MTA Raises NYC Subway to $3; California Reminds Nation That Driving Exists, For Those Who Can Afford Parking

NYC transit fare hike hits $3 while California surfers solved public transit by having none; neither solution is working for working-class people

NEW YORK / SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority raised New York City’s subway fare to $3.00 per ride, prompting libertarian analysis that the government-operated transit monopoly’s pricing reflects the absence of competitive market pressure that would otherwise force service improvement and cost efficiency. California’s car-dependent cities note they solved this problem by simply not building public transit — which is either the libertarian solution in practice or a cautionary tale about what happens when car-friendly infrastructure planning is taken to its logical conclusion and produces a metropolitan area where you can’t get anywhere without sitting in traffic.

The libertarian analysis of public transit is genuinely complicated: government-operated transit systems do produce transit monopolies that lack market-discipline incentives for efficiency, and the New York City subway’s maintenance backlog, service reliability problems, and fare increases are consistent with what monopoly public services produce. At the same time, the alternative — car-dependent urban design that eliminates public transit — produces traffic congestion, air pollution, land consumption by roads and parking, and the specific immobility of people who cannot afford or cannot operate vehicles, which is a different kind of government failure produced by government-mandated car-centric planning.

The California Model: What Car Culture Produced

California’s car culture is the libertarian infrastructure vision implemented at scale: private vehicles, private fuel, private route choices, the freedom to go anywhere at any time in your personally controlled transportation unit. It has also produced: four-hour commutes on the 405, air quality emergencies in the Central Valley, urban heat island effects from the ratio of pavement to green space, the carbon emissions that drive the climate regulations that surfers dislike, and the dependency on fossil fuel infrastructure that makes the Iran war’s oil price impact directly relevant to the cost of driving to the break.

The libertarian case against California’s car culture is not that driving should be prohibited — it is that the car-centric infrastructure was produced by government decisions (zoning laws that require parking minimums, highway funding that subsidized suburban sprawl, building codes that prohibited density) rather than market choices. People in California drive because the alternative to driving is not available, which is different from driving because they have freely chosen driving over an equally accessible alternative. The transit libertarianism that could actually work — competitive transit providers, congestion pricing reflecting actual cost of road use, market mechanisms that price transportation choices at their true cost — requires the political coalition to implement it, which is smaller than the coalition that supports subsidized driving. The Cato Institute’s transit research documents the costs and benefits of privatized transit in various global contexts, finding that privatized transit can improve efficiency under the right regulatory conditions. Those conditions have not been achieved in any major American transit system. The MTA is $3.00. The 405 is stopped. The wave is clean. Get to it however you can.

The Surfer’s Political Philosophy

Surfing produces a specific relationship to authority and freedom that is not easily categorized within conventional political frameworks. The ocean does not negotiate. It does not issue permits, form committees, or produce impact assessments. It generates energy from wind fetch across open water, transmits it across thousands of miles of ocean, and delivers it at the break in forms ranging from unusable slop to transcendent perfection, without consulting any regulatory body about the appropriateness of the conditions. The surfer who reads a swell chart, drives to the break before dawn, paddles out in cold water, and catches the wave before the crowds arrive has exercised a kind of freedom that government cannot provide and cannot easily restrict: the freedom to show up, to have prepared, and to encounter reality on reality’s terms rather than on the terms that bureaucratic systems impose on everything they touch. The libertarian political philosophy that resonates with this experience is not the libertarianism of think tank policy papers, although those papers make useful arguments. It is the libertarianism of showing up at the break and finding that the wave doesn’t care who you voted for, how much you earn, or what your regulatory compliance status is. It just breaks. Your job is to read it correctly and respond accordingly. Every surfer who has done this well understands something about freedom that political theory describes imperfectly. The ocean is always free. The parking lot situation, however, requires ongoing engagement with the systems that govern everything outside the water.

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California’s Permanent Political Economy Problem

The pattern across California’s regulatory failures — housing scarcity, EV mandate timelines, utility monopoly disasters, transit underfunding, environmental review delays — is not accidental and is not fixable through better-intentioned regulation. It reflects the specific political economy of a state where the people who benefit from regulatory restriction (existing homeowners, licensed businesses, established utility operators, incumbent politicians) are better organized and more politically effective than the people who bear the costs of that restriction (first-time homebuyers priced out of the market, workers who can’t afford the EV mandate’s transition costs, fire survivors who can’t switch utility providers, surfers who pay $35 to park at a beach that the ocean provides for free). The libertarian solution is to change the political economy by reducing the government’s capacity to create and maintain the restrictions that produce these outcomes — not by replacing one form of government management with another, but by expanding the scope of decisions that individuals and voluntary markets make without government permission. This is easier to state as a principle than to implement in a state where the political coalition that supports regulation is deeply entrenched and the political coalition that opposes it is fragmented, underfunded, and philosophically diverse. The wave is still free. The system that governs everything outside the water is not. Understanding why, and what to do about it, is the work of the libertarian political project in California — a project that the surf community, with its anti-authority ethos and its direct experience of freedom as a physical reality rather than a political abstraction, is unusually well-positioned to understand.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com