is that I might push the swell of carnality back a bit. To be painfully honest, though not to insult, it disturbs me to see a minister speaking in the same terms as the Mongol horde, if you will pardon the saying. For it serves my disillusionment: that no one really believes anything more than fits comfortably into the frames outlined by his society.
What number describes a middle-class household, really? For a $30,000 household is a rich one indeed; having much that is not needed and often more that is of detriment to the soul. Let us be honest and admit that the middle class struggle, so called, is the struggle to maintain the comforts and the excesses of the flesh; Those same the prophets tried, at length, to make us weary of.
It is true I lack a good compassion for these. At present I suppose my compassion must be rationed until the next delivery. Thus I have withheld it for the lower classes, who, if they struggle, struggle so to eat, and not to pay the month’s mortgage.
I can only hope that something of what I write, or rather that I’ve plagiarized from the master, whether causticly received or not, will penetrate: The teachings are clear. We must begin anew to advocate what Yeshua spoke; what evidenced the prophets and apostles. One must make a concerted effort to not be of the world. If you have the means to make you middle-class, even lower-middle-class… well, you certainly have a lot of the worlds stuff in your closet to not be of its nature, nor wavered by its devices.
Neigh, I say. Meow is knot the thyme four that.
-sigh-