I’ve wondered lately if California’s current system of requiring two-thirds approval for budgets and tax increase is even constitutional. I mean, isn’t our system roughly based on majority rule?

Then again, I’m not a Constitutional scholar.

It was all about cheap oil. California, like the rest of the country, chose to rely on that for its transportation, even after the 1970s ought to have taught us otherwise. That combined with another product of the 1970s – the right-wing tax revolt, which taught Californians it’s evil and wrong to tax someone to subsidize a service, even if that helps the overall economy.

The rationale was that low taxes wouldn’t cripple the state’s economy thanks to low oil prices. Folks can drive everywhere they need to go, things are cheap, why waste tax money on transit?

Now we see the folly of that thinking. Cheap oil wasn’t going to last forever, and when it began to give out, we ought to have had alternatives in place. But to do so would require taxes to be raised and spent and god forbid we do that. So now we have a transit system wilting under the weight of soaring ridership and no political will – at least among the media-legislature axis – to raise taxes to deal with the crisis, even though the tax increases would be cheaper to the average Californian than the cost of driving.

As long as we had cheap oil we could avoid that core issue. Now that we don’t, there is no avoiding it.

25 cyclists were denied boarding on Caltrain 226 this morning along the way from SF to San Jose.

72x bus at 5:52 AM from Santa Rosa to San Francisco left 7 passengers standing at the bus stop in Rohnert Park.

I don’t ride BART at rush hour and from what I heard, I don’t want to.

Yet Arnold cuts funding for transit.