[Mpls] Privatizing bus service

[Anderson, Mark (GE Infrastructure)]

Our List Manager commented that some bus strike messages are getting off of Mpls.  I assume that at least partly relates to the thread I started on privatizing bus service, and the more generalized discussions between Mark Snyder and I about the respective efficiency of government vs private enterprise.  Therefore I won't refute Mark latest posting in that thread point-by-point, but instead cover Mark's most extreme error, and quickly get back onto the important issue of making our bus system work better.

Mark Snyder seems to be making an assumption that I think is widely prevalent, although usually unstated.  Namely that government workers have the best interests of the populace at heart, but private enterprise folks care only for themselves.  The advocates of this point of view continually gripe about politicians for whom this isn't the case (the ones they disagree with), yet their arguments seem to assume that the self-sacrificing politician is the way things are supposed to be.  

Dream on, utopians.  Just because someone is able to get elected means nothing about their level of ethics.  In all my interactions with those who work in business and those in government, I haven't noticed higher ethics in government types.  How many politicians would sacrifice their careers for the betterment of others?  About the same tiny number of business people that would do the same, I imagine.  For sure, different people are attracted to the public life of politics from those that prefer the more private life in business.  But those that enjoy politics aren't better people.  Mark Snyder assumes that politicians whose main motivations are to get re-elected are exceptions to the rule, but he's dead wrong.  Any elected official has that as their highest priority, or they wouldn't have been elected in the first place.

Back to the bus system.  Since in the real World, we can't count on anyone to sacrifice themselves to help humanity, we need to have the right incentives in place to induce people to do the right thing.  Right now the governor-appointed Met Council runs the system, so the governor is ultimately in charge.  So the incentive to run a good system is that it'll help the governor be re-elected.  As we've seen, that ain't much of an incentive.  And even if we had a DFL governor (or God forbid, a Green governor), beholden to Labor and mass transit advocates, the bus system is only one small piece of the governor's portfolio.  So it wouldn't have a whole lot of effect on his/her re-election chances.

One way to give the Met Council more incentive to run a good mass transit system is to make it an elective body, selected by the residents of the metro area.  But we already have so many confusing jurisdictions now that the downside would be adding to the ballot confusion.  So such an electoral change might not help.

And even an elected Met Council would be looking to the voters and political parties to be re-elected, of which the bus riders are just a small subset.  Wouldn't a better solution be someone who's accountable just to the actual people that use the system?  Of course I mean a private firm, which would live or die based on whether people rode their buses. The firm would also presumably get revenue from the Met Council as bonuses for the unprofitable routes, but I would hope we'd set the bonuses low enough so that the company couldn't survive just on them.  Top management would be focused on getting more ridership, and they'd be hurt bad from a strike like we've got now.

Wizard Marks has made some general comments about Cleveland showing this won't work, but she needs to add a lot more details for her comments to make sense.  Does Cleveland have a privatized system, and are there several companies driving different routes?  That's what it sounds like from your comments, Wizard.  I don't see why the Met Council couldn't organize the routes and various policies to be followed, so as to maintain safety and lessen confusion.  The system will still work much better if they didn't run the actual buses.

Mark V Anderson
Bancroft