Retired Indianapolis attorney Joseph H. Born has been has been studying IndyGo’s societal cost. On September 20th, Mr. Born copied CollegeAvenueIndy.org an editorial that he sent to columnist Tim Swarens of IndyStar. Mr Born's editorial was intended to counter the stunningly irresponsible September 6th Scott Fox article that charged IndyGo opponents with “an undercurrent of racism.” Mr. Born's piece demonstrates that numbers, not racism, motivate Red Line opposition. Here is Mr. Born's Op-Ed piece in its entirety... Beyond a $390 million five-year buildout, the IndyGo referendum’s passage would allow IndyGo to implement the Marion County Transit Plan, i.e., to provide less than half a percent of Indianapolis transportation at a yearly cost nearly 10% as large as the entire Indianapolis budget—and to confiscate a day’s pay annually per household. Applying IndyGo’s per-boarding averages of $1.08 in fare revenue and 4.07 passenger miles to the Plan reveals that IndyGo will spend $1.47 per passenger mile. Even if every car carried only one passenger, that would still be about three times what car transportation costs. Providing only 0.4% of the city’s 17.7 billion total passenger miles, moreover, IndyGo’s net effect on Indianapolis emissions and congestion could at best be negligible. What little emissions effect IndyGo does have, in fact, will be adverse. IPL’s fuel-mix goals will make the power-plant emissions attributable to the new $1.2 million electric buses equal what a 4.3-mpg gasoline-engine vehicle would produce. IndyGo’s fleet-wide occupancy is 5.8 passengers/bus, and its 2017 budget implies the equivalent of 18 passenger miles per gallon of gasoline for the existing fleet, so the expanded fleet will get the equivalent of only 20 passenger miles per gallon if IndyGo uses those new buses for a quarter of its revenue miles. Most cars would do better than that even if none carried more than one passenger. The “social justice” that proponents invoke to urge a 127% increase in the IndyGo subsidy’s local-tax burden is merely a flag of convenience that lobbyists like the Indy Chamber’s Mark Fisher fly to seek corporate welfare. As an example of the resultant 70% service expansion’s benefit, Mr. Fisher cites reducing the commute time of an airport FedEx employee who lives at 34th & Moller Road. The problem of delivering its employees to their workplaces is something a company in FedEx’s business should be able to solve without taxpayer help. Together with savings on bus passes, for example, a $2.57/hour raise would enable the employee to finance a brand-new Prius every five years and pay for maintenance and repair, insurance, fees, and enough fuel for the commute—together with a vehicle-mileage tax to redress the current gas-tax-revenue shortfall. And the required raise could be half that or less if FedEx promoted carpooling. Instead, FedEx will burden taxpayers with the more-expensive expedient of relegating the employee to buses. The taxpayer cost of subsidizing one day of that employee’s IndyGo commute comes to $32.78, or $4.10/hour over an eight-hour workday. For that the employee gets to wait in the rain for a bus, when for $2.57 and his bus-pass savings he could have driven to work in a Prius. Confiscating forty days of taxpayer income to provide the $3.74 local-tax portion of a single FedEx employee’s $4.10/hour subsidy may pass for social justice in some circles. But a Franklin Township physical therapist trying to make ends meet out of what’s left of her paycheck may question the justice of expropriating for corporate welfare the earnings she could have used for her struggling son’s math-tutor bill. If our low-income neighbors’ mobility were really the referendum’s goal, its proposal would be to cut off IndyGo’s subsidy and use the money to issue “ride stamps” redeemable not only for IndyGo but also for cabs and Uber, just as food stamps are not restricted to Kroger. Low-income riders could thereby get more transportation from Uber than they get now from IndyGo—and they could go anywhere in town, not just to places that have bus stops. Since non-riders’ IndyGo taxes are several times the transportation value that IndyGo provides riders, any aggregate increase in real-estate value near bus stops will be dwarfed by decreases the tax hike causes elsewhere. And giving 4% of our populace something for nothing is unlikely to attract more residents to Indianapolis than are driven to the donut counties by giving 96% nothing for something. Ford intends to sell cars without steering wheels by the time the Marion County Transit Plan is fully implemented. Uber is already beta testing driverless rides in Pittsburgh. Yet, following other large cities’ fossilized thinking, we see expensive transportation restricted to 19th-Century streetcar routes as “moving forward.” Let’s instead steal a march on those cities by being the first to embrace the 21st Century. Let’s leave the corporate-welfare seekers to other cities and attract employers that want to pay their own way in a low-tax environment. Let’s stop subsidizing a transportation mode whose time has passed. Kudos Mr. Born. We at CollegeAvenueIndy.org salute you!