No Hassle Transit? Try Hasselt

Belgian city offers BC a workable, fare-free model.

Ten years ago the people of Hasselt, Belgium embarked upon a bold experiment: no more charging for bus rides. Ever since, they've been proving the idea can work wonderfully.

This city of 70,000 residents, with 300,000 commuters from the surrounding area, has made traveling by bus easy, affordable, and efficient. Now, people in Hasselt often speak of "their" bus system, and with good reason. The Boulevard Shuttle leaves you waiting for at most five minutes, the Central Shuttle has a 10 minute frequency, and system-wide you never have to wait more than a half an hour.

Just like the Whidbey Island, Washington, system we visited Friday, in Hasselt wheelchair users not only have access to the entire fleet of buses, they can reserve a spot by calling the "Belbus" line an hour in advance. According to the City of Hasselt's website, the driver will help the wheelchair user get aboard, "even giving a push, if desired," and help with unloading, too.

A prime lesson offered by Hasselt is the fact that they radically improved the bus system as well as their walking and cycling infrastructure before they removed the fare boxes. In 1996, there were only three bus routes with about 18,000 service hours/year. Today, there are 11 routes with more than 95,000 service hours/year.

	Hasselt, Belgium	Nanaimo
Service Population	70,000	92,300
Ridership	3,706,638 (in 2001)	2,317,763
Service Kilometres	1,624,000	2,263,992
Service Hours	95,000	94,333
Vehicles in Service	40 Buses	31 buses
Operating Budget	5,119,968 € (~CA$7,850,000, all from taxes, both municipal and national)	$6,906,910 ($3,065,488 from fares)

The transit system in Hasselt cost taxpayers approximately $1.9 million in 2006. This amounts to one per cent of their municipal budget and makes up about 26 per cent of the total operating cost of the transit system. The Flemish national government covered the rest (approximately $5.4 million) under a long-term agreement.

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For comparison, one per cent of the City of Vancouver's municipal budget for 2007 is about $8.5 million.

Making it go

So how did Hasselt make it happen?

On January 1, 1991, the Flemish Authority brought together three public transport companies and joined them into one autonomously operating state company. This company's raison d'etre is to provide transport for the whole of Flanders. That was the beginning of the Flemish Transport Company, since then generally known under the name "De Lijn." This structure allows them to buy buses more cheaply and they can even share buses among the different city and regional systems, whenever needed.

By contrast, BC Transit doesn't seem to purchase enough buses to offer similar benefits and they don't operate any systems outside Victoria any longer so sharing isn't possible. BC Transit's main role for smaller transit systems in B.C. seems to be providing pre-paid media (tickets and passes), which obviously isn't needed for fare-free systems like Hasselt.

Jean Vandeputte, the chief engineer-director for the City of Hasselt, shared by e-mail these thoughts about converting existing transit systems in B.C. to fare-free systems:

"To be successful, I think that the public transport system must not be crowded at the start. Our project was originally organized to attract more passengers and to have less cars in the city centre. The buses also need separate lanes, because travelling by bus has to be faster than by car, so the infrastructure of intersections and streets has to be adapted. The buses have to be modern, clean ... you need to have more bus stops. And the shelters must be attractive."

Ridership zooms

Hasselt City Council's principal aim in introducing free public transport was to promote the new bus system to such a degree that it would catch on and become the natural option for getting around. And it did -- immediately. On the first day, bus ridership increased 783 per cent! The first full year of free-fare transit saw an increase of 900 per cent over the previous year; by 2001, the increase was up to 1,223 per cent and ridership continues to go up every day.

By making public transport free of charge it became possible to guarantee the right to mobility for all residents in Hasselt. Their position was that an improved public transport system simply means a better use of the public space that will not only improve the quality of traffic, but the quality of life in general.

Why isn't this our position as well? Isn't it worth trying a similar experiment at least somewhere in B.C.?

The Hasselt experience before 1997 was not much different than anywhere else in the western world. Car ownership in Hasselt rose by 25 per cent from 1987 to 1999, while the population increased by only 3.3 per cent during this same period. Although Hasselt is the fourth largest city in Belgium, it ranked first in car ownership during those years.

After implementing fare-free transit, over 40 per cent of the people visiting hospitals switched from a car to the bus. Over 32 per cent of the people "going to market" switched from using cars to buses. Overall, in November 1997, 16 per cent of all bus riders studied previously drove a car. It is important to understand that this was achieved by both the elimination of fares as well as the implementation of bus priority measures such as bus lanes.

Careful planning is key

Karl Storchmann, a researcher at Yale University, has documented that even the 12 per cent of bus riders that were previously cyclists, as well as the 9 per cent that switched from walking to the bus in Hasselt, will produce a net positive change for society, since pedestrians and cyclists "belong to the most endangered road users, [and] every decrease in these modes will lead to a reduction of automobile-caused costs [i.e., deaths and injuries]."

The primary difference between Hasselt and most other places since 1997 is the creation and implementation of an integrated policy Hasselt calls "Working Together on a New Form of Mobility" ("Samen Anders Mobiel" for you Flemish speakers).

Within this sustainable mobility policy, there are two traffic policies: a Large Traffic Policy and a Small Traffic Policy.

The Large Traffic Policy includes the public transport policy (fare-free transit with appropriate service levels), a Mobility Plan, Cycle Policy Plan, Parking Policy Plan, Programme of Thoroughfares, Green Boulevard, an Outer Ring Road Plan, and a plan to reconstruct the area surrounding the main train station.

The Small Traffic Policy offers quicker solutions to local residents like "no parking" signs, speed humps (sleeping policemen that prohibit speeding), raised crosswalks, street narrowings (corner and mid-block bulges), and many others.

The Mobility Plan included targeted campaigns to help make residents aware of the policy and plans. These campaigns included car-free days (similar to East Vancouver's Car-Free Commercial Drive Festival), shop-by-bike, bike pools (primarily for school children in Grades 1 to 5), and more.

A 'mobility plan' for all

Because Hasselt's policy makers understand that bikes are the most sustainable form of transport, today in Hasselt one can borrow a bicycle, tandem, scooter or wheelchair bike free of charge. On the Groenplein (behind the town hall) you can also borrow a stroller free of charge for your little one (as their website states, "Handy when your toddler can't make the distance"). And two wheelchairs are available for free loan from the tourism bureau. This is one mobility plan that includes both families and people with physical challenges.

The Mobility Plan notes that in the city centre, "you will find a network of pedestrian shopping streets, where as a pedestrian you can breathe easily and move freely as the imminent danger created by traffic has been removed." In these car-free areas, there are free guarded bike racks (similar to the bike valet system that the Vancouver Parks Board recently voted against) and luggage guard services. Again, this plan is not just for commuters and younger folks.

The businesses in Hasselt know very well that restricting cars can dramatically increase the numbers of people visiting them (the Vancouver Folk Music Festival has learned this, as well). In Hasselt, they've taken the next step and made it easy for people to shop as much as they want -- without a car. Elsewhere in the city, there are practical and pleasant "short-cuts" pedestrians can take to make it easier to walk than to drive.

The "Green Boulevard," formerly the inner ring road, was a traffic nightmare in the 1960s. Starting in 1997 and finishing in 2000, it has been transformed into a multi-use transportation dream: a nine-metre wide pedestrian area (Vancouver's standard sidewalk width is less than two metres), separate bike paths, separate lanes for transit, and roads that are engineered to ensure that cars drive at a maximum of 30 kilometres an hour. Although there are only two lanes for cars, there is rarely any congestion.

Money saved

The Mobility Plan has saved the City of Hasselt millions of Euros on transportation infrastructure costs and has eliminated the previously perceived need of a third ring road. Overall, taxes have decreased because the city spends less money on transportation with the new Mobility Plan, despite the huge increase in pedestrian, cycling, and transit infrastructure and services.

The Hasselt website also describes the "Women's Promenade" running through the city centre: "All kinds of women who over the years have made their mark on the city have been literally placed on a pedestal." The promenade shows off famous art and comic strips featuring women, as well as displays ranging from "the nuns' convent and witches' coven, to a club of cigar smoking ladies from Hasselt."

Clearly the city isn't afraid to innovate. As Hasselt Mayor Steve Stevaert declares, "We don't need any more new roads, but new thought highways!"

"You have to improve the existing system before changing the bus fares."

--Jean Vandeputte, chief engineer-director for the City of Hasselt, Belgium.

Are you listening, Kevin Falcon?

Contrast Hasselt's forward thinking with the recent manoeuvre by B.C. Minister of Transportation Kevin Falcon and the provincial government to change TransLink's governance structure. It's the latest attempt to further privatize public transit in the region.

Who is accountable?

The proposal creates an appointed 11-member board to oversee day-to-day operations. This board would be "made up of professionals," which clearly means that we will be paying private sector folks to run our public transit system. The existing board is made up of mayors and councillors elected throughout the GVRD. The current structure has been criticized for not being democratic enough, but if Falcon has his way, his government's hand-picked officials won't be accessible to any voters, anywhere.

This kind of top-down politics in service of privatization has already given us the RAV/Canada Line, a public-private partnership (P3) that guarantees the private contractor who builds and operates this automated light rail line will receive a hefty profit every year for 35 years, regardless of ridership. They also get the lion's share of the $2.5 billion of our taxes spent on the project, while hiring non-union imported labour to build it. And when they borrow more money from private sources at interest rates higher than government would pay, we the taxpayers pay for that, too.

A TransLink board stripped of democratic accountability will also make it easier for Falcon's ministry to push through mega-projects like Gateway (which includes the twinning of the Port Mann Bridge), with further subsidies to privately-owned automobiles -- the major producers of greenhouse gases and toxic pollution in our region.

When this series resumes, we'll look at ways to get the "public" back in public transportation. We'll examine the costs of collecting transit fares and sustainable, long term funding strategies used around the world.

The Mayor Who Wowed the World Urban Forum

Peñalosa biking on False Creek.

Bogota's Enrique Peñalosa's happy 'war on cars.'

By Charles Montgomery

If you think the problems facing the world's exploding cities are insurmountable then you need to spend a few hours on a bike alongside the former mayor of Bogota. That's how I spent Thursday afternoon, and it left me with new hope for the global south, not to mention the bloated 'burbs of Greater Vancouver.

Enrique Peñalosa presided over the transition of a city that the world--and many residents--had given up on. Bogota had lost itself in slums, chaos, violence, and traffic. During his three-year term, Penalosa brought in initiatives that would seem impossible in most cities, even here in the wealthy north. He built more than a hundred nurseries for children. He built 50 new public schools and increased enrolment by 34 percent. He built a network of libraries. He created a highly-efficient, "bus highway" transit system. He built or reconstructed hundreds of kilometers of sidewalks, more than 300 kilometres of bicycle paths, pedestrian streets, and more than 1,200 parks.

He did it all, in part, by declaring a war on private cars.

What makes us happy?

Peñalosa explained the philosophy behind this war--and Bogota's transformation--earlier Thursday during a plenary lecture at the World Urban Forum. He began with a sobering reminder to the mayors of developing world cities:

"If you base progress on per capita income, then the developing world will not catch up with rich countries for the next three or four hundred years. The difference between our incomes is growing all the time. So we can't define our progress in terms of income, because that will guarantee our failure. We need to find another measure of success."

The measure he came up with was shockingly simple. Happiness.

"And what are our needs for happiness?" he asked. "We need to walk, just as birds need to fly. We need to be around other people. We need beauty. We need contact with nature. And most of all, we need not to be excluded. We need to feel some sort of equality."

Before you dismiss Peñalosa as some hemp-hatted revolutionary, remember that this is a guy who titled his first book Capitalism: The Best Option.

The problem in Bogota was that most people didn't have access to the public space that is supposed to make such happy things happen. The wealthy had turned city sidewalks into parking lots for cars. Public parks had been fenced off, essentially privatized by neighbours. And for years, the government had been blowing its budgets on highways and road improvements, with the encouragement of Japan's international development agency, which was apparently in the business of creating new markets for Japan's carmakers. So while the wealthy in Bogota could spend their weekends in country clubs or private gardens, the poor had little but jammed streets and televisions to occupy their leisure time. Peñalosa resolved to establish a balance.

Peñalosa's official War on Cars began when he ordered the sidewalks cleared of cars. That triggered a movement to impeach him--unsuccessful, since it was in fact illegal for people to park on the sidewalks. He then launched a system which banned 40 percent of vehicles from the roads during rush hour. Peñalosa convinced his city council to raise the tax on gasoline, and used half the revenues to fund a rapid bus system that now serves more than 500,000 citizens.

After Bogota's first wildly popular "Car-Free Day" in 2000, residents voted in a referendum to make the event an annual affair. Most powerfully, the city was transformed from a place of hopelessness to one of civic pride.

Pedaling with the rock star of WUF

I've never seen a crowd of planners, politicians and sustainability wonks go wild like they did after Peñalosa's address. The guy got a standing ovation. Stuart Ramsey, a B.C. transportation engineer, explained why.

"Bogota has demonstrated that it is possible to make dramatic change to how we move around our cities in a very short timeframe," he said. "It's simply a matter of choosing to do so. We could improve our air quality and dramatically reduce our emissions anytime we want. It's easy to do. For example, we can improve the capacity of our existing bus system without adding a single bus. All it would take is a can of paint, and you'd have dedicated bus lanes. It doesn't require huge amounts of money. It simply requires a choice."

Peñalosa now advises cities around the world on how to make sense of their own transportation systems. I tagged along with the former mayor and his entourage of Colombian politicians and activists as they hit Robson on a fleet of rented bikes. I observed the first rule of Colombian cycling: never break a sweat. The second rule: establish a critical mass of riders, and you don't really need to pay attention to traffic lights.

Peñalosa explained that he is actually a fan of traffic. "First of all, it's a sign that you have enough density to support transit. Second, it is one of the best ways to get people out of their cars. Anywhere you look in the world, when people use public transport, it's not because of some high level of consciousness. It's because private driving is restricted. What is the easiest way to restrict private cars? Traffic. Just look at New York."

It occurred to me that traffic is experienced differently in Bogota and Vancouver. In Bogota, it's the rich who sit alone behind the wheel in their rush hour frustration, dreaming of more lanes. Here, I think it is generally the middle class and working poor: they own cars, but have to commute from the 'burbs because they can't afford to live in our jewel-box downtown. Some might consider it only fair for the province to build the Gateway Program's new bridge and highway lanes.

"Well, sometimes the solutions to our problems are not obvious," responded Peñalosa between licks of his ice cream cone. "We think that traffic jams are going to be solved by building more roads. But that has never worked, anywhere in the world. Building more roads will just lead to more traffic jams."

A Vancouver connection

It would be nice if cities didn't have to wait until they were staring into the abyss before changing course. But Peñalosa's Bogota proves that change is not so much a matter of spending big money as it is a matter of choice.

"Transport is the only urban problem that actually gets worse as you get richer," he said. "It's only solved by changes in our behaviour. And this is always a political issue."

What seems to have surprised Peñalosa is that his policies have been lauded by international environmental groups as green activism for their salubrious effects on local air, public health and greenhouse gas emissions. But for him the idea of giving all citizens equal rights to transportation, education and public spaces have always been matters of social equity. What pleases him most is the notion that, at least on Bogota's greenways, children are no longer terrified of being hit by cars.

One more thing. Where did Peñalosa find the inspiration to transform his city? Why, at Jericho Beach in 1976, where his father was the secretary general of Habitat '76.

Suburbia's Worst Enemy

Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency.

By Charles Montgomery

June 12, 2006Since the 1994 release of The Geography of Nowhere, author James Howard Kunstler has been among the most acerbic critics of North American urban design. Kunstler has argued that suburban sprawl has left citizens almost entirely dependent on cars, just as the world nears the historic peak of oil production. What happens after we pass that fossil fuel "tipping point"? That's the subject of Kunstler's latest book, The Long Emergency, in which the author describes the massive changes that Americans -- and their neighbours -- will experience as the age of cheap oil drips to a close. In what The Guardian describes as "a 300-page dirge to the doom that awaits us," Kunstler predicts the end of cheap aviation, the withering of the American southwest, the collapse of global trade and a shallow grave for suburbia, among other horrors.

Such predictions are now being taken seriously by some local governments, as a recent report to Burnaby city council shows. As we prepare for the World Urban Forum, writer Charles Montgomery tracked down the cantankerous Kunstler to discover what his Long Emergency might have in store for the Lower Mainland.

Charles Montgomery: You call suburbia the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. Why?

James Howard Kunstler: Because it was a living arrangement with no future, and we poured all the wealth of our post-Second World War society into the infrastructure of it.

But we are still planning and building suburbs. Why do you say there is no future in them?

Our suburban arrangements are entirely a product of, and utterly dependent on, reliable supplies of cheap petroleum. That is exactly what we will not have in the years ahead. And the notion that we can compensate for that loss with "renewables" or "alternate fuels" is, alas, a fantasy. Our suburban environments are going to lose both their monetary value and their usefulness.

We're producing more oil in Canada than ever before. We've barely touched the huge reserves in the Alberta oil sands. And you write in your book that we are never actually going to run out of oil. So what do you mean by peak oil, and why the alarm?

You're flattering yourself about the tar sands. And there is a great deal of misinformation flying around out there that is a great disservice to the public. For instance, the CBS Sixty Minutes TV program ran a segment this past winter saying the tar sands had the equivalent of two trillion barrels of oil. This was just flat-out untrue. The best real estimates are between 150 to 200 billion barrels, of which 50 to 70 might be recoverable -- and the US alone uses seven billion barrels a year. Do the math.

What's more, the Canadian ministry itself estimates that the tar sands will produce at maximum around three million barrels a day (the world uses over 80 million now) by 2010. Meanwhile, we will be losing between 20 to 40 million [barrels per day] in current depleting production. The peak argument, based on Hubbert's mathematical model, states that total world production will peak around the present time and that production will then commence an inexorable and remorseless arc of depletion.

I have argued further -- and others have, too -- that the very circumstance of passing the peak will severely disrupt the complex systems we rely on, including agriculture, electric power generation, international trade and finance. It will change everything. It will represent a significant historical discontinuity.

Skeptics say that as demand for energy rises, scientists will develop new technology and new fuels to keep us moving. For example, here in BC, the government is investing in a network of refuelling stations for hydrogen fuel cell-powered cars. Do you see any hope in such alternatives?

It would be nice if we developed alternative technologies on top of the ones we already know about, but it is a big mistake to think that technology and energy are identical and mutually substitutable. For instance, jet aircraft will either run on liquid hydrocarbon fuels or they won't be running. I have stated that no combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run the interstate highway system, Wal-Mart, and Walt Disney World, or even a substantial fraction of those things. I believe there is tremendous wishful thinking associated with these issues at the moment, and a great deal of unreality in the public discourse.

Let's imagine a typical family, say, the Smiths from Surrey. They've got a couple of kids, a dog, two cars, a detached house and a mortgage. How do you think life will change for them in the next few decades?

I think suburbia is going to lose its value and usefulness dramatically.

Urbanists say that Vancouver is outperforming American mid-sized cities when it comes to focusing growth into dense, walkable neighbourhoods and preserving agricultural land. With dozens of new high-rise condo towers, Vancouver's downtown will house more than 100,000 people by the end of the decade. This is a good thing, right?

I think we are going to be very surprised and disappointed by our decision to build so many high-rise structures. They are not going to run very well in an energy-scarce society, which may feature less-than-totally reliable electrical service. Skyscrapers -- which I define as any building over seven stories -- were a product of the cheap fossil fuel age, and they may cease to serve us very well as we leave that behind. My own sense of things is that our cities will contract severely in the decades ahead and that we will see a reversal of the 200-year-old trend of people leaving the rural areas and small towns for the big cities.

Right now our region is experiencing explosive growth. Trade with China is booming. The ports are bottlenecked. Roads are congested. Our governments are on the verge of investing $3 billion in new highways to prepare for more Chinese trade, and more people. Comment?

More highways equals an extremely bad investment.

Why?

We will not have the means to continue our fiesta of easy motoring -- including the portion of it that involves commercial trucking of goods. Again, "alternative fuels" will not make up for the loss of cheap and abundant petrol. We will have to return to a more multi-modal system for moving goods -- with an emphasis on rail plus ships and boats. In any case, commercial relations are apt to become a lot more local-regional and less global. The idea that "globalism" is a permanent institution is another fantasy. As the fossil fuel era draws to a close, the world will become a larger place again.

So what form of city is best suited to handle an oil-scarce future?

Something about the scale of the Gothic city, but with updated plumbing and electric lights, wherever possible.

Gothic? You mean a return to the medieval city?

Yes, I mean a dense, low-rise (seven story maximum) pattern that we would identify as similar to the medieval city. They may even require fortification. Now, how exactly we might manage the contraction of our hypertrophied mega-cities is a related matter. Our notions these days of what we can "manage" may be grandiose; in reality, circumstances will simply manage it for us, and in a disorderly process. In any case, we have to recognize that the super-gigantic city of the 20th century is an historical anomaly. New conditions will require different arrangements.

Real estate prices in Vancouver's dense downtown are going through the roof. Any advice for home buyers?

Buyers beware. In my opinion, the really big cities are going to become very disorderly places.

OK, give me your worst-case scenario for life on Canada's West Coast in 40 years. I do recall a warning of marauding bands of pirates.

Readers seem to have misunderstood what I said, which is that the Pacific Ocean is liable to become a much wilder place, especially as Asian nations melt down politically and their naval equipment falls into the hands of freelancers. There will be a lot of them, and they will be looking for easy pickings along the continental coasts.

Your book has been described as apocalyptic. Yet, as I read it, I got the distinct impression that you relish the idea of some of the changes you predict in The Long Emergency. What could possibly be good about an energy-scarce future?

In the U.S.A., immersive ugliness of car-dependent suburbia is a terrible generator of anxiety and depression. Even if we weren't entering a crisis of fossil fuels we would have to severely reform our living arrangements. Our treatment of public space, in particular, has had tragic consequences -- since the degradation of public space leads inevitably to the decay of civic life.

A lot about the way we live now is unhealthy, frightening and repulsive. It probably requires a correction, and boy are we going to get one.

17 Reasons (or More) to Stop Charging People to Ride the Bus

The case for Fare-Free Transit.

By Dave Olsen

The time has come to stop making people pay to take public transit.

Why do we have any barriers to using buses, trolleys, SkyTrain? The threat of global warming is no longer in doubt. The hue and cry of the traffic jammed driver grows louder every commute. Yet since 2000, TransLink has hiked fares 50 per cent, and its board has just agreed to follow the staff’s recommendation to raise them higher still.

That kind of thinking is so last century. Just ask the mayor of San Francisco, a city similar in size to Vancouver, who ordered his staff to seriously explore the cost efficiency of no longer charging people to ride public transit.

Listen to Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, who recently voiced to a reporter his top dream: "I would have mass transit be given away for nothing and charge an awful lot for bringing an automobile into the city."

Consider this sampling of communities providing free rides on trolleys, buses, trams, and ferries: Staten Island, NY; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Vail, Colorado; Logan and Cache Valley, Utah; Clemson, South Carolina; Commerce, California; Châteauroux, Vitré, and Compiègne, France; Hasselt, Belgium; Lubben, Germany; Mariehamn, Finland; Nova Gorica, Slovenia; Türi, Estonia; Övertorneå, Sweden.

Or speak, as I have, with transit officials in locales of Washington State and Belgium, where Fare-Free Transit has hummed along smoothly now for years.

It's time B.C. joined the trend because forcing people to pay ever higher fares is not just tough on the planet and people with tight budgets, it's bad economics and self-defeating public policy, as I will explain in this five part series funded by a Tyee Fellowship for Solutions-oriented Reporting.

Tough sell?

Over the course of the next few days, I'll be doing my best to explain why taking the fare box out of our buses -- wherever you live in B.C. and beyond -- makes both dollars and sense.

Believe me, I know that's a tough sell for skeptics.

Just seven years ago TransLink stated that their "market research" indicated that people wanted to pay when boarding the bus. But as Tania Wegwitz, senior transit planner in the Municipal Systems Program for BC Transit recently wrote: "Prepaid fares are better than cash fares, I don't think there is anyone -- passengers, municipalities, transit staff -- who would disagree with you."

Well, fare-free transit is simply the ultimate implementation of prepaid fares. We would prepay for all public transit through taxes, and then we'd ride for "free."

Why Fare-Free Transit?

Perhaps the skeptic in you is saying: without fares, public transit would run out of money and break down. Or you worry that a free ride would attract riff-raff threatening other passengers' safety and comfort. Or you doubt that sober, number crunching officials would ever take the idea seriously.

By the time you are done reading this series, I will have shared real life examples and expert findings to counter all those concerns.

Fare-free transit brings many benefits, some of which include:

1. a barrier-free transportation option to every member of the community (no more worries about exact change, expiring transfers, or embarrassment about how to pay)
2. eliminating a "toll" from a mode of transportation that we as a society want to be used (transit is often the only way of getting around that charges a toll)
3. reducing the inequity between the subsidies given to private motorized vehicle users and public transport users
4. reducing, and in some cases eliminating, the need for private motorized vehicle parking
5. reducing greenhouse gas emissions, other air pollutants, noise pollution (especially with electric trolleys), and run-off of toxic chemicals into fresh water supplies and ocean environments
6. reducing overall consumption of oil and gasoline
7. eliminating the perceived need to spend billions on roads and highways (now up to $7 billion for the proposed Gateway Project in Vancouver)
8. eliminating the perceived need to spend billions on bigger car-carrying ferries ($2.5 billion for BC Ferries' new super-sized boats and ramps)
9. contributing significantly to the local economy by keeping our money in our communities
10. reducing litter (in Vancouver, the newer transfers/receipts have overtaken fast food packaging for most common garbage found on our streets)
11. saving trees by eliminating the need to print transfers and tickets
12. allowing all bus doors to be used to load passengers, making service faster and more efficient
13. allowing operators (drivers) to focus on driving safely
14. giving operators more time to answer questions
15. providing operators a safer work environment since fare disputes are eliminated
16. eliminating fare evasion and the criminalization of transit-using citizens
17. fostering more public pride in shared, community resources

Pampered cars

If it's hard economic arguments you prefer, bear in mind that making use of free public transit eliminates the significant costs of fare collection and combating fare evasion (more on this later in the series). It also cuts costs associated with global warming, air and noise pollution, litter collection and garbage removal.

As our own premier trumpets a green agenda, more people are taking a hard look at just how many of their tax dollars subsidize the private car versus less polluting buses and trains. You have to figure in roads, parking and other infrastructure, tax breaks for car and fuel companies, as well as subsidies for car ferries throughout the province and federal income tax reductions and write-offs for companies that use motor vehicles.

Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute has estimated that in 2000 the government subsidy to each private vehicle owner was about $5,378 in Canadian dollars.

In that year, the average cost of providing each trip taken by transit in Vancouver was approximately $5. The equivalent subsidy for transit users would have been 1,075 free trips. Few of us could even use that many.

In fact, if the subsidy given private car owners were simply handed over to each car-free transit user, bus riders would make money for taking transit!

Why raising fares impoverishes the system

Big or small, most transit systems are scraping by or on the brink of financial collapse, paradoxically because of their reliance on the fare box. Revenue for any system drops when ridership dips or when fares are increased. Yes, when fares are increased. This is so well proven it has a name: the Simpson-Curtain rule. Most often the dip in ridership is caused by the hike in fares.

To understand this cycle better, let's imagine that you are in charge of a transit system. You feel pressure to increase service or to maintain service despite increasing costs. You need to raise more money. Politically and practically, for most systems, the easiest way is to raise fares. But soon after, ridership goes down. It drops 3.8 per cent for every 10 per cent increase in fares, researchers have found (Cervero, R., 1994). Which means you either haven't gained much new revenue, or worse, you've started spiraling downward.

In 1955 and 1959, fare increases helped send Vancouver's transit system into an 11-year tailspin, reducing ridership from 109 million trips in 1954 to less than 63 million in 1966, a decrease of 42 per cent!

Further fare increases in 1970, 1978, and 1987 were followed by a decrease of 9 million, 7 million, and 13 million trips, respectively (even with the new SkyTrain line!).

More recently, in a context of explosive population growth and rapidly rising fuel prices, TransLink's first two of three recent fare increases (with another to come in 2008!) in 2000 and 2002 resulted in 400,000 fewer riders in 2002 compared to 2000.

Meanwhile, Toronto's transit system went into a 12-year downward spiral throughout the 1990s after a series of fare increases and resultant service cutbacks.

The Transit Cooperative Research Program creates expert panels (appointed by the Transportation Research Board in Washington, DC) to solve operating problems, to adapt appropriate new technologies from other industries, and to introduce innovations into the transit industry. In their 2004 publication, Traveler Response to Transportation System Changes, the chapter on Transit Pricing and Fares clearly documents how fare increases always result in lower ridership.

Reality check

What the trends above tell us is that if you want a strong public transit system, then we need to figure out how to slash or eliminate the fares riders pay.

That said, let's make a few important guiding principles clear:

Taking the farebox out of any bus without a plan is just a recipe for disaster. That's why we'll be looking at operations like Island Transit on Whidbey Island that have proven beyond doubt that fare-free systems can be safe, clean and very friendly.

Making transit free of charge won't in itself allow huge numbers of people to abandon their cars. We'll need more public transit vehicles, running more frequently, too. The decade-old experience in Hasselt, Belgium, has shown that investing in the service prior to the removal of the fare boxes not only makes the transition smoother, it will get people on the bus and out of their cars.

We need to pay, one way or another. There isn't a transit system on the planet that pays for itself solely through the fare box. If we want a transit system that is adequate, reliable, and gets those lonely drivers out of their cars, we need to find funding formulas that are adequate and reliable.

From Aukland, New Zealand's Residents Action Movement to Scotland's Socialist Party and Vancouver's own Bus Riders Union, advocates are putting cheap and abundant public transit on politicians' agendas..

New York plans surveillance veil for downtown

The program would include license plate readers and 3,000 security cameras below Canal Street.

By the end of this year, police officials say, more than 100 cameras will have begun monitoring cars moving through Lower Manhattan, the beginning phase of a London-style surveillance system that would be the first in the United States.

The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, as the plan is called, will resemble London's so-called ring of steel, an extensive web of cameras and roadblocks designed to detect, track and deter terrorists. British officials said images captured by the cameras helped track suspects after the London subway bombings in 2005 and the car bomb plots last month.

If the program is fully financed, it will include not only license plate readers but also 3,000 public and private security cameras below Canal Street, as well as a center staffed by the police and private security officers, and movable roadblocks.

"This area is very critical to the economic lifeblood of this nation," New York's police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said in an interview last week. "We want to make it less vulnerable."

But critics question the plan's efficacy and cost, as well as the implications of having such heavy surveillance over such a broad swath of the city.

For a while, it appeared that New York could not even afford such a system. Last summer, Kelly said the program was in peril after the city's share of Homeland Security urban grant money was cut by nearly 40 percent.

But Kelly said last week that the department had since obtained $25 million toward the estimated $90 million cost of the plan. While $15 million came from Homeland Security grants, he said, another $10 million came from the city, more than enough to install 116 license plate readers in fixed and mobile locations, including cars and helicopters, in the coming months.

The readers have been ordered, and Kelly said he hoped the rest of the money would come from additional federal grants.

The license plate readers would check the plates' numbers and send out alerts if suspect vehicles were detected. The city is already seeking state approval to charge drivers a fee to enter Manhattan below 86th Street, which would require the use of license plate readers. If the plan is approved, the police will most likely collect information from those readers too, Kelly said.

But the downtown security plan involves much more than keeping track of license plates. By the end of 2008, 3,000 surveillance cameras would be installed below Canal Street, about two-thirds of them owned by downtown companies. Some of those are already in place. Pivoting gates would be installed at critical intersections; they would swing out to block traffic or a suspect car at the push of a button.

Unlike the 250 or so cameras the police have already placed in high-crime areas throughout the city, which capture moving images that have to be downloaded, the security initiative cameras would transmit live information instantly.

The operation will cost an estimated $8 million to run the first year, Kelly said. Its headquarters will be in Lower Manhattan, he said, though the police were still negotiating where, exactly, it will be. The police and corporate-security agents will work together in the center, said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the police. The plan does not need City Council approval, he said.

The Police Department is still considering whether to use face recognition technology, an inexact science that matches images against those in an electronic database, or biohazard detectors in its Lower Manhattan network, Browne said.

The entire operation is forecast to be in place and running by 2010, in time for the projected completion of several new buildings in the financial district, including the new Goldman Sachs world headquarters.

Civil-liberties advocates said they were worried about misuse of technology that tracks the movement of thousands of cars and people,

Would this mean that every Wall Street broker, every tourist munching a hot dog near the United States Court House and every sightseer at Ground Zero would constantly be under surveillance?

"This program marks a whole new level of police monitoring of New Yorkers and is being done without any public input, outside oversight, or privacy protections for the hundreds of thousands of people who will end up in NYPD computers," Christopher Dunn, a lawyer with the New York Civil Liberties Union, wrote in an e-mail message.

He said he worried about what would happen to the images, once they were archived, how they would be used by the police and who else would have access to them.

Already, according to a report last year by the civil-liberties group, there are nearly 4,200 public and private surveillance cameras below 14th Street, a fivefold increase since 1998, with virtually no oversight over what becomes of the recordings.

Browne said the Police Department would have control over how the material is used. He said the cameras would be recording in "areas where there's no expectation of privacy" and that law-abiding citizens had nothing to fear.

"It would be used to intercept a threat coming our way, but not to collect data indiscriminately on individuals," he said.

Browne said software tracking the cameras' images would be designed to pick up suspicious behavior. If, for example, a bag is left unattended for a certain length of time, or a suspicious car is detected repeatedly circling the same block, the system will send out an alert, he said.

Still, there are questions about whether such surveillance devices indeed serve their purpose.

There is little evidence to suggest that security cameras deter crime or terrorists, said James J. Carafano, a senior fellow for homeland security at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group in Washington.

For all its comprehensiveness, London's ring of steel, which was built in the early 1990s to deter Irish Republican Army attacks, did not prevent the July 7, 2005, subway bombings or the attempted car bombings in London last month. But the British authorities said the cameras did prove useful in retracing the paths of the suspects' cars last month, leading to several arrests.

While having 3,000 cameras whirring at the same time means loads of information will be captured, it also means there will be a lot of useless data to sift through.

"The more hay you have, the harder it is to find the needle," Carafano said.

An Irish TV interview with President Bush

Reservist fighting his fifth war call-up

After serving in Afghanistan and three times in Iraq, an Army Reserve sergeant from Port St. Lucie recoiled at still another deployment.

BY AMY DRISCOLL

Erik Botta is an Army Reservist who has done four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is now being called for a fifth tour.

Erik Botta believes he's done right by his country.

Days after 9/11, as a young Army reservist, he volunteered to go to war. He was soon in Afghanistan.

The next year, he was sent out again, this time to Iraq, part of a Special Operations team.

In the next two years, he was sent to Iraq again. And again.

He thought he was done. But now, the Army wants Sgt. Botta one more time.

The 26-year-old Port St. Lucie man has been ordered to report to Fort Jackson, S.C., on July 15 for his fifth deployment. And that has compelled Botta, a first-generation American who counts himself a quiet patriot, to do something he never thought he'd do: sue the Army.

''I'm proud of my service,'' he said. ``I never wanted it to end like this.''

Nearly seven years into his eight-year commitment to the reserves, the personal costs are higher for Botta. He could lose his home. His job at Sikorsky, working on the Black Hawk military helicopter, could be on the line. He's halfway to his electrical engineering degree, planning a career in defense work, but his professors say he'll suffer a significant setback if he is deployed. He doesn't mention the danger another deployment would bring, but his wife and parents do.

''I'm proud of being in the Army,'' he said. ``They taught me responsibility. They taught me maturity. And they gave me a good toolbox of technical skills to work with. I think I'd be more valuable to my country at this point by being here, getting my degree and working at Sikorsky.''

In a lawsuit he expects to file this week in federal court in Florida, Botta says he will ask for an exemption or delay so that he can complete his engineering studies. He will also ask the court to prevent the Army from requiring him to report for duty until the legal questions are settled.

His attorney, Mark Waple -- a West Point graduate and former military judge advocate who practices in Fayetteville, N.C. -- says Botta's case shows that the Army is inconsistent in its decisions when selecting reservists for involuntary mobilization, over and over.

''This is an arbitrary decision by the Army Human Resources Command with no rational basis,'' Waple said.

THE CONSEQUENCES

Deployment now would mean that he could no longer afford his house -- his wife would probably have to move in with her parents. Plans to start a family would be on hold. He would probably have to repeat some engineering courses after his return, and he might even lose the job he just landed about a month ago. Previously, he worked at Pratt & Whitney in the Joint Strike Fighter and Raptor engine programs.

''This is no peace protester,'' Waple said. ``I wouldn't have touched this case with a 10-foot pole if it was. He's put the boots on and been in combat.''

Although Botta knew there was a risk that he would be called to duty again, he assumed that it was very slight, given his four combat deployments, pursuit of an engineering degree and employment with military contractors, he said.

''The world pretty much stopped when I got the notice,'' said Botta, weighing each word. ``I've sacrificed a lot for the military. I didn't want to end with litigation, but I feel I've done my service to my country. I've done what I signed up for in more ways than one.''

The Army doesn't agree. It turned down one appeal, with another pending but unofficially denied. Last year, it granted Botta a 287-day delay, pushing his deployment date to this month, after an inquiry by U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.

''This is something we're starting to see more of,'' Bryan Gulley, Nelson's spokesman, said about repeat deployments. ``It's one of the reasons Nelson has been saying we have to stop relying so heavily on the [National] Guard and the Reserve.''

Army spokeswoman Maj. Cheryl Phillips issued a statement Friday regarding Botta's case, saying in part that the Army evaluates ``each request independently to determine if the mobilization will cause undue hardship for the soldier or the family. We appreciate the sacrifice our citizen soldiers and their families make when called to active duty.''

The Army has granted 87 percent of delays requested by soldiers -- most are 90 days or less -- and 54 percent of exemptions, the statement said. It did not comment on Botta's case, but the Army said in a letter sent to him regarding one of his appeals that he did not ``meet the requirements for a hardship exemption/discharge.''

Botta joined the reserves in 2000 and asked to be activated in 2001 -- ''I felt like I had to do something'' after 9/11, he said -- and his tours of duty have lasted up to eight months. He left active duty at the end of 2004.

Under his current reporting date, he might not even complete the semester; classes end in August.

Attorney Waple says the Army has granted an exemption in at least one similar case, in 2005. A 24-year-old North Carolina enlisted Army reservist with two combat tours under his belt -- in Iraq and Kosovo -- was involuntarily mobilized while attending community college in Raleigh, pursuing a degree in chemical engineering.

He had completed five of his eight years in the service, Waple said. The man's first appeal was denied, but after Waple filed a second appeal, he was given an exemption and honorably discharged, Waple said.

Botta's case may be even stronger. He has completed more years of service and more combat tours, has a job in the defense industry while pursuing his engineering degree, and was granted a 287-day delay already, Waple noted.

Botta has tried hard to avoid a suit, Waple said, filing every appeal available within the Army's justice system. Botta and his wife have sent letters to everyone from Sen. Nelson to the White House. His professors and employers have sent letters, too, on his behalf.

''It's an awkward thing for any serviceman,'' Waple said. ``He has a very strong sense of responsibility and duty to serve.''

In his own letters to the Army, Botta notes that he is attending school on the GI Bill, maintaining a 3.9 grade-point average, and is grateful that he can use his Army skills in his work with military contractors.

''If I was to go back to the Army at this juncture in my life, I could very well lose my house and be in considerable debt for years to come,'' Botta wrote. ``I am proud of the fact that I can still continue to serve my country with the knowledge that I have acquired from the U.S. Army.''

The Army's response during the appeals, Botta said, has been ``minimal communication.''

Carlos Botta, his father, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Argentina, said he applauded his son's military service -- until now. ``He served in Afghanistan. He served three times in Iraq. The odds are getting slimmer and slimmer for him. He might get hurt. Don't you think he has served the country enough already?''

WIFE'S CONCERNS

Botta's wife, Jennifer, who married him between Iraq stints, said she can't face the idea of his returning to combat. Losing their house, painful as that would be, is the least of her worries.

''He's been over there four times. There's only so many times you can go over without something happening . . . .'' Her voice trailed off.

During his deployments, she said, she would watch television news reports about bombings and then count the hours until he called. ''My cellphone was in my hand 24 hours a day,'' she said. ``I never let it go.''

For Erik Botta, who keeps his hair military-short, the last few months have played out as a struggle between his battle-hardened loyalty to the Army and an abiding sense of what's right.

''We were in a wartime situation,'' he said. ``I did what they asked me to do. I went over and did it. And then when I was leaving, they told me I could leave. They told me to get on with my life, and I did. Now it seems they've changed their mind.''

But he doesn't regret his service -- at all. ``I'm proud to be in the Army, and I'm proud -- cheesy as it might sound -- I'm proud to be an American.''

Music licensing companies come calling for royalties

BY JOHN A. TORRES

Six months after raising the curtain on their gourmet coffee shop in the beachside Indian Harbour Place shopping center, Laurie and Jim Hall decided to offer live music on Friday and Saturday nights.

The performers, normally duos, mainly covered songs written and made famous by other musicians. There was no cover charge, no pay for the musicians, no limit to how long patrons could sit on a couch with their coffee, playing chess and enjoying the music.

No problem.

Then a few months later, music industry giant ASCAP started calling and sending letters saying East Coast Coffee & Tea was in violation of copyright laws. The fee to continue the music was $400 a year.

"At the time, the shop was losing money, so we had to break it up into payments," said Laurie Hall. But the Halls paid, and the music continued.

Six months later, other music copyright companies began calling the Halls and demanding money. Most days there would be three or four phone calls from each company, Hall said. Finally, unable to afford the fees, she had to call most of her musicians -- those who did not play original music -- and tell them they would not be allowed to continue performing.

This aggressive -- but legal -- posture being taken by music licensing companies has the potential to unplug live music in many restaurants, bars and coffee shops in Brevard County.

It comes on the heels of a massive music industry crackdown during the past several years on illegal downloads from the Internet. Whether it's a professional recording taken from a Web site or an accordion player singing a Jimmy Buffet tune in a small venue, the industry is working to collect royalties for whoever wrote the songs.

"They have threatened to shut down my place," said Lou Andrus, owner of the popular beachside nightclub Lou's Blues.

Copyright laws

When a songwriter signs with one of the licensing companies -- the country's three biggest are BMI, SESAC and ASCAP -- his or her music is copyrighted.

Unless Hall pays the three major companies, and even some of the smaller ones, she would be breaking the law by having musicians perform songs written by others.

"It makes me so angry," Hall said. "People like playing here because it's not a bar, there's no smoke and it's a clean environment. I feel like the greedy music industry is extorting money from us and hurting these musicians just starting out."

In addition to the $400 she has already paid ASCAP, she routinely receives annual bills from BMI for $305 and from SESAC for between $250 and $300.

She doesn't understand why a little coffee shop is in the same "eating/drinking establishment" category as places where music is more front and center, such as Lou's Blues or Meg O'Malley's in downtown Melbourne. Hall said she likely will start offering music just one night a week.

SESAC spokesman Shawn Williams said in e-mail responses to questions that it is his company's responsibility to enforce copyright laws, many of which were enacted nearly a century ago.

"The copyright law requires each business that publicly performs music to obtain permission prior to performing any copyrighted music," Williams said, adding that the owners of East Coast Coffee need to decide whether music "is important to their operations and overall profitability. We have many license agreements with small establishments."

Williams defends the money collected.

"This provides the majority of income to songwriters," he said.

Run-ins

Andrus, the owner of Lou's Blues, said he has had many run-ins with the copyright companies over the years.

"It started 15 years ago when I had a guy come out to our other place, Cantina dos Amigos, and play Mexican music on his guitar on the patio," Andrus said. "They came after me for money. Are they really sending royalty checks to the songwriter in Mexico?"

Andrus said he pays BMI and ASCAP about $3,000 a year but is ignoring the smaller companies that seek royalties from him.

"There are so many damned companies you don't know who to pay," he said. "One guy called and said I had to pay him if I played any gospel music at all. It's really a mess."

Hall insists that her coffee shop makes no extra money when the musicians play. Unlike a bar where patrons may imbibe several cocktails during the course of the night, her customers normally order one cup of coffee per performance.

But Andrus and others who refuse to pay could find themselves paying anyway -- in the form of fines.

"The law provides damages ranging from $750 to $150,000 for each song performed without proper authorization," Williams said.

And in no way do the songs have to be performed live, or even on the radio, to elicit calls for royalties.

Andrus said a friend of his who owned a restaurant that did not feature music was contacted by a company looking to charge him because it owned the rights to a Hank Williams Jr. song, "Are You Ready for Some Football?" The song preceded every "Monday Night Football" telecast, which the restaurant carried on its televisions.

He said his friend simply chose to turn the volume down when the song came on.

The licensing companies use a variety of methods to find out whether copyrighted music is being used.

"ASCAP representatives may visit establishments and find that they advertise live entertainment," explained Richard Reimer, senior vice president of ASCAP, in an e-mail. "Local newspapers carry advertisements for venues that present live entertainment and, of course, the Internet is a valuable resource as well."

Fewer gigs

Singer/songwriter Al Urezzio, who played at East Coast Coffee, said he recently lost his steady gig at the Getaway Lounge in Suntree because the owners were being asked to pay copyright fees as well.

Now Urezzio, who performs as "Grumpy Al," is relegated to performing only his original compositions. That means his options on where to perform are limited.

"This is really bull," said Urezzio, who owns the Burger Inn on U.S. 1 in Melbourne. "East Coast called and told me to only play originals from now on."

Chad Fagg, one half of the pop-rock duo "Just Blue," also is without a steady place to perform. Like Urezzio, the group was told recently that they could no longer play at the East Coast Coffee -- where they've performed for four months -- unless they played only original music.

"It's very disappointing, and it's frustrating," Fagg said. "They gave us a shot before anyone else would. I understand it's about royalties, but it's such a small place."

Other crackdowns

Nightclubs and coffee shops are not the only places affected by the industry crackdown.

Neil Butler, owner of Hawk's Gym in Melbourne, said he has had to pay a few hundred dollars a year to licensing companies in order to pipe in satellite music to his fitness center. Commercial radio is free to play because the radio stations have already paid the necessary fees.

Professional guitarist and singer Eddy Fischer, who performs in the group "Robin and Eddy," has been a member of ASCAP since he was 17. Having performed with members of The Monkees and The Mammas and Pappas, Fischer figured it was a good idea to protect himself. But even he thinks the industry might be going a bit too far.

"I think this is a little out of line," he said a day before playing his new age-style folk music at the Halls' coffee shop. "It seems kind of rough that little coffee houses with no stage or no lights that were not built for live music have to come up with that kind of money."

But ASCAP's Reimer said the licensing fees are "affordable for any small nightclub, restaurant, tavern or coffee house." He said there was little option available other than seeking permissions directly from the songwriters.

Andrus agreed business owners really don't have a choice.

"It's extortion, it's intimidating. It's such a scam."

Woman jailed for 'neglected' lawn

A 70-year-old US woman has been left bruised and bloody after an unexpected clash with police who came to arrest her because her lawn was dry and brown.

Trouble flared when Utah pensioner Betty Perry, 70, refused to give her name to an officer trying to caution her for not watering her lawn.

She says the officer hit her with handcuffs, cutting her nose, although police insist she slipped and fell.

Ms Perry said she was "distraught" after the incident.

She denied that she was resisting arrest, maintaining that she turned to go inside to call her son to fix the confusing dispute.

"I tried to sit down and get away from him," she told Utah newspaper the Daily Herald.

"I don't know what he's doing. I said: 'What are you doing?' And he hit me with those handcuffs in my face," she said.

"He's just trying to cover his tracks, as far as I'm concerned."

Set free

The officer had judged that Ms Perry's "sadly neglected and dying landscape" breached an Orem city guideline and was attempting to issue a formal caution when the 70-year-old was injured.

She was treated in a local hospital for the cut to her nose and for other bruises before being taken to jail.

But she was let go when police realised there were "other ways" of finding out her identity without taking her to jail, a police spokesman said.

The arresting officer has not been named but has been placed on administrative leave, he added.

Ms Perry, who says she has never had a run-in with police in the past, has been offered help by local church leaders to clean up her garden.

"I'm very distraught over all this," she said.

"I can't believe this happened. Do you ever just wish you could start your day over and it would all be different?"

Keep Watching...

‘More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics’

By STEVEN E. LANDSBURG

MORE SEX IS SAFER SEX

It's true: AIDS is nature's awful retribution for our tolerance of immoderate and socially irresponsible sexual behavior. The epidemic is the price of our permissive attitudes toward monogamy, chastity, and other forms of extreme sexual conservatism.

You've read elsewhere about the sin of promiscuity. Let me tell you about the sin of self-restraint.

Consider Martin, a charming and generally prudent young man with a limited sexual history, who has been gently flirting with his coworker Joan. As last week's office party approached, both Joan and Martin silently and separately entertained the prospect that they just might be going home together. Unfortunately, Fate, through its agents at the Centers for Disease Control, intervened. The morning of the party, Martin happened to notice one of those CDC-sponsored subway ads touting the virtues of abstinence. Chastened, he decided to stay home. In Martin's absence, Joan hooked up with the equally charming but considerably less prudent Maxwell - and Joan got AIDS.

When the cautious Martin withdraws from the mating game, he makes it easier for the reckless Maxwell to prey on the hapless Joan. If those subway ads are more effective against Martin than against Maxwell, they are a threat to Joan's safety. This is especially so when they displace Calvin Klein ads, which might have put Martin in a more socially beneficent mood.

If the Martins of the world would loosen up a little, we could slow the spread of AIDS. Of course, we wouldn't want to push this too far: if Martin loosens up too much, he becomes as dangerous as Maxwell. But when sexual conservatives increase their activity by moderate amounts, they do the rest of us a lot of good. Harvard professor Michael Kremer estimates that the spread of AIDS in England could plausibly be retarded if everyone with fewer than about 2.25 partners per year were to take additional partners more frequently. That would apply to three-fourths of all British heterosexuals between the ages of 18 and 45.

A cautious guy like Martin does the world a favor every time he hits the bars. In fact, he does the world two favors. First he improves the odds for everyone who's out there seeking a safe match. The second favor is more macabre, but probably also more significant: If Martin picks up a new partner tonight, he just might pick up an infection as well. That's great. Because then Martin goes home, wastes away in solitude, and eventually dies - taking the virus with him.

If someone has to get infected tonight, I want it to be Martin rather than Promiscuous Pete, who would probably infect another twenty people before finally dying.

I'm always glad to see guys like Martin in the bars. When he takes home an uninfected partner, he diverts that partner from a potentially more dangerous liaison. When he takes home an infected partner, he diverts that partner from giving the virus to someone who might spread it far and wide. Either way, I sure hope he gets lucky tonight.

Sadly, none of this makes for a good pickup line. You're unlikely to get very far with an approach like "You should sleep with me so you can get infected, die, and take the virus with you." That would be like saying "You should sell your leaf blower so your neighbors' lawns stay cleaner" or "You should stay seated at the ballpark so everyone else can see." The whole point is that what's good for the group can be bad for the individual, and that's why we get bad outcomes.

If multiple partnerships save lives, then monogamy can be deadly. Imagine a country where almost all women are monogamous, while all men demand two female partners per year. Under those circumstances, a few prostitutes end up servicing all the men. Before long, the prostitutes are infected; they pass the disease on to the men; the men bring it home to their monogamous wives. But if each of those monogamous wives were willing to take on one extramarital partner, the market for prostitution would die out, and the virus, unable to spread fast enough to maintain itself, might well die out along with it.

The parable of the monogamous wives has a more profound moral than the legend of Martin and Joan, because it shows that even on a society-wide level, increased promiscuity could retard the epidemic - at least in principle. But what about practice? That's where Professor Kremer's research comes in. With plausibly realistic assumptions about how people choose partners, his work shows that the moral remains essentially the same. When your relatively demure neighbor experiences a rare moment of rakishness, he really is doing his part to combat the deadly scourge.

That's one reason why you should root for Martin to have sex with Joan. Here's another: they'll probably enjoy it.

Enjoyment should never be lightly dismissed. After all, reducing the rate of HIV infection is not the only goal worth pursuing; if it were, we'd outlaw sex entirely. What we really want is to minimize the number of infections resulting from any given number of sexual encounters. That's the same as maximizing the number of (consensual) sexual encounters leading up to any given number of infections. Even if Martin fails to deny Maxwell a conquest, he can at least make someone happy.

If you are a monomaniac whose goal is to minimize the prevalence of AIDS, then you should encourage Martin to have more sex. But if you are a sensible person whose goal is to maximize the difference between the benefits of sex and the costs of AIDS - then you should encourage Martin to have even more sex.

To an economist, it's crystal clear why people with limited sexual pasts choose to supply too little sex in the present: their services are underpriced. If sexual conservatives could effectively advertise their histories, HIV-conscious suitors would compete to lavish them with attention. But that doesn't happen, because conservatives are hard to identify. Insufficiently rewarded for relaxing their standards, they relax their standards insufficiently.

When you take a new sex partner, you bear some costs and you reap some benefits. Those are your business. You also impose costs and benefits on others, and those are everyone else's business. If you have a history of reckless promiscuity, that's a cost. Everyone's fishing for partners in a great communal stream and you've polluted that stream just by entering it.

But if you've always been cautious and selective, you're likely to raise the average quality of the partner pool. Just by jumping into the stream, you make it purer. Thanks to you, everyone who goes fishing for a partner tonight has a better chance of catching a safe one.

Like any other communal stream, the stream of partners has too many polluters and too few volunteers to clean it up. The reason factory owners don't do enough to protect the environment is that they're insufficiently rewarded for environmental protection (or insufficiently punished for neglecting it). They reap some rewards (even factory owners like clean water and clean air), but most of the benefits go to total strangers. Likewise, the reason Martin might not do enough to fight the scourge of AIDS (by sleeping with Joan) is that, while he certainly would reap some rewards (such as sexual pleasure), many of the benefits would go to Joan's future partners, and their future partners.

The flip side of the analogy is that Martin's chastity is a form of pollution - chastity pollutes the sexual environment by reducing the fraction of relatively safe partners in the dating pool. Factory owners pollute too much because they have to breathe only a fraction of their own pollution; Martin stays home alone too much because he bears only a fraction of the consequences.

The pollution analogy is so powerful that it dictates the moral of virtually any story you could tell. To conclude that Martin's coupling with Joan slows the epidemic, you have to make some assumptions about what Joan and Maxwell and all of their potential partners would be doing if Martin stayed home. But to conclude that Martin's coupling with Joan makes the world a better place (where "better" accounts for both the costs of disease and the benefits of sex), you don't need any of those assumptions. It is a quite general principle that when goods (such as Martin's sexual services) are underpriced, they are undersupplied.

Here, then, is what we know:

When sexual conservatives relax their standards, benefits spill over onto their neighbors. That alone is enough to tell us that the world would be a better place if we could loosen these people up a little.

There is, however, more than one way for the world to become a better place. Maybe the epidemic slows down. Maybe people enjoy more sex. Maybe the epidemic speeds up, but people enjoy so much more sex that it's worth it.

Pure theory - in the guise of the communal-stream principle - tells us that at least one of those good things must happen. Professor Kremer's research suggests that both good things happen: we get more sex and less illness.

If all you want to do is slow down the epidemic, Professor Kremer's research says that more sex is a good thing. But if you want to maximize the excess of benefits over costs, then even more sex is an even better thing.

So: how do we encourage Martin (and others like him) to have more sex?

I wish this book could nudge him in the right direction, but sadly, there's no reason why it should - even if he reads and understands it completely. (Don't let that stop you from buying him a copy, though.) Martin has already chosen the activity level that's right for him. He's not likely to adjust that level just because he learns that a bunch of strangers - namely, Joan's future partners and their future partners - would appreciate it.

Martin, being human, tends to concentrate on what's good for Martin, not what's good for the society he lives in. You can make a polluting factory owner understand that he's hurting his neighbors, but that's not the same as convincing him to stop.

So we need something more effective than mere education. Extrapolating from their usual response to environmental issues, I assume that liberals would attack the problem of excessive sexual temperance through coercive legislation. But as a devotee of the price system, I'd prefer to encourage good behavior through a well-designed system of subsidies.

In other words, we could pay people to have more sex with more partners. But that's not ideal, because we don't want everyone to have more sex with more partners. Maxwell, for example, is quite oversexed enough as it is. The problem is to subsidize Martin's sexual awakening without simultaneously subsidizing Maxwell's genuine excess.

So we should pay people for having sex only if they are relatively inexperienced. Unfortunately, that doesn't work very well either - not as long as Maxwell can lie about his past and keep a straight face long enough to collect his handout.

What we need is a reward that Martin values and Maxwell doesn't - like, say, a library card. I'm guessing that Maxwell, with his busy social life, doesn't spend a lot of time at the library.

That's a definite improvement, but it's still imperfect. When Martin arrives at the circulation desk looking appropriately smug and disheveled, how can the librarian know whether he's really fulfilled his coital obligations or is just putting on a good show?

Let's try again: We need a reward that's of no value to Martin unless he actually has sex. And as before, it should be something the cautious Martin values more than the promiscuous Maxwell does.

I can think of only one reward that fits both criteria: free (or heavily subsidized) condoms. To reap the benefits of a free condom, Martin has to have sex. And Martin probably values a free condom considerably more than Maxwell does. Here's why: Martin's almost surely not infected yet, so a condom has a good chance to save his life. Maxwell, by contrast, knows he might have the virus already, so a condom at this point is less likely to make a difference. Subsidized condoms could be just the ticket for luring Martin out of his shell without stirring Maxwell to a new frenzy of activity.

As it happens, there is another reason to subsidize condoms. Condom use itself is underrewarded. When you use a condom, you protect both yourself and your future partners (and your future partners' future partners), but you are rewarded (with a lower chance of infection) only for protecting yourself. Your future partners can't observe your past condom use and therefore can't reward it with extravagant courtship. That means you fail to capture all the benefits you're conferring. As a result, condoms are underused.

In other words, people use too few condoms for the same reason they have too little sex. When Martin has sex with Joan, that's good for Joan's future partners. When Martin uses a condom, that's good for Martin's future partners. In neither case do the future partners get a fair opportunity to influence Martin's behavior.

It's frequently argued that subsidized (or free) condoms have an upside and a downside. The upside is that they reduce the risk from a given encounter, and the alleged downside is that they encourage more encounters. But that's not an upside and a downside - it's two upsides. Without the subsidies, people don't use enough condoms, and without the subsidies, the sort of people who most value condoms don't have enough sex partners.

The main drawback to subsidizing condoms is that they're not very expensive to begin with. You can reduce the price of a condom from a dollar all the way down to zero without having much impact on people's sexual choices.

Our goal, then, should be to drive the price of condoms below zero, by rewarding people who use them. In other words, we should pay a bounty for used condoms. The best of all possible bounties would be one that is more valuable to abstemious Martins than to promiscuous Maxwells. With that in mind, the journalist Oliver Morton has made the marvelous suggestion that if at least some abstemiousness is due to shyness and the inability to find partners (while the promiscuous have relatively little trouble in this regard), then the answer might be to establish a government-funded dating service: bring us a used condom and we'll get you a date.

The entire problem - along with the entire case for subsidies - would vanish if our sexual pasts could somehow be made visible, so that future partners could reward past prudence and thereby provide appropriate incentives. Perhaps technology can ultimately make that solution feasible. (I imagine the pornography of the future: "Her skirt slid to the floor and his gaze came to rest on her thigh, where the imbedded monitor read 'This site has been accessed 314 times.'")

Or, as one of my Slate readers suggested, we could have an online service to record negative HIV test results. You'd type in your prospective partner's name and get a response like "Last negative test result 7/4/2006." Or, to protect privacy, you'd type in not a name but an ID number provided by the partner. Your screen could show both a test result and a photo to avoid fake IDs. This strikes me as such a good idea that I can't figure out why nobody's doing it yet. Until then, the best we can probably do is to make condoms inexpensive - and get ride of those subway ads.

Addendum

In 1996, Slate magazine published an abbreviated version of this chapter that generated hundreds of email responses. Quite a few of those responses were both thoughtful and interesting, and helped me to improve the presentation you've just read. Others contained nothing but a line or two of invective. To those, I usually responded with a short note that read "I'm sorry, but from the email you sent me I was not able to ascertain at exactly which point you stopped following the argument. If you can be more precise about where you got lost, I'll do my best to make it clearer." In a remarkable number of cases, I got responses that were both thoughtful and apologetic, and a few of those led to multiround correspondences that taught me something.

Other readers seemed bound and determined to miss the point by miles. One, brandishing his credentials as a medical doctor, termed the column "particularly unfortunate" and - in a letter that was published in a subsequent issue of Slate - explained why:

We are at a stage in the HIV epidemic in which heterosexual spread is becoming increasingly significant. Casual readers . . . may justify increasing their sexual-risk-taking behavior. Unfortunately, failure, lasting in a shortened lifetime, can result from a sexually successful one-night stand. For an appropriate sequel, the editor of Slate might solicit an article . . . defending Russian roulette as statistically OK but cautioning that three loaded chambers is too risky.

Military Preparing for Martial Law

Pentagon Confirms It Sought To Build Gay Bomb

BERKELEY A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting.

Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsquently rejected, building the so-called “Gay Bomb.”

Edward Hammond, of Berkeley’s Sunshine Project, had used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the proposal from the Air Force’s Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.

As part of a military effort to develop non-lethal weapons, the proposal suggested, “One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.”

The documents show the Air Force lab asked for $7.5 million to develop such a chemical weapon.

“The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soliders to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistably attractive to one another,” Hammond said after reviwing the documents.

“The notion was that a chemical that would probably be pleasant in the human body in low quantities could be identified, and by virtue of either breathing or having their skin exposed to this chemical, the notion was that soliders would become gay,” explained Hammond.

The Pentagon told CBS 5 that the proposal was made by the Air Force in 1994.

“The Department of Defense is committed to identifying, researching and developing non-lethal weapons that will support our men and women in uniform,” said a DOD spokesperson, who indicated that the “gay bomb” idea was quickly dismissed.

However, Hammond said the government records he obtained suggest the military gave the plan much stronger consideration than it has acknowledged.

“The truth of the matter is it would have never come to my attention if it was dismissed at the time it was proposed,” he said. “In fact, the Pentagon has used it repeatedly and subsequently in an effort to promote non-lethal weapons, and in fact they submitted it to the highest scientific review body in the country for them to consider.”

Military officials insisted Friday to CBS 5 that they are not currently working on any such idea and that the past plan was abandoned.

Gay community leaders in California said Friday that they found the notion of a “gay bomb” both offensive and almost laughable at the same time.

“Throughout history we have had so many brave men and women who are gay and lesbian serving the military with distinction,” said Geoff Kors of Equality California. “So, it’s just offensive that they think by turning people gay that the other military would be incapable of doing their job. And its absurd because there’s so much medical data that shows that sexual orientation is immutable and cannot be changed.”

The CIA's favorite form of torture

If the Bush administration forces the CIA to drop "tough" interrogation techniques like waterboarding, the agency will probably fall back on a brutal method that leaves no physical marks.

By Mark Benjamin

According to news reports, the White House is preparing to issue an executive order that will set new ground rules for the CIA's secret program for interrogating captured al-Qaida types. Constrained by the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which contains a strict ban on abuse, it is anticipated that the order will jettison waterboarding and other brutal interrogation techniques.

But President Bush has insisted publicly that "tough" techniques work, and has signaled that the CIA's secret program can somehow continue under the rubric of the Military Commissions Act. The executive order will reportedly hand the CIA greater latitude than the military to conduct coercive interrogations. If waterboarding goes the way of the Iron Maiden, what "tough" techniques will the CIA use on its high-value detainees?

The answer is most likely a measure long favored by the CIA -- sensory deprivation. The benign-sounding form of psychological coercion has been considered effective for most of the life of the agency, and its slippery definition might allow it to squeeze through loopholes in a law that seeks to ban prisoner abuse. Interviews with former CIA officials and experts on interrogation suggest that it is an obvious choice for interrogators newly constrained by law. The technique has already been employed during the "war on terror," and, Salon has learned, was apparently used on 14 high-value detainees now held at Guantánamo Bay.

A former top CIA official predicted to Salon that sensory deprivation would remain available to the agency as an interrogation tool in the future. "I'd be surprised if [sensory deprivation] came out of the toolbox," said A.B. Krongard, who was the No. 3 official at the CIA until late 2004. Alfred McCoy, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has written extensively about the history of CIA interrogation, agrees with Krongard that the CIA will continue to employ sensory deprivation. "Of course they will," predicted McCoy. "It is embedded in the doctrine." For the CIA to stop using sensory deprivation, McCoy says, "The leopard would have to change his spots." And he warned that a practice that may sound innocuous to some was sharpened by the agency over the years into a horrifying torture technique.

Sensory deprivation, as CIA research and other agency interrogation materials demonstrate, is a remarkably simple concept. It can be inflicted by immobilizing individuals in small, soundproof rooms and fitting them with blacked-out goggles and earmuffs. "The first thing that happens is extraordinary hallucinations akin to mescaline," explained McCoy. "I mean extreme hallucinations" of sight and sound. It is followed, in some cases within just two days, by what McCoy called a "breakdown akin to psychosis."

It is therefore as insidious as some forms of obviously abusive coercion that are likely to be forbidden under the new CIA rules, like waterboarding, the technique of strapping a subject to a board with his feet raised and pouring water on his face to produce a sensation of imminent death. Legally, however, sensory deprivation is more nebulous than physical abuse, and that is what worries human rights advocates.

"People finally came to an understanding of what waterboarding really was, and once that happened, it was no longer sustainable," noted Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First. Just like waterboarding, Massimino said, extreme sensory deprivation techniques "push people beyond the brink of what they can bear, physically and mentally. Once you understand that, the veneer of acceptability -- the myth that 'it's not torture, it's just harsh' -- completely falls apart." But compared to the outcry over physical torture, she described a "deafening silence" about techniques like sensory deprivation.

The issue, said Massimino, is that sensory deprivation is relative -- she compared it to a "rheostat." Former CIA executive director Krongard made the same point about sensory deprivation's variability, saying that the techniques exist on a spectrum. The term could refer to anything from being left alone in a room to being subjected to complex get-ups combining goggles, earmuffs, mittens and darkened cells that quickly drive subjects into psychotic states.

On the low end, said Krongard, sensory deprivation techniques would pass muster with most observers. But he admitted that taken to extremes, some methods "would not pass anybody's muster." Sensory deprivation techniques taken to extremes would clearly violate the Geneva Conventions, according to international law experts, and would appear to be illegal under the Military Commissions Act, which bans "severe or serious mental pain and suffering." McCoy stated that based on his experience tracking down and interviewing subjects from the CIA's early research, some subjects never fully recover.

Sensory deprivation has apparently already been employed during the so-called war on terror. The prevalence of its use has been hinted at in images of alleged terror-plotter Jose Padilla and of detainees at Guantánamo shown wearing blacked-out goggles and earmuffs -- basic deprivation tools intended to soften prisoners up mentally by plunging them into a sensory void. A source familiar with the 14 high-value detainees interrogated at the CIA's so-called black sites and transferred to military custody at Guantánamo late last year, said the CIA appeared to have used some form of sensory deprivation techniques on most, if not all, of those 14 high-value detainees.

But the CIA's reliance on sensory deprivation goes all the way back to the early days of the Cold War. It is a big part of the CIA's 1963 "KUBARK" interrogation manual, obtained in 1997 by the Baltimore Sun. That agency manual describes sensory deprivation as a central tenet of coercive interrogations. For particularly rapid results, the manual endorses the use of a "cell which has no light (or weak artificial light which never varies), which is sound-proofed, in which odors are eliminated, etc." Following that plan, the manual says, "induces stress; the stress becomes unbearable for most subjects." The manual adds, "The subject has a growing need for physical and social stimuli; and some subjects progressively lose touch with reality, focus inwardly, and produce delusions, hallucinations, and other pathological effects."

As proof, the KUBARK manual refers to a raft of CIA-sponsored Cold War research on sensory deprivation, including studies at McGill University in Montreal and the National Institute of Mental Health. Subjects in that research were placed in isolated water tanks or confined to silent rooms on soft mattresses, wearing blacked-out goggles and earmuffs. In one study, subjects experienced "visual imagery somewhat resembling hallucinations" within three hours. In another study, only 6 of 17 subjects could last 36 hours on a mattress in a quiet tank that prohibited movement. The stress is described in the KUBARK manual as "unbearable."

The dark world of CIA-sponsored sensory deprivation research is plumbed in depth in the book "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation From the Cold War to the War on Terror," written by McCoy. "They've been doing this for 50 years," McCoy explained. His book discusses more CIA-sponsored research at McGill by Dr. Donald O. Hebb, who during the same era placed 22 college students in small, sound-proof cubicles, wearing translucent goggles, thick gloves and a U-shaped pillow around the head. Most subjects quit within two days and all experienced hallucinations and "deterioration in the capacity to think systematically."

The theory behind the CIA's fascination with sensory deprivation, McCoy said, is that subjects are so starved for stimulation that they will even crave interaction with their interrogator. "The idea is that they break down and then they cling to the interrogator, because you are hungry for stimulus," McCoy explained.

There is a debate about whether breaking down the subjects in this manner produces any good intelligence. Military intelligence experts raise serious doubts. Peter Bauer, a former senior interrogation resistance trainer for NATO, called sensory deprivation methods "coercive techniques that could produce false information, rather than actionable intelligence." Bauer, who was the most forward-deployed Army interrogator during Operation Desert Storm, said sensory deprivation can drive people to come up with lies "based on ending the harsh treatment. That is not an effective way to conduct intelligence collection operations."

But the White House has apparently adopted the CIA's logic, which suggests that sensory deprivation is not going to go away any time soon. When President Bush unveiled the CIA interrogation program Sept. 6, he called it "one of the most vital tools" against al-Qaida. "Part of it is that they really do believe these techniques work," explained Darius Rejali, a professor at Reed College and author of the upcoming book "Torture and Democracy," due out later this year. "It is a kind of hall-of-mirrors effect. All the information they are getting is all from coercive interrogation," he said. "Everything begins to reflect everything else. It all looks like it is making sense."

The White House has pledged to inform the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence of all future CIA interrogation methods. The upcoming executive order is supposed to be a public document and will most likely rationalize the CIA program in cryptic legalese. Congressional staffers said they expect the CIA to issue separate and secret guidelines that explicitly lay out for agents what interrogation tools are at their disposal.

If the White House is preparing a bid to legally rationalize psychologically coercive interrogations, it must do so in a new legal environment that gives administration attorneys little room to maneuver. The Supreme Court has ruled that the basic tenets of the Geneva Conventions apply to all detainees. And the Military Commissions Act contains an abuse ban designed to rein in administration attorneys who have used the most imaginative interpretations of the law to proceed with coercive interrogations. It is that law that requires the White House to issue the executive order that will govern future CIA interrogations.

But human rights groups were confounded when Bush signed the Military Commissions Act into law on Oct. 17 and announced that it would allow what he has called "tough" CIA interrogations to continue. "This program has been one of the most successful intelligence efforts in American history," Bush added proudly.

If the White House chooses to go the sensory deprivation route, it is unclear what, if anything, Congress could do to put a stop to it. There are limited tools available to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the committee with direct oversight of the agency, to step in. As one committee aide explained, "We don't have a veto over it."