What Transit Advocates Could Learn from SOPA

[marmar]

from the Next American City blog:



What Transit Advocates Could Learn from SOPA
Diana Lind | Next American City | Feb 12th, 2012


The Stop Online Piracy Act was a bill with bipartisan support introduced into Congress in October 2011. What seemed like a well-meaning attempt “to promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property” was later deemed a major threat to the Internet community. By January 18, 2012 major Internet organizations such Wikipedia, Reddit and 7,000 smaller sites lobbied the public (and legislators) to stop SOPA and created a one-day black-out of their content. SOPA died an early death.

I asked friends what the transportation advocacy movement could learn from this incredibly successful campaign to defeat a piece of legislation. Many said “nothing,” others said, “good question,” but one person said “create something that hundreds of millions of people use every day.” That struck me as funny. The thing is: millions of Americans use public transportation every day, particularly in our country’s largest cities. New York’s Penn Station serves 1,000 people every 90 seconds. While it’s true that New York is the only American city where less than half the population owns cars, a sizable portion of the American population relies on public transportation. Could America’s greatest cities survive without their transportation systems? It’s not just people that rely on transit. More than an Internet blackout, transportation stoppages have the power to completely screw up travel, business, food distribution and dozens of other aspects of daily life. Remember the Icelandic ash cloud of 2010? That cancelled more than 60,000 flights and cost the European Union more than $3 billion in lost business.

So why hasn’t the transportation community rallied around defeating H.R. 7, the new and completely devastating House transportation bill? Why has it failed to organize all the people who live in cities and depend on the occasional bus or subway ride? .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://americancity.org/buzz/entry/3335/

[Proud Public Servant]

1. One obvious difference

People love the internet. It brings them LOLcats and porn, it allows them to shop without getting dressed, it allows them to connect nationwide with people who share their political derangements, it allows them to kill time when they should be working (*ahem*).

People -- most people -- don't love public transit. They appreciate it, abstractly. But their day-to-day experience of it is not the fun of viral videos, but the grind of the daily commute. Hell, I genuinely do love public transportation -- a tough thing to do in Washington, DC, where it's embarrassingly bad -- and even I have a visceral negative reaction to it when I'm on it.