It’s getting to be almost embarrassing how popular transit is with voters.
We win just about every time there’s a referendum on the ballot.
In the face of a well-organized ideological campaign to cut transit service in Charlotte (a few weeks before the light rail line is scheduled to start running), voters overwhelmingly rejected the measure and thus decided the sales tax for transit is a smart investment.
Here’s a story from the Charlotte Observer. It begins with these delicious paragraphs:
Mecklenburg County voters overwhelmingly backed the transit sales tax Tuesday, dismissing an aggressive grass-roots effort to repeal it and endorsing CATS’ ambitious plans to expand light rail and buses.
The margin of victory stunned even transit supporters. With all but one precinct counted, 70 percent voted against repeal, with 30 percent in favor of stopping the tax. The number of people voting for repeal — roughly 37,000 — fell short of the 48,000 signatures collected that put the tax back on the ballot.
Black precincts were particularly strong for transit, the article notes. That’s an important insight for our transit advocacy — African-Americans are part of our base.
In San Francisco, two competing referenda presented voters with a stark choice: transit or traffic. Proposition A, drafted and funded by the civic planning types with unanimous support (!) by municipal leaders, invests in Muni (their transit network). Proposition H, drafted and funded by GAP owner and apparent ideologue Don Fisher, would have permitted far more parking spots in the city. Civic leaders were nervous, as everyone likes free parking (right?), so it seemed like an easy one to hookwink the electorate and leave them with more congestion and pollution to go with those parking spaces. (Here’s a great write-up in the Golden Gate XPress).
Turns out, the San Francisco electorate (in a very low turnout election so the voters skewed more conservative) embraced transit and rejected the high costs of free parking.
These two sweet victories suggest that the electorate is generally more pro-transit than conventional wisdom holds, and that suggests we need to be bolder and more audacious with our requests to elected officials for transit investments. The people are with us!
Trackbacks