"Efficient" Government

     It's a concept that gets thrown around a lot: "Efficient government."  Trouble is, nobody ever takes a close look at what it is.

     Republicans run for office and promise to "run it like a business;" Dems run and promise to allocate resources equitably and efficiently.

     But governments that pride themselves on their efficiency are, without exception, repressive and disrespectful of individual rights.  Most are totalitarian.

     Human beings are not especially efficient.  Human societies are not all that efficient.  "Waste not, want not," we're told, and the stories of the past, no matter if they're ungarnished or slanted, nearly always tell us how our primitive ancestors "used every part of the pig but the squeal," recovered nails from old buildings,* and on and on -- and yet, much of what we know of the past aside from written records comes from midden heaps.  Garbage piles.  Abandoned buildings.  Stonehenge has stood in mute, hard-to-fathom ruin far longer than it served as a ceremonial center.  Even when we're trying, even when we are so poor that have nothing to spare, our efficiency is not all that high.

     Efficiency may not suit us in our interactions with others.  When disaster strikes, we rush in help; but effectiveness and immediacy outweigh efficiency.

     This ties in to public transportation, long a kind of litmus test of libertarian purity.  Indeed, run as a business, most public transit systems lose money or at best break even; considered as transportation, most of them outside of large, population-dense urban areas are a poor second to automobiles (for short distances and a moderately hale rider, even bicycles are better).   --But what is the goal?  My parents grew up in the days of streetcars and interurbans; mass transit meant that as teenagers, my Dad worked in a grocery store well outside of walking distance, meant my Mom's family could get by with one car, and meant two low-middle income kids could go to movies and window-shop in downtown Indianapolis.  That kind of semi-casual use isn't efficient; but it may be effective.

     In Indianapolis, the Red Line buses approximate one of the old streetcar routes, Broad Ripple to Downtown.  Supposed to be spaced so there's one every ten minutes, they're running farther apart and the city has struggled with the ticketless electronic far system, bus charging and even the system of center-lane dividers used to mark the bus lane and remind drivers to turn left only at stoplights.†  The big, beautiful buses have low occupancy except at peak times and even then, they're not nearly full.  Considered as a business enterprise, it's risible.

     As a way for people without cars to get from home to work (or shopping, or places to eat), it's effective.  The Indiana Blind School is a brisk walk from the north end of the Red Line and I'm seeing more white canes along the route‡ than I ever did with the old buses. The elderly seem to be using it, too -- and that's one less car inching down the street with someone struggling to peer through the wheel, a win-win situation.  The system of buses and raised stations is accessible to wheelchair users in a smooth and easy way, too.

     Maybe efficiency isn't the only metric of these things.  The Red Line's progress has been fumbling, awkward; the construction to install center-street bus stops and move utilities away from beneath the center lane was disruptive.  The technology of the electric buses is by no means mature and their batteries struggle to hold a charge on cold weather.  But it is making a change, and it seems to be useful in ways that the former bad-neighborhood-on-wheels buses were not.  One of the major ones is traffic no longer has to fight around a hulking bus stopped at the curb every few blocks, and that's making me happy.
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* My parents were Great Depression babies.  I grew up in a household where if you took down a little project -- a playhouse, a rabbit hutch, whatever -- you took care to pull the nails out straight (or hammered them back straight) and to salvage just as much of the wood and hardware as possible.  The first time I saw a double-headed nail, I laughed in delight, knowing just what it was for; conversely, finishing nails, sunk and filled over, were only for the very nicest of constructions, like the "food box" kitchen my Dad built to fit in the back hatch of the VW bus for use on camping vacations.  I'm still a little thrilled by the notion of having a whole big box of brand-new nails instead of a coffee can of bedraggled much-used ones.  For that matter, the idea that they sell plant stakes still seems odd; that was one of the last uses for scraps of lumber, sawn or split into narrow widths, pointed, hammered into the garden soil and holding up tomatoes.

† They started out with a rubber-block system, like a long speed bump down the center of the bus lane.  People drove cars over it to turn left despite the ban, and tore out segments.  Now the city's installing a long concrete curb; you could drive over it, but you're not going to enjoy the experience.

‡ Including one guy strolling down the slick and snow-drifted sidewalk yesterday with what might be "snow tires" on his cane: a flat, thick-ish disc a few inches in diameter on the end, presumably providing a little more tactile information about what would be underfoot for the next steps.