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State pours cash into new highway, lets bus riders wait
April 22, 2004
Margie Peterson
The Morning Call (Allentown, PA)

It rarely fails.

Run a story about someone body-slammed by fate — the family whose home goes up in flames, the baby with the rare disease — and Lehigh Valley residents respond with open hearts and wallets.

So it was with Stephen Wallace, whose epic commute from his home in Slatington to an $8.50 an hour job in Fogelsville was highlighted April 11 in an excellent story by Morning Call reporters Sam Kennedy and Garrett Therolf. They wrote about Wallace's daily odyssey by bus and on foot, spanning several hours, as an extreme example of the plight of the working poor who have to rely on the Lehigh Valley's very un-mass mass transit.

The compelling story prompted lots of responses, including several from readers who offered to donate used cars to Wallace. One man even suggested he could help Wallace get a job closer to home.

Kennedy told me some bus riders were angry at local officials who dismissed the need for more frequent Lehigh and Northampton Transportation Authority service with claims that they often saw buses with empty seats. Job-seekers said they are stymied by buses that run infrequently, don't run late enough for shift work and stop far from job sites.

The problem lies partly in who is being left at the side of the road. I'd wager that Wallace's situation was a revelation to most Valley residents, who have never ridden a LANTA bus. Like many issues in this country, spotty public transit isn't a problem until middle-class Americans say it is.

Yet you can't really blame current officeholders in Lehigh and Northampton counties for failing to boost money for LANTA, though the counties contributed just 3 percent of the system's nearly $18 million 2002 operating budget, according to the story. Coming on the heels of steep 2002 property tax increases in both counties, anyone proposing big increases in spending would be run out of town on light rail — if we had one.

Which brings me to reporter Tim Darragh's great two-part series this week on the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, its plans to hike tolls in August and its boondoggle, the Mon-Fayette Expressway and Southern Beltway.

That highway project, which will link Pittsburgh to Morgantown, W.Va., is estimated to cost $4.2 billion, Darragh reported, and revenue from tolls is expected to pay for only about 25 percent of the debt service for the road. Taxes, fees and borrowing will have to pay for the rest. The project is controversial in western Pennsylvania, where it's expected to displace as many as 114 businesses and 703 homes.

"Their [the Turnpike Commission's] predictions in terms of traffic demand and toll revenue are hugely overblown," Mon-Fayette critic Heather Sage, of Citizens for Pennsylvania's Future, or PennFuture, told me in a phone interview.

Sage and other environmentalists argue that Americans can't build our way out of highway congestion.

It might sound counterintuitive, but it works on the "Field of Dreams" principle: "If you build it, they will come." Constructing new roads, studies show, does not in the long run ease traffic on older ones.

PennFuture has suggested an alternative plan for the Pittsburgh area that includes repairing roads and bridges, some new roads, light rail, and extending bus routes.

"We have a crumbling road and bridge system throughout Pennsylvania," Sage said. "The state really needs to think about a "fix it first' policy."

Sage suggested that one of the forces driving projects such as the Mon-Fayette is the desire of public officials to point to concrete accomplishments. New roads are sexier trophies than, say, more buses carrying people who can't afford cars.

Explain that to Stephen Wallace.

margaret.peterson@mcall.com