From Lars Erickson, Pierce Transit's spokesperson:
Pierce Transit currently operates 417,000 annual service hours. The revised service plan, with the September implementation, will reduce annual service hours to approximately 275,000. The plan will be made available for riders and the public to review on the agency website shortly. Pierce Transit will distribute information through print materials, open houses, and presentations. Look for information in the coming days regarding agency outreach efforts. A public hearing on the implementation plan will happen in May 2013.All of this because a large number of voters in that county and its surrounding areas did not want a sales tax increase of 3 cents on every $10 spent. And you can bet that almost all of these voters are not rich, and yet they see taxes in exactly the same way that rich people do. Taxes are not a great thing if you have lots of money, but they are vital to those who have little or none at all. A rich person doesn't need society to provide transportation, health services, child care, job protection, or other social goods. When an upper-class person votes against taxes, he/she is being rational. But when a middle-class or working-class person, a person who needs or could need such goods and services from society, does, he/she is being irrational.
Elements of the reduction plan include elimination of Saturday, Sunday, and holiday service and the route 62 in northeast Tacoma. Primary impacts to weekday service include reductions in service past 7:00 pm and mid-day service (9:00 am - 3:00 pm).
How is this irrationality even possible? Because, as Marx pointed out in the German Ideology, our very sense of human rights has never been constructed from the perpective of those at the bottom. All in this society (and Western society as a whole) have been raised to see themselves as possessing the natural rights of people with wealth—the right to own property, the right to the protection of property, the right to purse more property, and so on. It's easy for us to unthinkingly vote like the rich because our whole sense of legal identity is based on that kind of subjectivity.
