In the comments to my post about how the voters of Pierce County all but killed public transportation in their neck of the woods, giffy wrote...

It should not be Pierce County Transit, it should be Tacoma Transit. Transit makes sense in dense areas, not sprawling counties. By having these large County or regional bodies doing transit you create a need to provide service to areas where it makes little sense.

This got me thinking. If Tacoma voted for Proposition 1 (a very small tax increase that would have saved the bus service), and the surrounding, less urban (and more suburban—even more country) areas didn't, would it be fair for the cuts to be across-the-board? Wouldn't it be more sensible to concentrate the cuts in the areas that strongly voted against Proposition 1? When I asked Pierce Transit's spokesperson Lars Erickson about this, he first pointed out that many of the areas that voted to destroy the county's public transportation system have low-income and minority communities, and then recommended that I have a look at this graph, which he granted me the permission to post...
As you can see, Tacoma did vote for the tax, but not overwhelmingly. So, if anyone is to blame for this mess, it's Tacoma. Because one expects the bulk of the voters in the country and suburbs to be stupid, to vote against their own interests, and that kind of thing, it's up to the dense core to diminish the force of this stupidity. 54 percent is not going to cut it. If Tacoma was really serious about saving public transportation, its support for this tax should have been in the 70s.