Random quotes, images, and thoughts from Ed Ireson.
The set up to this is almost too easy: SF tends to lean more liberal, and is typically characterized as being anti-corporations. But I’m going to take the bait, and dive into this.
BART recently received a fair amount of bad press for their decision to physically unplug the cell phone nodes underground in their terminals in response to a potential protest. This was done because BART had discovered online rumblings that their might be the “use [of] mobile devices to coordinate their disruptive activities and communicate about the location and number of BART Police”.
There has been quite a bit of mis-information surrounding this issue, so I’ll lay it out as I understand the issue. Contrary to the NYT blog post (which states: “After all, since it pays for the cell service underground, it can cut it off.”), BART receives a not insubstantial amount of revenue from the mobile providers to offer service in the tunnels (0.75 million USD in 2010, per BART). It works something like: Nextel (now Sprint) built out the underground network, which it then licenses to the other major carriers, and pays BART for access to the tunnels.
BART posted messages on their electronic signs warning of potential disruptions of transport services due to protests, but made no mention of shutting down the third-party cell phone network system. This warning was released after some group… using Blogspot (heh), posted that they were going to coordinate a protest in the underground BART terminals.
The original BART press release (and subsequent media reports) indicates they tried to reach out to carriers to convince them to shut down coverage at certain stations — and I suspect they didn’t gain much support from the for-profit corporations on that. The revised statement seems to show that they physically pulled the power to the cell nodes underground. (Which, fortunately for BART, doesn’t seem to violate any federal anti-jamming laws.)
Enough back story: I don’t really care for comparisons of the BART incident to what happened in Egypt or what Cameron mumbled on about for London. What I find disconcerting is that BART, a conglomerate of Bay Area governments that came together to coordinate transportation in the region, receives public money (i.e. taxes residents of area counties) to support the system. According to the APTA2, BART only covers 64.5% of it’s revenues through fares. The remainder comes from taxes, advertising, etc.
I’m staunchly against a government agency attempting to quash free speech — but I’m even more strongly against the government interfering with the operations of business. This isn’t an issue of regulation… BART forcefully disconnected commercial systems and denied those businesses (the mobile carriers) the ability to capture revenues from the customers in the BART terminals. (At least, during the time of the protests, which, it should be mentioned, never occurred.)
Here in lies the problem: BART cannot sustain itself on fare revenues alone, but wants to retain the right to private property by restricting free speech and commercial activity to the benefit of the government, not the people.
There’s a simple answer. It sucks for people who ride BART daily, but is entirely sustainable for the broad economy. Privatize BART. Fares will go up, but area counties (many of which can’t even access the BART system) will be freed from ridiculous taxes. But the stronger argument? As a private business, and therefore private property, the underground system will have unrestricted control over limiting mobile service in order to prevent any “mishaps”.
The inverse effect? People will be able to vote with their use (or lack thereof) of the private system. If a private security force were to kill a subdued, unarmed man — it would be trivial to deny your dollars to the system (vs being forced to pay taxes to fund them). If you didn’t support their decision to shut down cell service for a non-existent protest, you could simply choose not to utilize the system.
