Calgary Transit just announced that transit fares are increasing from $2.50 to $2.75. In addition, public transit service levels will be decreasing. This is a double whammy. Unfortunately history is repeating itself.

In the 1940s and 1950s Calgary Transit had a problem. With the price of cars decreasing and the creation of publicly funded highways, there were more transit options for Calgarians. Slowly more and more people were choosing to buy a car rather than take public transit.

What was the response of Calgary Transit? They increased fares without increasing the service. This just compounded the problem. People predictably en masse jumped off the public transit bandwagon. The result was that the percentage of Calgarians who took public transit to and from work went from 90% in the 1920s to 15% today.

The same thing is continuing today. When you increase the price of a service without improving the service, those with a choice will choose another alternative. Those who want to save money or drive less for environmental reasons will continue to drive. Those with low incomes will be stuck taking a public transit service that will take them even longer to get where they want to go and will be paying more for it. This is absurd.

Instead Calgary is still choosing to build more roads. The Stoney Trail Ring Road recently opened. At a cost of $460 million, it is now 45% complete. There were no complaints at the cost. Nobody complains about the cost because nobody pays for it directly. Everyone, no matter if you use the road or not, pays indirectly for it through their taxes, whereas Calgary Transit recovers half of its costs through transit fares. Therefore if you take public transit you directly feel the pinch and therefore complain about the cost.

Obviously there is a bias against public transit. This is an illogical and destructive flaw in our current mode of capitalism. The economy grows faster when everyone has one or two vehicles, rather than everyone taking a kick ass public transit system. There is more to sell and maintain. Though such a public transit system would be more efficient in terms of energy use, pollution, and cost, it is devalued under the present form of capitalism.

The only way this could change is if the externalities of driving cars were eliminated. An example of an externality is pollution, from mining materials your car is made up of, to the water used to make your car, to the oil drilled or scooped up, and to the exhaust coming out of your car's tailpipe. The true cost of this pollution is not presently being paid.

The result is driving a car is artificially cheaper than taking public transit. A price on carbon, high enough to reflect the true cost, is necessary to address this problem. Though this is on the agenda in the climate change talks in December in Copenhagen, Canada has shown no intention of going down this road anytime soon.

We are still stuck in a car culture. Unfortunately, at a time of climate change and peak oil, the City of Calgary is giving people less incentive to take public transit. If capitalism was functioning properly, the cost of driving would be increasing and the cost of taking public transit would be decreasing.

This is tragic, for it has created an unsustainable economy that is threatening  the lives of humans and other species on earth.