Strong and Weak Management: The Case of American Bus Companies and Regional Transit Authorities

By the end of the 2010’s, city officials in several American cities were rethinking bus service in a fundamental way; the passenger-fare revenue model was being questioned, and in some cases replaced with a model that fit better with serving poor people and changed local business environments. Yet the downside effects on the bus companies of trends, especially regarding ridership, may have been the result of internal organizational factors immune to a change in the revenue model. I contend that city officials and the managers of bus companies should resist the temptation to view a new model as a cure precisely because some problems, internal to the companies, could go on and silently undermine analysis of the new model such that it could erroneously be discontinued. To be sure, being willing to question a longstanding model is a mark of managerial strength. Indeed, it is precisely the managers of bus companies and regional authorities who are mired in longstanding assumptions who would tend to have the most difficulty in dealing with troublesome internal problems. 

Providers of goods or services must adjust to changing local environments, which in turn are impacted by broader trends. Bus companies and regional authorities in the U.S. faced increasing traffic congestion as well as decreasing ridership from 5.6 billion in 2008 to 4.67 billion in 2018.[1] Also, competition ranging from electric scooters to ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft were literally driving people away from buses nationwide, according to transit officials. Light rail and subways, which do not have to fight street congestion, also saw ridership decline, but not as much as buses. There was also the argument that the very poor, including the homeless, who generally rely on bus service, are least equipped to pay for it. Many universities were already using the student-fee model for university bus service, spreading the cost wide enough that the students could afford the service. Alternatively, only students who used the service could have paid for it, which would have been particularly hard on poor students.

In the altered environment in which bus companies found themselves by 2020, the concept of free fares on some or all bus routes was drawing increasing support in several cities. “Advocates in Massachusetts claimed that free buses would speed up boarding times, draw more passengers, aid poor residents and help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.”[2] Michelle Wu, a member of the Boston City Council who supports free transit, remarked, “If we’re truly treating it as a public good that has benefits to everyone when everyone uses it, then we should remove barriers.”[3] To the extent that poor people are especially in need of a public good, charging a user free can essentially privatize the good for the poor.

The poor may go without transportation needed for their very sustenance, or resort to fraud. In Phoenix, Arizona, for example, people needed only go to a convenience store to buy reduced-fare cards otherwise reserved for the elderly and disabled. As of 2020, enforcement on the buses was rare; few if any drivers asked to seek the accompanying ID of discount fare-riders. Even on the light rail, security employees intent on staring at passengers as if they were all conducive to violence would not bother to even ask to see the ID. In fact, passengers who had not paid were let out at the next platform, from which they could easily board the next train. Lest the shady passengers get all the blame (though surely they deserve a lot for their sordid attitude alone), the revenue model itself was culpable because it did not adequately take into account the extremely limited financial resources and vital transportation needs of the very poor. Such a regional transit authority and its bus operating companies would not likely be willing or able to address internal problems, such as rude drivers and horrendous (and risky) driving. Phoenix buses were widely known locally for these two things. Also, it was not uncommon to see three or four transit security employees in half of a light-rail train car staring at passengers as if the latter were prisoners.

Put another way, city and transit officials in the Phoenix metro would not be likely to analyze, let alone perceive the free-rides option because they were so preoccupied with, and yet unsuccessful at, stopping the ticket fraud in order to boost revenue from riders. Getting serious with bus drivers who were rude and/or bad drivers was something beyond the reach (and will) of the bus operating management and regional transit authority. Moreover, the political environment in Arizona was such that a majority of the voters would have balked at the prospect of paying for poor people to ride free. Minimizing tax increases fared much better in that political climate.

A world away, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the region’s transit authority in September, 2019 stopped collecting money on three routes that go through the poorest parts of the city. Lawrence used $225,000 in reserves to waive fares for two years. Lawrence Mayor Dan Rivera explained the rationale for free rides. “We could support those citizens to mobilize themselves out of poverty.”[4] The regional transit agency said ridership on the three free lines climbed quickly—up about 24% in the first few months from a year earlier.

In Olympia, Washington’s capital, a ballot measure in 2019 that boosted transportation funding helped the Intercity Transit agency start offering free service on all buses in January, 2020, according to Ann Freeman-Manzanares, the system’s general manager. Fares there amounted to $2.7 million annually, a small portion of the agency’s budget, and some of that is spent maintaining fare boxes and collecting cash. “It actually was surprising to us when we started digging deep how much it costs to collect fares,” Ms. Freeman-Manzanares said.[5]

In Kansas City, the local transit authority was overhauling its bus service and already offered free rides to veterans and students. The authority aimed to completely cancel fares by May, 2020, Chief Executive Robbie Makinen said. The city council voted unanimously in December, 2019 to find about $8 million a year to cover free buses, which were already heavily supported by taxpayers.

Meanwhile in Phoenix, bus drivers regularly held up their buses waiting for passengers to dig for more coin—not having bothered to do so before boarding. Also, the fare machines on the buses were old, and thus particularly susceptible to breaking down, in spite of the priority on revenue from passengers. The bus operating companies and the regional authority erroneously accepted these intangible and tangible costs as necessary in part because the managers assumed the passenger-revenue model being used to be fixed rather than possibly replaced.

Generally speaking, a mind wetted to one way of thinking as if a blind card set in a highly rutted dirt road is likely to accept as necessary too many costs because another way of thinking, a broader one, would be necessary to take into account other models even though their costs would be lower. A mind willing and able to perceive and think beyond its groves is necessary. Though such a mind is likely to be more motivated and able to take on seemingly intractable internal problems, such as rude drivers and bad driving (e.g., accelerating too fast, and braking too hard), even being willing to think wider may not be sufficient. Hence it is possible that the continuing internal factors (i.e., problems within a bus company) could sabotage a new model’s perceived efficacy.

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[1] Jon Kamp, “Cities Offer Free Buses in Bid to Boost Flagging Ridership,” The Wall Street Journal, January 14, 2020.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

Cases of Coronavirus: Comparing China, the U.S.A., and Italy

On March 26, 2020, “the US overtook Italy and China as the country with the highest number of confirmed Covid-19 cases.”[1] At first glance, this statement can gain sufficient traction to become definitive. The implication that the U.S. is mismanaging the pandemic can even be regarded as valid even though the comparison itself is invalid.

Firstly, the United States, Italy, and China have very different population-levels. At the time, China’s population stood at roughly 1.435 billion, the U.S. population was 331 million, and Italy’s was 60 million. The U.S. had at least 81,321 cases.[2] China had at least 82,000 cases.[3] Italy had at least 80,539.[4] Per capita, the U.S. had at least one case for every 4,070 people; China had at least one per 17,500 people; and Italy had at least one case per 745 people. Adjusted for population-level, Italy was worse than the United States, which in turn was worse than China. Of course, China was coming down from its apex of cases, while the United States had not yet hit its apex and Italy may not have hit its own yet. Singapore’s confirmed 631 cases may seem a trifle until the city-state’s population of 5,838,360 is taken into account.  With at least one case per 9,253 people, Singapore stood between the United States and China in severity of cases.  So, at the very least, taking the population level into account is vital in comparing countries on the coronavirus pandemic.

Secondly, comparing countries assumes that they are all equivalent, as countries, not only for comparative purposes, but also as political entities. This is a modern assumption—that a city-state is equivalent to an empire, to take two points at the extremes; the kingdom being between the two. In other words, it is assumed that just because every country is sovereign, every country is equivalent even in non-political matters of comparison.

Historically, the attribute of sovereignty was not so decisive in declaring equivalencies. No one would claim that a stand-alone kingdom was the equivalent of an empire. For example, Althusius’ theory of federalism, described in his Political Digest (1604), clearly distinguishes a city, province, kingdom, and empire from each other. Based in part on the Holy Roman Empire, Athusius’ version of federalism contains a hierarchy, including guilds, villages, cities (composed of villages), provinces/regions, and the empire. Representatives of the guilds sit on village councils, village representatives sit on city councils, and so on until representatives of the provinces sit at the federal head—the empire’s governance.[5] It would be absurd to claim that a kingdom in one empire is equivalent to either a city or another empire. With these terms of political organization going by the wayside, the vague, over-generalizing term, country, filled the void, with its fallacious assumption that the attribute of sovereignty means that countries are equivalent in matters of making even non-political comparisons. This working assumption, as part of the status quo by the twenty-first century, is so ridiculous that the underlying presence of a warping large mass can be indirectly detected.[6] The ideology of nationalism, for instance, would have sufficient force to warp reasoning, as well as perception.

To get a glimpse of the flawed assumption, we can superimpose the historical terms on early-modern/modern countries (e.g., the UK, rather than the medieval England). At least as of 2020, the United States and China, as well as the European Union, were empire-level polities, whereas the E.U. state of Italy was an (early-modern) kingdom-level polity, and Singapore was a city-state. The flaw in only using the number of cases of coronavirus rests on the deeper flawed assumption that all countries can be classified on the same level, notwithstanding huge differences in scale and political type. In the E.U. and U.S., representatives of the states (early-modern kingdom level) sit in bodies at the empire level (i.e., the European Council and the U.S. Senate). To treat a state in one empire as equivalent to another empire thus represents a category mistake (i.e., conflating two different categories as one).

By implication, to treat the regions or provinces of a U.S. or E.U. state as equivalent to the U.S. or E.U. state level (provincia level in the ancient Roman Empire) also involves a category mistake. The American colonies, which became sovereign states (in a league or confederration), were mapped out to be on the scale of the early-modern kingdoms in Europe.[7] Hence the geographical scales of the U.S. and E.U. states cluster. California is roughly the size of Spain, Arizona of Italy, Texas of France, and Montana of Germany. The small states also cluster, but the differences between the large and small states is dwarfed by the difference between the state cluster and the unions' cluster. In other words, the difference between the sizes of the states and the unions is sufficiently larger than how much the states differ and the unions differ that a "step" (i.e., difference in kind, rather than just in amount) can be seen. That the unions are made up of the states is another way of pointing to two plateaus rather than a continuous slope (i.e., saying that the U.S. is larger than France, which is the size of Texas). This is why conflating the two clusters (i.e., of the states and of the unions) represents a category mistake. 

Therefore, comparing Italy’s 80,539 cases to the United States’ 81,321 can be understood as misleading, therefore, because not only are the population-levels so different, but also Italy is a state in a union that in turn is equivalent to the U.S. Logically, if the two unions are equivalent, then a state in one cannot be equivalent to the other union.

In comparisons in which either the E.U. or the U.S. as one or both sides, the overgeneralization is itself problematic because it hides the significant differences between the states. In other words, that the American States differed significantly in coronavirus cases in March, 2020 was lost in comparing the entire U.S. to Italy. With a population of 5.85 million, Wisconsin had at least 707 cases on March 26, 2020, and therefore one case per 8,274 people, while Washington (the state) had at least 3,207 cases in a population of 7.8 million, and therefore one case per 2,432 cases. The represents a substantial difference that is hidden in aggregating all of the states' data. The statement that the entire United States just got worse in coronavirus cases than a state in the E.U. is thus problematic. 

Even in correcting for the category mistake (e.g., comparing an empire-scale geographic polity with an early modern/modern "kingdom"-level polity, we would over generalize to say that the E.U. is worse off than the U.S. precisely because such a comparison ignores significant differences between the states in both unions. In fact, even if it made sense to generalize the entire U.S. (i.e., states differing little) rather than report predominately on the States, then the E.U. too should have been at the other end of the comparison, even if its states differed appreciably. As both unions were empire-scale, their respective states were very likely to different on a variety of indexes.

Having corrected for the category mistake and taken account of the fact that state-level differences were significant in both unions, greater insight could have been gleamed on how the virus was faring in Europe and America by comparing the "hot spots," for example. That is to say more accurate comparisons would be made between Italy, New York, France, Germany, California and Washington because they were all being battered by the illness by the end of March (which was going out like a lion).

On March 26, 2020, New York (the State) had over 37,000 cases in population of 20 million: one case for every 542 people, worse than Italy's 745 people. Washington (the State) stood at 2,432 people, less severe than the E.U. state of Italy. From this standpoint, the derivative (i.e., the change in the rate of increased cases) for each state could be used to compare the "hot spots" with regard to where they are relative to their respective apexes (i.e., the highest, hence peaking, infection rates). Comparing the "hot spots" could thus have been quite useful. 

Because the state level in both the U.S. and E.U. bore out tremendous differences in severity, it is just common sense that states rather than the unions, or even worse, a union and a state in another like union, should be compared. Moreover, that vast differences in population and in political category, or even just geographical scale (Italy being roughly the size of Arizona), have been routinely missed is a serious flaw both in reasoning and knowledge of political organization. I submit that the flaws in the default-axis of comparison have been protected by a worldwide blind-spot, which has enabled a myriad of false-comparisons. 

Nietzsche would doubtlessly write that a brain-sickness predicated on a weakness was behind the warping of reason and perception. A herd-animal mentality, including in the animals who cannot resist the urge to dominate, could explain how the warping became ingrained in the societal (and global) status quo. I contend that nationalism and turning the attribute of governmental sovereignty into a tautology rendered the flaws both invisible and part of the taken-for-granted status-quo. 

Well into the twenty-first century, people (and governments) around the world were still intent on assuming that the attribute of sovereignty justifies the assumption of equivalence between countries even in making non-political comparisons. Singapore and the U.S. can be compared on a variety of things because both are countries, meaning both are recognized internationally as sovereign within their respective territories. 

With its strong desire, ideology can eclipse reason and perception without leaving finger-prints. Nationalism has likely been playing a subterranean role in the warping of equivalence as in comparing E.U. states like France and Germany to the U.S.A., with the E.U.'s governance and the American States being deliberately overlooked or even blocked from view in a sort of state of denial. 

Even in comparative politics, confounding the state and federal levels of both the E.U. and U.S. is problematic. For instance, federalism came out of empire-level groupings and has the greatest benefits for empires, which are by definition heterogenous (diverse between provinces/states). To model the governance system of the E.U. or U.S. on that of Sinapore (a city) would entail a greater downside of uniform (i.e., union-wide) laws because in empires, "one size does not fit all" of the circumstances of the states (e.g., significant differences in coronavirus infection). Hence New York's government took much more strict measures against the spread of coronavirus than did the government of Kansas in March, 2020. Had the U.S. President handed down a severe, blanket "lock-down," it would have gone unnoticed that several states did not yet need that level of caution through government action. Hence, the state governments were able to set policies according to their situations. As in the case of the E.U. state governments, it was even possible for those American governments to distinguish between their respective regions (or provinces) in taking precautionary measures.[8] As a city, Singapore, unlike the states (and empire-scale unions), could only have one situation. Rather than being influenced by where sovereignty resides (at both the state and federal levels in the U.S. and E.U.), the level at which comparison is best made depends on what is the subject of comparison (e.g., coronavirus) and which level (or cluster) of institutional and geographical political organization (i.e., state, county/province, state/kingdom, or empire-scale country) presents the greatest differences on the subject.

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[1]. Jeffrey Sachs, “Why America Has the World’s Most Confirmed Covid-19 Cases,” CNN.com, March 27, 2020 (accessed March 28, 2020).

[2]. Donald McNeil, “The U.S. Now Leads the World in Confirmed Coronavirus Cases,” The New York Times, March 26, 2020.

[3]. Sachs, “Why America Has the World’s Most Confirmed Covid-19 Cases.”

[4]. Crispian Balmer and Gavin Jones, “Italy Suffers Setback to Hopes Its Corronavirus Epidemic Might Be in Retreat,” US News & World Report, March 26, 2020.

[5]. Skip Worden, British Colonies Forge an American Empire: A Basis for Transatlantic Comparisons (2015). Athusius' theory of federalism is also discussed and applied.

[6]. I am thinking here of how the presence of a black hole can be detected by looking at the warped orbits nearby (their shape and relatively high speed).

[7]. Skip Worden, British Colonies Forge an American Empire: A Basis for Transatlantic Comparisons (2015).

[8] Lest it be argued that the most suitable level of comparison is that of intra-state regional/provincial, the state size-cluster is not so large that intrastate differences would be as big as the interstate differences. However, the fact that the counties of Dane (which contains the state capital city, Madison) and Milwaukee were both more severely hit on March 26, 2020 than were the other counties suggests that state governments had reason in at least once case to either have different policies for counties or delegate the power to the county governments. Adopting the county level for comparisons within or across empire-scale unions would not be parsimonious and thus practical. Also, I suspect that the typical inter-county differences were less than the inter-state differences. This is why I stopped at the state level in assessing the best level of comparison generally. 

American Federalism: The Case of Coronavirus

On March 22, 2020, during a press conference on the coronavirus, U.S. Vice President Pence claimed that the United States is unique in that it has a federal system of public governance. He overlooked the equivalent case of the European Union even as he stressed an idea that is the European federal principle of subsidiarity, which means that decisions and actions that can be taken locally are to be done locally. The state level is next, followed by the federal level. The theory behind this principle is that cultural, political, economic, and social diversity that exists from state to state, especially in an empire-scale federal system such as the E.U. and U.S., means that one-size-fits-all federal-level decisions may not be effective everywhere. Pence’s point was that the federal government would be playing a supportive role so the States get what they need, rather than playing a pivotal role with the States and localities as instruments of implementation. I contend that relative to the European Union, the United States was at the time much less equipped to apply the principle of subsidiarity to the coronavirus pandemic.

At the time of the press conference, Washington, New York, and California were the “hot spots” wherein the virus was relatively pronounced. Even though the European Union had not only closed its borders, it had also allowed states including Italy, France, and Germany—the E.U.’s “hot-spots”—to close their respective borders. Lest it be objected that their American counterparts could not close their borders practically and even constitutionally, this point suggests that the American federal system had not taken sufficient account of subsidiarity even in the constitutional design. Put another way, a sitting vice president emphasized the principle even as it has insufficiently incorporated into statute and constitutional/basic law. The implication is that the constitution was flawed or deficient.

The E.U. demonstrates that a federal system can indeed take subsidiarity into account. Even as the E.U. itself had its federal borders at the time, its states could maintain their own even though most of those borders were open. The case of the virus in 2020 shows that in an emergency, federal officials, together with state officials, could suspend the open-border law.

To be sure, the American states were not completely without authority to protect themselves as suited their particular circumstances. The government of California, for instance, put its 40 million residents on lock-down, whereas Arizona, a neighboring state, did not (as of March 22^, 2020) because that state was not then a “hot-spot.” This is indeed a valuable benefit of federalism. Especially at the empire-scale (i.e., wherein the states are the size of fully-sovereign, or unfederalized, states, governmental measures in “hot-spot” states would not fit, and indeed could be bad for, states in which the virus was present in a big way. In short, the principle of subsidiarity was present in the American Constitution.

Unfortunately, it is also evident that the principle was not sufficiently in the American Constitution because the States should have been able to close their respective borders within the U.S. to reduce people entering with the virus and slow down the spread of the virus into other states. A basis for such state authority on an emergency basis could be that under normal circumstances, California could stop entering vehicles to search for plants. Thus, border stations already existed. Constitutionally, perhaps California’s rationale of keeping agricultural pests out could be broadened to give the state governments authority to close their respective borders under emergency circumstances such as a pandemic.